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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
The first serious book to examine what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased.
Once, war was a temporary state of affairs—a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. Today, America’s wars are everywhere and our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today, military personnel don’t just “kill people and break stuff.” Instead, they analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.
Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret. Her experiences lead her to an urgent When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and institutions we’ve built—and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it’s no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come.
By turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and law, and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect, but don’t really understand. It’s the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished, and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond recognition—and time is running out to make things right.
Once, war was a temporary state of affairs—a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. Today, America’s wars are everywhere and our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today, military personnel don’t just “kill people and break stuff.” Instead, they analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.
Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret. Her experiences lead her to an urgent When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and institutions we’ve built—and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it’s no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come.
By turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and law, and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect, but don’t really understand. It’s the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished, and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond recognition—and time is running out to make things right.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published August 9, 2016
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November 1, 2017
I found Rosa Brooks via David Rothkopf’s Deep State Podcast. As a neophyte to foreign policy, listening to the podcast has been a learning experience. I downloaded the book from Audible as I thought it might be easier to digest it by listening (and it was, at least for me it was).
Rosa Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and, a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks served as counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Michele Flournoy. She is the mother of two girls and married to an Army Special Forces officer.
Her book basically talks about how the military has taken over many of the responsibilities (by which I believe she means both government and private institutions) that deal with solving global problems. I first saw this in Afghanistan when the military started building projects and assisting tribal leaders in getting money from the local government for these projects.
Her time in the Pentagon has given her insights that are amazing, she displays a level of honesty that is very compelling making this book a very thought-provoking read.
Rosa Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and, a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks served as counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Michele Flournoy. She is the mother of two girls and married to an Army Special Forces officer.
Her book basically talks about how the military has taken over many of the responsibilities (by which I believe she means both government and private institutions) that deal with solving global problems. I first saw this in Afghanistan when the military started building projects and assisting tribal leaders in getting money from the local government for these projects.
Her time in the Pentagon has given her insights that are amazing, she displays a level of honesty that is very compelling making this book a very thought-provoking read.
July 10, 2018
This book explores a vast array of subject areas. Many are interesting and some searing. There are times when the Pentagon, the military (meaning U.S.) completely disappears in many chapters.
The author is in many ways positive about the military. In the U.S. it is seen in a far more positive light than other government institutions. When in need, call the troops. Or to use another phrase about Prussia is the U.S. becoming an “Army with a State”? The military is the largest employee in the U.S. And it is a good employee providing free health care (sadly lacking for most Americans), subsidized housing and groceries, and a good pension. Its budget is astronomical. I wish the author would have explored the impact of the military within the U.S. in more detail.
She does discuss the total secrecy surrounding the use of American Special Forces and drones in foreign countries. As she says China and Russia are observing this – and starting to do the same. She also mentions how more and more documents are being classified as secret. Apparently it is higher status when a project is classified as secret – and it will receive more money.
She also sees the U.S. as becoming the world’s police in failed states. And by police she means the army will become more engaged with the people in those countries – for social and economic development. This seems to be a mighty task indeed, as well as one with no end game. Is the military really ready to absorb the language and cultures in far-flung areas of the world? There are other groups, which the author ignores, that already do this like Doctors Without Borders, plus various U.N. groups. Religious groups have members that commit many years of service in communities learning the language and culture, whereas the military has a tendency to rotate personnel creating a discontinuity and a lack of commitment.
As I said there are several interesting topics discussed – many from a legal point of view. But the book is long with repetition. Also it is irritating to read sentences with self-evident statements.
The author is in many ways positive about the military. In the U.S. it is seen in a far more positive light than other government institutions. When in need, call the troops. Or to use another phrase about Prussia is the U.S. becoming an “Army with a State”? The military is the largest employee in the U.S. And it is a good employee providing free health care (sadly lacking for most Americans), subsidized housing and groceries, and a good pension. Its budget is astronomical. I wish the author would have explored the impact of the military within the U.S. in more detail.
She does discuss the total secrecy surrounding the use of American Special Forces and drones in foreign countries. As she says China and Russia are observing this – and starting to do the same. She also mentions how more and more documents are being classified as secret. Apparently it is higher status when a project is classified as secret – and it will receive more money.
She also sees the U.S. as becoming the world’s police in failed states. And by police she means the army will become more engaged with the people in those countries – for social and economic development. This seems to be a mighty task indeed, as well as one with no end game. Is the military really ready to absorb the language and cultures in far-flung areas of the world? There are other groups, which the author ignores, that already do this like Doctors Without Borders, plus various U.N. groups. Religious groups have members that commit many years of service in communities learning the language and culture, whereas the military has a tendency to rotate personnel creating a discontinuity and a lack of commitment.
As I said there are several interesting topics discussed – many from a legal point of view. But the book is long with repetition. Also it is irritating to read sentences with self-evident statements.
March 10, 2017
This is an excellent book. Even as a staunch Clausewitzian myself, I found I had very little heart burn with Ms. Brooks' characterization of war. In fact, I'd argue that it is essential that Clausewitzians should consider and wrestle with other forms of the characterization of war--even if the Prussian philosopher's is probably still the best accounting for the empirical data of war.
The only major critique of Brooks' book is that while there is a bit of an explanation of "how everything became war and the military became everything," what that explanation really appears to highlight are the symptoms of the problem not the process by which the problem came about. Said differently, despite a few anecdotes, if you are looking for a clear causal path for anything before 9/11, you'll probably be a bit disappointed in Brooks' explanation of how everything became war and the military became everything.
On that theme, what I had hoped to learn more about was why the metaphor of war came so easy to our nation? Why did those metaphors transform our policies to become more militarized, and ultimately, why once they had become such what were the conduits and those responsible for just leaving the means of fighting everything that had become war to the military.
I recall a narrative, somewhere I cannot locate now, that President George W. Bush was visiting troops in Kosovo early in 2001 before September 11th. In that visit, the account stated that, supposedly, the president leaned over to the commanding general there and stated, "we've got to get you out of the nation building business," or thereabouts. And providing some measure of contingency and empathy to the president to the events that were to eventually unfold in September, the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the post-war planning (such as it was, several historical sources now point to the fact that there were "Phase Four plans" that were not accepted, enacted, or feasible), and the subsequent transition from cosmopolitan forms of nation-building to one in which Rumsfeld made it a condition of invasion that the DoD would be the lead-agency for post-war determinations. One would think that it would require more than just a passing reference to MOOTW, the military's resistance to it under President Bill Clinton, to its later acceptance of it under the aegis of some different terms once institutional forces made it the best option for retaining imperatives for end strength: counterinsurgency and stability operations.
This is a worthy vein to consider, even if Brooks does not, because even if the conventional wisdom is that MOOTW and nation building are boondoggles they are at least relatively cheap when compared to the DoD lead-agency attempts to do the same: $60B for the former Yugoslavia versus $1.5-3T (or more) for Afghanistan and Iraq. It may not be a direct comparison, and there are probably a great number of reasons to quibble with the comparison, however, even if we grant the incongruity between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, as far as the worst case of failure might be considered MOOTW has been drastically less expensive in terms of both blood and treasure. This comparison is not made, nor even mentioned in Brooks' account, and I think it is a significant missed opportunity.
That said, for what Brooks does present, it is cogent, interesting, and compelling. I commend this book to every military thinker.
The only major critique of Brooks' book is that while there is a bit of an explanation of "how everything became war and the military became everything," what that explanation really appears to highlight are the symptoms of the problem not the process by which the problem came about. Said differently, despite a few anecdotes, if you are looking for a clear causal path for anything before 9/11, you'll probably be a bit disappointed in Brooks' explanation of how everything became war and the military became everything.
On that theme, what I had hoped to learn more about was why the metaphor of war came so easy to our nation? Why did those metaphors transform our policies to become more militarized, and ultimately, why once they had become such what were the conduits and those responsible for just leaving the means of fighting everything that had become war to the military.
I recall a narrative, somewhere I cannot locate now, that President George W. Bush was visiting troops in Kosovo early in 2001 before September 11th. In that visit, the account stated that, supposedly, the president leaned over to the commanding general there and stated, "we've got to get you out of the nation building business," or thereabouts. And providing some measure of contingency and empathy to the president to the events that were to eventually unfold in September, the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the post-war planning (such as it was, several historical sources now point to the fact that there were "Phase Four plans" that were not accepted, enacted, or feasible), and the subsequent transition from cosmopolitan forms of nation-building to one in which Rumsfeld made it a condition of invasion that the DoD would be the lead-agency for post-war determinations. One would think that it would require more than just a passing reference to MOOTW, the military's resistance to it under President Bill Clinton, to its later acceptance of it under the aegis of some different terms once institutional forces made it the best option for retaining imperatives for end strength: counterinsurgency and stability operations.
This is a worthy vein to consider, even if Brooks does not, because even if the conventional wisdom is that MOOTW and nation building are boondoggles they are at least relatively cheap when compared to the DoD lead-agency attempts to do the same: $60B for the former Yugoslavia versus $1.5-3T (or more) for Afghanistan and Iraq. It may not be a direct comparison, and there are probably a great number of reasons to quibble with the comparison, however, even if we grant the incongruity between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, as far as the worst case of failure might be considered MOOTW has been drastically less expensive in terms of both blood and treasure. This comparison is not made, nor even mentioned in Brooks' account, and I think it is a significant missed opportunity.
That said, for what Brooks does present, it is cogent, interesting, and compelling. I commend this book to every military thinker.
November 8, 2019
I started the book hoping for interesting commentary but it ended with the author developing a starry-eyed view of the military and how it gets things done. She overestimates its efficiency (let alone the inherent goodness of some of the people involved, or what they really want)—a friend who also read it and has worked for the defense dept for past 10 years (including a lot of overlap with the author) described the author’s faith in their efficiency as “like a child’s.” [this may be slander on children, who ask lots of good questions]
The author ends by wanting to hand over broad programs to the military and get more people to join because they’re just so good at getting things done. She comes painfully close to major public works of the past and then misses how the last 30 years have been the systematic defunding of these kinds of projects and systematic funding of the military. What would happen if the military’s budget were diverted to hiring people to repair the country’s roads and bridges? She doesn’t ask WHY this money isn’t there and such programs have been defunded. She doesn’t ask whether entirely different agencies and programs could have the capacity or even used to before the neocon and neolib attack on govt.
It’s essentially the story of one hopeful liberal woman’s encounter with the military and unwillingness to look deeply into it or engage with any of the historical context of what she considers. Excellent only as a cautionary tale.
The author ends by wanting to hand over broad programs to the military and get more people to join because they’re just so good at getting things done. She comes painfully close to major public works of the past and then misses how the last 30 years have been the systematic defunding of these kinds of projects and systematic funding of the military. What would happen if the military’s budget were diverted to hiring people to repair the country’s roads and bridges? She doesn’t ask WHY this money isn’t there and such programs have been defunded. She doesn’t ask whether entirely different agencies and programs could have the capacity or even used to before the neocon and neolib attack on govt.
It’s essentially the story of one hopeful liberal woman’s encounter with the military and unwillingness to look deeply into it or engage with any of the historical context of what she considers. Excellent only as a cautionary tale.
September 18, 2016
"Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret. Her experiences lead her to an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and institutions we’ve built—and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it’s no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come."
I thought the first third and the last third of the book were very lucid with much thought-provoking information. The middle third was less so but maybe you will find it more enlightning than I did. The book covers a lot of territory both historical and the personal trip of the author through her time at the Pentagon. She liked a lot of the people she met there and thinks they mostly try to do a good job. She is not knee-jerk anti-military like I might tend to be. I did not agree with everything she said but I did learn some things about the military. She thinks we should accept that the world may never fully return to a time of peace but is also very sure that we should hang on tightly to human rights. Her ultimate solution is universal service and how she gets there is very pragmatic.
One of the observations of the author is that the US has been leading the way in taking the world down the wrong path with its secret use of drones and other extra judicial activities. The US has not been a very good example and what are we going to say when other countries start doing the same things? With her two years at the Pentagon she has bought into the system quite a bit but at the same time has quite a few informed criticisms of US activities.
Definitely a book worth reading if you are distressed with the state of the world. She does talk a lot about drones and her point of view about them is worth reading the book.
I thought the first third and the last third of the book were very lucid with much thought-provoking information. The middle third was less so but maybe you will find it more enlightning than I did. The book covers a lot of territory both historical and the personal trip of the author through her time at the Pentagon. She liked a lot of the people she met there and thinks they mostly try to do a good job. She is not knee-jerk anti-military like I might tend to be. I did not agree with everything she said but I did learn some things about the military. She thinks we should accept that the world may never fully return to a time of peace but is also very sure that we should hang on tightly to human rights. Her ultimate solution is universal service and how she gets there is very pragmatic.
One of the observations of the author is that the US has been leading the way in taking the world down the wrong path with its secret use of drones and other extra judicial activities. The US has not been a very good example and what are we going to say when other countries start doing the same things? With her two years at the Pentagon she has bought into the system quite a bit but at the same time has quite a few informed criticisms of US activities.
Definitely a book worth reading if you are distressed with the state of the world. She does talk a lot about drones and her point of view about them is worth reading the book.
August 10, 2016
A useful summary of various trends relating to the law and the role of more stable countries (particularly the US) in engaging in conflicts around the world. For anyone who's been following these things closely, there probably isn't too much of the middle descriptive chapters to reward the price of the book; rather, download the kindle sample and get a sense of the overall argument that way. For a general audience/reader, this offers an extremely readable way into the legal, moral and practical quandaries that characterises twenty-first-century life.
Some of the 'solutions' offered in the book's final section fell too short as a mix of inspirational get-to-it and huge unlikely pronouncements like the following:
That said, this was an intelligently-written book with some interesting details here and there from the author's time working for the Pentagon.
Some of the 'solutions' offered in the book's final section fell too short as a mix of inspirational get-to-it and huge unlikely pronouncements like the following:
"we will need to thoroughly overhaul existing international governance structures, and pour both money and diplomatic energy into persuading other powerful states to join us."
That said, this was an intelligently-written book with some interesting details here and there from the author's time working for the Pentagon.
December 18, 2016
"War made the state and the state made war" is a common explanation of the formation of modern societies. But this quote doesn't belong solely to history. War is continuing to remake modern states in new ways. When combined with rapid technological change and globalization, war is transforming the United States in particular into a country that is constantly in a kind of "war" but lacks the legal and social categories that can regulate its own behavior. As such, war is seeping into every aspect of life, while the military, well-funded and well-regarded, is slowly becoming the only real institution left - gobbling up all others in society.
We are still using legal categories from a period of standing armies, but the reality of war today is quite different. It is something of a hybrid between law enforcement, warfare, development work, political advocacy, media work and technological espionage. Laws, social norms and institutions need to adapt to this new reality. In the absence of such changes, the government has effectively given itself the right to conduct any type of activity, including mass surveillance, indefinite detention and extrajudicial killings, without any type of transparency or due process.
Since 9/11, the military has grown to such a size that it dwarfs all other institutions and state agencies in American society. It is increasingly looked to as a go-to for fixing any problem around the world, because it is one of the only institutions has the resources and manpower to get things done. The military now does development work, legal training, mediation and a whole host of other activities around the world. The problem is that this is not its traditional role and is not a role that it has consciously accepted. As such, it often does these tasks poorly, while other civilian agencies are emaciated and dysfunctional - probably irreversibly so - and are thus woefully incapable of even trying.
Brooks envisions a reimagined military that is something other than a "military." Her vision is closer to a universal service force that engages all aspects of American society. The idea that civilian agencies will be reinvigorated seems remote, given the rigidity against making such major changes in America's current political system. Brooks says that the military should embrace its new, ambiguous role and society should help it develop along that path. On one hand, this sounds suspiciously like "permanent-war" and the militarization of society. But Brooks rightly points out that war and peace have always been on a spectrum rather than on a binary (the World Wars were notable exceptions that predominate in our minds). As such, our present state of ambiguity is less exceptional than we think. The military can also be a more politically diverse organization if basing and recruitment decisions were modified, and if it could be effectively reimagined (and rebranded) as something other than an organization primarily devoted to the exercise of violence - something that even today only a small % of military members engage in. It is interesting as well to note that the military itself is kind of a welfare state in itself, providing the type of fulsome cradle-to-grave benefits that ordinary Americans do not receive, but people in traditional welfare societies do.
In the past, major changes in law and social norms have usually come about as the result of some kind of violent rupture, rather than as a neat teleological process. The Peace of Westphalia and the United Nations were responses to major episodes of bloodletting and trauma. The new norms and laws we need to govern violence in the 21st century can hopefully come about without violence on such a scale, but only if we recognize and consciously embrace the need for change, acting before events overtake us. Brooks does not think that it is possible to go back to a pre-9/11 world, but suggests the possibility of judicial or quasi-judicial processes that can make our new era more just, free and less brutal - including laws and processes to regulate drone strikes, detention and surveillance.
In the absence of such changes we will live in a state of effective lawlessness, where the government has the ability to operate in a greyzone that makes essentially everything permissible. In such a scenario war will also slowly "make the state" at home (as it already is beginning to do), developing it into a violent, opaque, Orwellian institution unbounded by any moral or legal constraints. Without laws and norms helping us better delineate categories, war is slowly coming to be the paradigm that governs all state actions, and is allowing the state to exercise its most extreme functions in situations that may not always call for it.
The book is written well and interspersed with anecdotes from the authors experiences working in the Pentagon, as well as visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda and other places the U.S. military either had a footprint or the state had fallen apart due in part to a lack of global governance input. Its a liberal book in many ways, despite being written by a former DoD official with (evidently) huge input from the military itself. At the end of the day the military is an institution made up of individuals, many of whom do not want to live in a dystopia of their unwitting creation. This book is an admirable call, perhaps even a first step, to reigning in the disturbing excesses of our present era of violent, opaque state lawlessness.
We are still using legal categories from a period of standing armies, but the reality of war today is quite different. It is something of a hybrid between law enforcement, warfare, development work, political advocacy, media work and technological espionage. Laws, social norms and institutions need to adapt to this new reality. In the absence of such changes, the government has effectively given itself the right to conduct any type of activity, including mass surveillance, indefinite detention and extrajudicial killings, without any type of transparency or due process.
Since 9/11, the military has grown to such a size that it dwarfs all other institutions and state agencies in American society. It is increasingly looked to as a go-to for fixing any problem around the world, because it is one of the only institutions has the resources and manpower to get things done. The military now does development work, legal training, mediation and a whole host of other activities around the world. The problem is that this is not its traditional role and is not a role that it has consciously accepted. As such, it often does these tasks poorly, while other civilian agencies are emaciated and dysfunctional - probably irreversibly so - and are thus woefully incapable of even trying.
Brooks envisions a reimagined military that is something other than a "military." Her vision is closer to a universal service force that engages all aspects of American society. The idea that civilian agencies will be reinvigorated seems remote, given the rigidity against making such major changes in America's current political system. Brooks says that the military should embrace its new, ambiguous role and society should help it develop along that path. On one hand, this sounds suspiciously like "permanent-war" and the militarization of society. But Brooks rightly points out that war and peace have always been on a spectrum rather than on a binary (the World Wars were notable exceptions that predominate in our minds). As such, our present state of ambiguity is less exceptional than we think. The military can also be a more politically diverse organization if basing and recruitment decisions were modified, and if it could be effectively reimagined (and rebranded) as something other than an organization primarily devoted to the exercise of violence - something that even today only a small % of military members engage in. It is interesting as well to note that the military itself is kind of a welfare state in itself, providing the type of fulsome cradle-to-grave benefits that ordinary Americans do not receive, but people in traditional welfare societies do.
In the past, major changes in law and social norms have usually come about as the result of some kind of violent rupture, rather than as a neat teleological process. The Peace of Westphalia and the United Nations were responses to major episodes of bloodletting and trauma. The new norms and laws we need to govern violence in the 21st century can hopefully come about without violence on such a scale, but only if we recognize and consciously embrace the need for change, acting before events overtake us. Brooks does not think that it is possible to go back to a pre-9/11 world, but suggests the possibility of judicial or quasi-judicial processes that can make our new era more just, free and less brutal - including laws and processes to regulate drone strikes, detention and surveillance.
In the absence of such changes we will live in a state of effective lawlessness, where the government has the ability to operate in a greyzone that makes essentially everything permissible. In such a scenario war will also slowly "make the state" at home (as it already is beginning to do), developing it into a violent, opaque, Orwellian institution unbounded by any moral or legal constraints. Without laws and norms helping us better delineate categories, war is slowly coming to be the paradigm that governs all state actions, and is allowing the state to exercise its most extreme functions in situations that may not always call for it.
The book is written well and interspersed with anecdotes from the authors experiences working in the Pentagon, as well as visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda and other places the U.S. military either had a footprint or the state had fallen apart due in part to a lack of global governance input. Its a liberal book in many ways, despite being written by a former DoD official with (evidently) huge input from the military itself. At the end of the day the military is an institution made up of individuals, many of whom do not want to live in a dystopia of their unwitting creation. This book is an admirable call, perhaps even a first step, to reigning in the disturbing excesses of our present era of violent, opaque state lawlessness.
March 6, 2017
This book made me consider points of view that I had not considered before. The perspective of a civilian who has worked both for civilian agencies and the Department of Defense brings a unique view. Some of which she writes is not new, such as the Kosovo Precedent and her concerns of drone warfare. However I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how our government increasingly relies on the military to do nearly anything with respect to foreign policy.
January 11, 2020
I had a visceral feeling of dislike for this book, but I found the reasons for my reaction hard to pinpoint. Various criticisms passed through my mind -- that it isn't well organized, that it mixes memoir and analysis, that it didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know. But none of these complaints really held up upon reflection. The organization isn't awful, the genre mixing isn't misleading, and there are as many new thoughts as in other books that I enjoyed. The writing is good, and for the most part I agreed with the author's point of view, which manages to remain humane in an arena filled with inhumanity. All of my internally articulated reasons for disliking the book were just after-the-fact justifications that didn't get to the heart of the matter. After thinking about it further, my best guess for explaining my reaction to the book is that the style of writing, the concerns, the point of view and the method of argument all scream "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer." Rosa Brooks is a bit of a legal cyborg -- part human, part lawyer, which is too bad, because I like the human part, but the lawyer part not so much. It is natural for anyone who has an absorbing job that they love to be molded by the methods and rules of the job and to have those methods and rules slop over a bit into life and thinking outside of the workplace. Artists tend to think like artists, engineers like engineers, and lawyers like lawyers. I'm sure that I do this myself in some ways (and, yes, I am a lawyer). But when this process goes too far, it damages a person's authenticity and essential humanity. In the final section of the book, entitled "The Game of Law Versus The Game of Life," the author recognies this problem and calls for the reader to go beyond legal thinking in addressing the challenges that the book discusses. I admired the author for this moment of self awareness, but it wasn't quite enough for me to turn around my feelings about the book as whole.
March 9, 2021
According to political sociologist Charles Tilly, bandits and strongmen ruled Europe until the rise of the state which could then outmuscle the strong men. Taxation allowed states to raise revenue to the point that non-state actors could no longer compete with the state. “Nineteenth-century British legal philosopher John Austin declared that law is nothing more than the commands of a sovereign, backed by the threat of force.” Many memos are labelled Top Secret not because they should be, but so that people will think them important and read them. “FBI efforts to ‘completely discredit’ Martin Luther King Jr. ‘as the leader of the Negro people’ were classified, as were government radiation experiments involving human subjects.”
854,000 Americans hold top-secret security clearances. Rosa raises a strong question about all new war technology: Will the coming swarms of mechanical insect drones with facial recognition software be used to take out truly bad people in crowds, or will it be used on non-violent protestors by a repressive government? 85% of military personnel are in non-combat positions. The nation’s largest employer is the Defense Department with “1.4 million active duty military personnel”. If 9/11 had been considered a crime, it would not have involved an armed response. “Successful states monopolize legitimate violence within their territories.”
To Rosa, our planet might look to someone on Mars like a failed state because we can’t stop the violence and destruction. The Islamic State has an estimated 500 billion dollars. Our Declaration of Independence shows our core notion of law is that “ALL power must be constrained by law.” When you see all the freebies offered on a military base, you are seeing American socialism. Marines who have volunteered for forced feeding, teared up and hated the pain of Gitmo feeding tubes.
In the end, the author says, America needs to share power, authority and resources with others. Yeah, well good luck with a rogue state doing that. On page 360, the author finally explains why generals wrote glowing blurbs on the back of this book, because Rosa sells out. Instead of following Andrew Bacevich’s call for reestablishing the draft to stop unnecessary wars, by putting the children of the elite’s skin in the game, Rosa wants two years of civil service by our children which they must spend protecting the dying American empire and current neoliberal/capitalist paradigm. My kids could spend two years taking down the dominant culture which thrives on permanent war and the commodification of everything (neoliberalism), or according to Rosa, they could at best “build roads” (notice she didn’t say “rails”) to keep us addicted to fossil fuels instead of building trains and rail which honestly provide America with far more energy security because its far greater fuel efficiency in a time of climate change.
Informative for activists yes, but ultimately this book sells out. Rosa says, rather than stop the war machine, let’s all do two years of service, get skin in the game, and no one try to stop the neoliberal agenda, the capitalist agenda, the race to extinction, the upcoming financial collapse, or the inequality and structural racism that starts these wars in the first place.
After Rosa diagnoses 50% of the problems correctly, let us all become complicit with her rather than stop the madness. No wonder the generals love her…
854,000 Americans hold top-secret security clearances. Rosa raises a strong question about all new war technology: Will the coming swarms of mechanical insect drones with facial recognition software be used to take out truly bad people in crowds, or will it be used on non-violent protestors by a repressive government? 85% of military personnel are in non-combat positions. The nation’s largest employer is the Defense Department with “1.4 million active duty military personnel”. If 9/11 had been considered a crime, it would not have involved an armed response. “Successful states monopolize legitimate violence within their territories.”
To Rosa, our planet might look to someone on Mars like a failed state because we can’t stop the violence and destruction. The Islamic State has an estimated 500 billion dollars. Our Declaration of Independence shows our core notion of law is that “ALL power must be constrained by law.” When you see all the freebies offered on a military base, you are seeing American socialism. Marines who have volunteered for forced feeding, teared up and hated the pain of Gitmo feeding tubes.
In the end, the author says, America needs to share power, authority and resources with others. Yeah, well good luck with a rogue state doing that. On page 360, the author finally explains why generals wrote glowing blurbs on the back of this book, because Rosa sells out. Instead of following Andrew Bacevich’s call for reestablishing the draft to stop unnecessary wars, by putting the children of the elite’s skin in the game, Rosa wants two years of civil service by our children which they must spend protecting the dying American empire and current neoliberal/capitalist paradigm. My kids could spend two years taking down the dominant culture which thrives on permanent war and the commodification of everything (neoliberalism), or according to Rosa, they could at best “build roads” (notice she didn’t say “rails”) to keep us addicted to fossil fuels instead of building trains and rail which honestly provide America with far more energy security because its far greater fuel efficiency in a time of climate change.
Informative for activists yes, but ultimately this book sells out. Rosa says, rather than stop the war machine, let’s all do two years of service, get skin in the game, and no one try to stop the neoliberal agenda, the capitalist agenda, the race to extinction, the upcoming financial collapse, or the inequality and structural racism that starts these wars in the first place.
After Rosa diagnoses 50% of the problems correctly, let us all become complicit with her rather than stop the madness. No wonder the generals love her…
January 21, 2020
As a development economist it was insightful to read this book to have a clear understanding of why I keep coming across problems with the military stepping on NGOs and non-profit toes. I don't like it but I understand a bit more what is happening.
Moreover I felt that the discussion of the drone program was insightful and made me think a bit more about the reasoning behind it as I find the drones seem to detract from the horrors of war that we are supposed to feel so as not to keep repeating it endlessly.
However when it comes to a discussion of how to change things she points out suggestions that have been made and things that are being done. However what bothers me is how very little discussion is made on what the American people might think about continuing to have military presence everywhere, while it may reduce some problems, it does come across as colonialism, and when did the people get to say that they wanted this? While she does discuss many things through the law she does not discuss where the voice of the people has entered into this discussion.
Moreover I felt that the discussion of the drone program was insightful and made me think a bit more about the reasoning behind it as I find the drones seem to detract from the horrors of war that we are supposed to feel so as not to keep repeating it endlessly.
However when it comes to a discussion of how to change things she points out suggestions that have been made and things that are being done. However what bothers me is how very little discussion is made on what the American people might think about continuing to have military presence everywhere, while it may reduce some problems, it does come across as colonialism, and when did the people get to say that they wanted this? While she does discuss many things through the law she does not discuss where the voice of the people has entered into this discussion.
October 7, 2016
An interesting read about how the Military has gradually become responsible for more and more responsibilities once tasked to Civilian agencies. What I assumed would be a critique of that the author instead takes an interesting turn and suggests that "heck why fight the trend, let the Military keep growing and taking over other agencies" until that day when the Military basically does everything and is the Executive arm of the Executive Branch.
While her thesis makes sense she did also state the problem with this and that is the old "If you always use a hammer everything looks like a nail". The military has many positive attributes but it is also expensive, unwieldy and when it bumbles through things it tends to break it. There are also massive amounts of restrictions and policies that surround the military hence the rise of Private Security Forces that aren't beholden to the red tape.
While her thesis makes sense she did also state the problem with this and that is the old "If you always use a hammer everything looks like a nail". The military has many positive attributes but it is also expensive, unwieldy and when it bumbles through things it tends to break it. There are also massive amounts of restrictions and policies that surround the military hence the rise of Private Security Forces that aren't beholden to the red tape.
February 15, 2018
Frankly unsure how this book got such accolades. The core value of her contribution took over half the book to get to. Yet then after outlining the erosion of the law of war, she returns to a wonky memoir. And I reject her resolution to accept perpetual war.
March 3, 2017
Each year at my university’s academic commencement, there’s a portion of the ceremony that I never quite know how to respond to. At some point, once all the faculty are up on stage and we’ve sung the Alma Mater and maybe after the awarding of the degrees (everything tends to blur together after a while) the graduating class of ROTC officers are sworn in. Upon walking onto the stage, before even a word is spoken in explanation, these young men and women invariably receive a standing ovation from the audience. Then, when they have taken their oath, the crowd is again on their feet with applause. This happens every year, and every year I remain seated in the back of the faculty seating with a few other junior faculty members, unsure of what to make of this. Surprised? Dismayed? Affronted?
I’ve been trying to puzzle out my reaction to this for a few years now. Part of it, I know, is simply my reactionary nature: I don’t like going along with spontaneous acclamations, and giving a group of anyone a standing ovation when nothing in particular has happened yet seems silly. But in addition to this, there’s a feeling of wanting to resisting a creeping militarization of everything. This is an academic ceremony, I find myself arguing. We’re not giving special recognition to the class of new pastors or nurses or teachers or engineers or social workers. Churches can have jingoistic fourth of July services waving the flag over the altar and equating love for God with love of county if they like, but I would prefer the culminating academic ceremony of my university to try to keep these things separate. How can you train young thinkers to evaluate and critique the military-industrial complex when we’re all so quick to jump to our feet and cheer the brave, young, new soldiers more loudly than we cheer anything or anyone else?
I thought this book would help me understand my own reaction better and that perhaps even give me ammunition in arguing against the militarization of everything in a post-9/11 world. Of course, to the author’s credit, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything was a good deal more complicated than that and forced me to evaluate my own feelings toward the military and its role in the world.
The best way to explain this book might be to talk a bit about the author’s background. Rosa Brooks was raised by two anti-war activists. She was trained in international law, spent time working with human rights groups around the world, and has written columns and articles on public policy. She worked as a civilian in the Pentagon and so has first-hand experience both with the functioning of the military. Finally, she married a career soldier and so has even deeper insights into the strange and somewhat insular world of the military. If this sounds like a complicated background that would make it hard to pin a simple “pro-military” or “anti-war” label on her, that is exactly correct—and it’s one of the things that make this work so compelling. Despite the book’s title, this is not a polemic either for a US interventionist policy or against war and the continued growth of the military.
Brooks does two separate but related things in this work. First of all, she’s providing perspective from her time spent working in the Pentagon to offer insight into the military’s expanding role in the world today. From building infrastructure to combating pirates to conducting drone strikes of dubious legality in nations at which we are not formally at war, she makes the point that actual fighting, the classical view of what the military does, is in reality becoming a very small portion of its mandate. The role of the military is expanding into policing and nation building, often at the cost of other civilian government agencies. Underfunded civilian agencies like the State Department are often passed over and their work given to the only agency whose budget has remained constant. More and more often, the military is given broader and larger tasks.
This is symptomatic of the post-9/11 world, and Brooks gives perspective not just on the dizzying administrative military complex and the bloated and often inefficient realities it entails but also a sympathetic image of a service trying to cope with a broader and broader mission in the new grey area between peace and an enduring state of war.
This portion of the book is not a memoir, though portions of it read like one. Brooks writes about her experiences in Uganda seeing the results of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s conflict on villagers and children. She gives a fascinating view of how things function (or don’t function) in the Pentagon and the relationship between military and civilian officers in the government, a tour of Guantanamo Bay, and stories of Iraq from just after the invasion. She talks about what it’s like living on a military base and the surreality of a separate society esteemed and valued but also misunderstood by the rest of the population. All of this though, while fascinating, seems partially intended to build credibility for what she wants to argue in the second portion of the book.
In the second portion, Brooks is making a legal case that the laws governing international conflicts need to change to address the changing nature of war. Laws are created to serve a certain purpose, and the laws of war have been created to keep war “boxed off” from the rest of life. But war since globalization and 9/11 puts us in a new era, a grey zone between peace (which, she says, is arguably as artificial a construct as the idea of sovereign states) and war, and we as a global society have the responsibility to change our laws so that they make conflict against a stateless enemy possible but also protect and enshrine human rights. She doesn’t make this claim immediately though. First she has to build up to it with some history.
Along the way, for instance, Brooks spells out the origins and the implications of the international law that has been in place in the UN Charter since the conclusion of World War II. This set of laws was designed to keep atrocities like the Second World War from happening again and is built around concepts of national sovereignty with a Security Council as a check against conflicts between states. She argues that this has been, despite notable exceptions such as Rwanda and Syria, largely successful but that it is beginning to fail in light of the new realities of warfare. In particular, Brooks examines the historical development of the concept of sovereignty and points out that often this is an artificial construct, imposed upon nations that never actually had cohesive boundaries or the ability to effect policy within those boundaries. Failed states, she argues, are more often examples of states that were never truly states to begin with, proxy states propped up by external colonial powers. More problematically though, she claims there is a contradiction at the heart of the UN Charter: the enshrining of sovereignty on the one hand and the protection of human rights on the other. This, she says, gives rise to contractions when a sovereign state is violating human rights. Do you respect sovereignty or human dignity?
Even more problematically, Brooks argues that since 9/11 the United States has been continually undermining the spirit of the UN Charter by either ignoring it or justifying US actions by legally stretching the laws of war into actions that are not against sovereign states, for instance striking combatants of a stateless enemy within the territories of states at which we are not formally at war. The problem is that this continually blurs the line between warfare (during which things like execution or detention without trial are legally permissible) and policing (where such things are not). As Brooks points out, the reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was not a given. Our leaders chose to respond to it as an act of war, perpetrated by a stateless enemy but giving rise to all issues in which we find ourselves as a nation embroiled today. But it could have been responded to as a crime, in which an entirely different set of legal paradigms would have come into play.
In the end, the book doesn’t offer any easy answers about what to do about the fact that everything is becoming war and the military is becoming everything, that we’re sliding down a slope toward more intervention and further blurring of the lines between police action and military operations in the nebulous, expanding, and un-winnable war on terror. She offers no clear solutions. Rather, her pragmatic response may be off-putting to those who were hoping (like me, I admit) this book would be a call to arms to resist the creep of the military into all aspects of life.
This is the new reality, Brooks admits. The nature of warfare is changing, and for better or worse she believes the military is going to continue to expand into new roles. But Brooks argues for a more difficult solution than simply resisting this. For one thing, she argues the military needs to change to become more adept and more effective at navigating its new roles. If it’s going to be about more than soldiers carrying guns, it needs to change how it recruits and how it operates. Secondly, and more compellingly, Brooks argues that the laws governing international conflicts need to change. If we’re going to live in a new world where technology and globalization have created a spectrum between peace and all-out war that includes grey areas like the war on terror or cyber-attacks, then we need to build new laws to guide us through this, new laws that focus on accountability and protecting human rights, instead of simply bending or disregarding laws that no longer fit the realities with which we’re faced.
Some might see this as a grim account, but Brooks is a law scholar, so she puts a great deal of faith in the nature of law itself. At its best, laws are meant to define and protect what we value. Brooks feels that the thing that should ultimately be valued are globally-defined human rights.
Yet as much as I value her argument, I feel she makes a large interventionist assumption in her work. She takes it as a given that the United States will have an invasive presence around the world, that we will continue to be active to protect our own interests and to police and enforce human rights abroad. It’s not clear why this is a given though, why we couldn’t have an approach that was active in international policy and law-making but that lacked a large military force. Do we need to have a defense budget larger than that of the next seven nations combined to lead the way in transparent international law that values human rights? Or does our extremely big stick undermine any attempt to do so? As she argues herself, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when all you have is the world’s largest military, than every problem looks like one to solve with military intervention (read: war).
Which brings me back to commencement and the standing ovation for the ROTC students. I love some of these students. I respect them all. I'm sure they'll be great officers. And if the military will have a larger and broader role in the world in which we live, don't I want its officers trained in a liberal arts setting, given tools for cultural literacy and understanding diversity and history and critical thinking? If nothing else, Brooks' book makes a compelling case for the diversity of situations and challenges these young men and women will face. The audience is not just applauding potential "boots on the ground," Brooks would say. They're applauding officers who are going to be called upon to do tasks yesterday's military never even considered. Whether or not that's a good thing is irrelevant, Brooks would argue. It's the way things are now, so the best response is to make sure we're creating effective international law that can help guide them in their work.
I’ve been trying to puzzle out my reaction to this for a few years now. Part of it, I know, is simply my reactionary nature: I don’t like going along with spontaneous acclamations, and giving a group of anyone a standing ovation when nothing in particular has happened yet seems silly. But in addition to this, there’s a feeling of wanting to resisting a creeping militarization of everything. This is an academic ceremony, I find myself arguing. We’re not giving special recognition to the class of new pastors or nurses or teachers or engineers or social workers. Churches can have jingoistic fourth of July services waving the flag over the altar and equating love for God with love of county if they like, but I would prefer the culminating academic ceremony of my university to try to keep these things separate. How can you train young thinkers to evaluate and critique the military-industrial complex when we’re all so quick to jump to our feet and cheer the brave, young, new soldiers more loudly than we cheer anything or anyone else?
I thought this book would help me understand my own reaction better and that perhaps even give me ammunition in arguing against the militarization of everything in a post-9/11 world. Of course, to the author’s credit, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything was a good deal more complicated than that and forced me to evaluate my own feelings toward the military and its role in the world.
The best way to explain this book might be to talk a bit about the author’s background. Rosa Brooks was raised by two anti-war activists. She was trained in international law, spent time working with human rights groups around the world, and has written columns and articles on public policy. She worked as a civilian in the Pentagon and so has first-hand experience both with the functioning of the military. Finally, she married a career soldier and so has even deeper insights into the strange and somewhat insular world of the military. If this sounds like a complicated background that would make it hard to pin a simple “pro-military” or “anti-war” label on her, that is exactly correct—and it’s one of the things that make this work so compelling. Despite the book’s title, this is not a polemic either for a US interventionist policy or against war and the continued growth of the military.
Brooks does two separate but related things in this work. First of all, she’s providing perspective from her time spent working in the Pentagon to offer insight into the military’s expanding role in the world today. From building infrastructure to combating pirates to conducting drone strikes of dubious legality in nations at which we are not formally at war, she makes the point that actual fighting, the classical view of what the military does, is in reality becoming a very small portion of its mandate. The role of the military is expanding into policing and nation building, often at the cost of other civilian government agencies. Underfunded civilian agencies like the State Department are often passed over and their work given to the only agency whose budget has remained constant. More and more often, the military is given broader and larger tasks.
This is symptomatic of the post-9/11 world, and Brooks gives perspective not just on the dizzying administrative military complex and the bloated and often inefficient realities it entails but also a sympathetic image of a service trying to cope with a broader and broader mission in the new grey area between peace and an enduring state of war.
This portion of the book is not a memoir, though portions of it read like one. Brooks writes about her experiences in Uganda seeing the results of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s conflict on villagers and children. She gives a fascinating view of how things function (or don’t function) in the Pentagon and the relationship between military and civilian officers in the government, a tour of Guantanamo Bay, and stories of Iraq from just after the invasion. She talks about what it’s like living on a military base and the surreality of a separate society esteemed and valued but also misunderstood by the rest of the population. All of this though, while fascinating, seems partially intended to build credibility for what she wants to argue in the second portion of the book.
In the second portion, Brooks is making a legal case that the laws governing international conflicts need to change to address the changing nature of war. Laws are created to serve a certain purpose, and the laws of war have been created to keep war “boxed off” from the rest of life. But war since globalization and 9/11 puts us in a new era, a grey zone between peace (which, she says, is arguably as artificial a construct as the idea of sovereign states) and war, and we as a global society have the responsibility to change our laws so that they make conflict against a stateless enemy possible but also protect and enshrine human rights. She doesn’t make this claim immediately though. First she has to build up to it with some history.
Along the way, for instance, Brooks spells out the origins and the implications of the international law that has been in place in the UN Charter since the conclusion of World War II. This set of laws was designed to keep atrocities like the Second World War from happening again and is built around concepts of national sovereignty with a Security Council as a check against conflicts between states. She argues that this has been, despite notable exceptions such as Rwanda and Syria, largely successful but that it is beginning to fail in light of the new realities of warfare. In particular, Brooks examines the historical development of the concept of sovereignty and points out that often this is an artificial construct, imposed upon nations that never actually had cohesive boundaries or the ability to effect policy within those boundaries. Failed states, she argues, are more often examples of states that were never truly states to begin with, proxy states propped up by external colonial powers. More problematically though, she claims there is a contradiction at the heart of the UN Charter: the enshrining of sovereignty on the one hand and the protection of human rights on the other. This, she says, gives rise to contractions when a sovereign state is violating human rights. Do you respect sovereignty or human dignity?
Even more problematically, Brooks argues that since 9/11 the United States has been continually undermining the spirit of the UN Charter by either ignoring it or justifying US actions by legally stretching the laws of war into actions that are not against sovereign states, for instance striking combatants of a stateless enemy within the territories of states at which we are not formally at war. The problem is that this continually blurs the line between warfare (during which things like execution or detention without trial are legally permissible) and policing (where such things are not). As Brooks points out, the reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was not a given. Our leaders chose to respond to it as an act of war, perpetrated by a stateless enemy but giving rise to all issues in which we find ourselves as a nation embroiled today. But it could have been responded to as a crime, in which an entirely different set of legal paradigms would have come into play.
In the end, the book doesn’t offer any easy answers about what to do about the fact that everything is becoming war and the military is becoming everything, that we’re sliding down a slope toward more intervention and further blurring of the lines between police action and military operations in the nebulous, expanding, and un-winnable war on terror. She offers no clear solutions. Rather, her pragmatic response may be off-putting to those who were hoping (like me, I admit) this book would be a call to arms to resist the creep of the military into all aspects of life.
This is the new reality, Brooks admits. The nature of warfare is changing, and for better or worse she believes the military is going to continue to expand into new roles. But Brooks argues for a more difficult solution than simply resisting this. For one thing, she argues the military needs to change to become more adept and more effective at navigating its new roles. If it’s going to be about more than soldiers carrying guns, it needs to change how it recruits and how it operates. Secondly, and more compellingly, Brooks argues that the laws governing international conflicts need to change. If we’re going to live in a new world where technology and globalization have created a spectrum between peace and all-out war that includes grey areas like the war on terror or cyber-attacks, then we need to build new laws to guide us through this, new laws that focus on accountability and protecting human rights, instead of simply bending or disregarding laws that no longer fit the realities with which we’re faced.
Some might see this as a grim account, but Brooks is a law scholar, so she puts a great deal of faith in the nature of law itself. At its best, laws are meant to define and protect what we value. Brooks feels that the thing that should ultimately be valued are globally-defined human rights.
Yet as much as I value her argument, I feel she makes a large interventionist assumption in her work. She takes it as a given that the United States will have an invasive presence around the world, that we will continue to be active to protect our own interests and to police and enforce human rights abroad. It’s not clear why this is a given though, why we couldn’t have an approach that was active in international policy and law-making but that lacked a large military force. Do we need to have a defense budget larger than that of the next seven nations combined to lead the way in transparent international law that values human rights? Or does our extremely big stick undermine any attempt to do so? As she argues herself, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when all you have is the world’s largest military, than every problem looks like one to solve with military intervention (read: war).
Which brings me back to commencement and the standing ovation for the ROTC students. I love some of these students. I respect them all. I'm sure they'll be great officers. And if the military will have a larger and broader role in the world in which we live, don't I want its officers trained in a liberal arts setting, given tools for cultural literacy and understanding diversity and history and critical thinking? If nothing else, Brooks' book makes a compelling case for the diversity of situations and challenges these young men and women will face. The audience is not just applauding potential "boots on the ground," Brooks would say. They're applauding officers who are going to be called upon to do tasks yesterday's military never even considered. Whether or not that's a good thing is irrelevant, Brooks would argue. It's the way things are now, so the best response is to make sure we're creating effective international law that can help guide them in their work.
November 24, 2021
As someone who has always only had an anti-military view of the military & really dug my head in the sand when it came to learning about it, I found this to be a fascinating and very informative book on the many things the military does. The military really, truly, has become everything in foreign operations - healthcare, marketing, stabilizing, education… But, I think I learned a ton in the first 100 pages and then got extremely bored & felt the book was a bit repetitive. It also didn’t explain in too much depth how the military actually became everything - while there were some mentions of the legal authorizations growing the military, I would have loved some more history on how different parts of the military came to be.
Overall, highly recommend the first section & first few chapters of the second section.
Overall, highly recommend the first section & first few chapters of the second section.
November 1, 2019
This book should have been good, and I really wanted to like it. However, I found her whole argument to be basically circular, dizzying, and difficult to follow. What should have been an interesting dive into the history of U.S. conflict and militarization (maybe amplified by some cool documents, interviews, or released information), was instead a dizzying and often annoying thought experiment for a philosophy student. I don't know what her main thesis was, and the entire book was the author going back and forth between sides of legalese. What are you trying to tell me here?
You can tell this book was written by a lawyer, because most of the book talks about legal issues, but spends equal amount of time arguing the other side of that legal issue. This means that it was hard to follow the author's argument, and re-reading it, I'm still not sure what the point of this book was.
I think Brooks is a qualified author and competent journalist. However, I don't know what the point of this book was, and I didn't even leave with any significant takeaway. Her logic was dizzying, and this felt like a 360-page interview with Vizzini from the Princess Bride, because I never knew where we were going or, more importantly, WHY. I think her writing is fine, but it reminds me of something I would have written in college: far too long, far too wordy, with irrelevant outside quotations to try to bring in some meaning, with too far-reaching scope. This book circled around many topics, but never landed on anything conclusive. I didn't enjoy it, nor did I feel like I learned much.
In addition, I think she tried to be too broad with this book. The scope was just too broad-- I applaud the effort, but it did not translate well. She covered personal anecdotes and recent military history (pre- vs. post-9/11), but also decided to foray into others cultures' warfare traditions, and then back to legalese, and then it turned into a moral philosophy text (at which point, is the reader is really, really tired of being asked relentless rhetorical questions? YES). (Also, are you doing that thing where you ask yourself a question to answer it? ALSO YES. Exhausting.)
It felt like a dizzying lecture by a moral philosophy/law professor, and it was difficult to follow. Eventually I just got irritated, because her use of rhetorical questions became so frustrating. "We can do this, BUT IF WE DO THIS, then THIS will happen, in which case is THAT THING okay? and IF that is okay, what does that say about our past? and then our FUTURE??" and it was really quite exhausting as a reader. The argument was difficult to follow. While I appreciate the depth of this topic (a topic that is, indeed, complex and hard to follow!), I felt like nothing was actually covered. Lots of words and information, but I learned very little.
I wanted to like it, but found very little relevant or interesting information. The arc was too broad, and it felt like she was being a true lawyer here and never actually reached a conclusion; instead, the whole book was a constant back-and-forth between two sides of various legal arguments, and the reader is left with thinking, "What was the point of this?"
In that respect, I suppose this writing is apt for the subject. The writing was dizzying and without purpose, much like her arguments. (Vizzini, again.) I couldn't tell you what the thesis was. I did enjoy the thought experiments, but I feel like this is the type of logic a sophomore in college uses in a paper-- not something suited for a 360-page text, where I'd hoped to come away with new insight. Like a sophomore in college, she included far too many irrelevant quotes to try to make her point (Lewis Carroll?? really?), and it was hard to follow.
To get through this book faster, I rented the physical book and audiobook from the library. The audiobook narrator did a good job, and I would recommend it if the content weren't so difficult to follow.
I didn't loathe this book as much as the review suggests, but I became annoyed at it, and was frustrated that I learned so little in what could have been an interesting read.
2/5 stars for effort and the topic. There is a thorough bibliography so you can learn more if you choose. I'm sad to give a bad review, since I really try to empathize with how hard it is to be a writer, but this book was extremely hard to glean anything from.
You can tell this book was written by a lawyer, because most of the book talks about legal issues, but spends equal amount of time arguing the other side of that legal issue. This means that it was hard to follow the author's argument, and re-reading it, I'm still not sure what the point of this book was.
I think Brooks is a qualified author and competent journalist. However, I don't know what the point of this book was, and I didn't even leave with any significant takeaway. Her logic was dizzying, and this felt like a 360-page interview with Vizzini from the Princess Bride, because I never knew where we were going or, more importantly, WHY. I think her writing is fine, but it reminds me of something I would have written in college: far too long, far too wordy, with irrelevant outside quotations to try to bring in some meaning, with too far-reaching scope. This book circled around many topics, but never landed on anything conclusive. I didn't enjoy it, nor did I feel like I learned much.
In addition, I think she tried to be too broad with this book. The scope was just too broad-- I applaud the effort, but it did not translate well. She covered personal anecdotes and recent military history (pre- vs. post-9/11), but also decided to foray into others cultures' warfare traditions, and then back to legalese, and then it turned into a moral philosophy text (at which point, is the reader is really, really tired of being asked relentless rhetorical questions? YES). (Also, are you doing that thing where you ask yourself a question to answer it? ALSO YES. Exhausting.)
It felt like a dizzying lecture by a moral philosophy/law professor, and it was difficult to follow. Eventually I just got irritated, because her use of rhetorical questions became so frustrating. "We can do this, BUT IF WE DO THIS, then THIS will happen, in which case is THAT THING okay? and IF that is okay, what does that say about our past? and then our FUTURE??" and it was really quite exhausting as a reader. The argument was difficult to follow. While I appreciate the depth of this topic (a topic that is, indeed, complex and hard to follow!), I felt like nothing was actually covered. Lots of words and information, but I learned very little.
I wanted to like it, but found very little relevant or interesting information. The arc was too broad, and it felt like she was being a true lawyer here and never actually reached a conclusion; instead, the whole book was a constant back-and-forth between two sides of various legal arguments, and the reader is left with thinking, "What was the point of this?"
In that respect, I suppose this writing is apt for the subject. The writing was dizzying and without purpose, much like her arguments. (Vizzini, again.) I couldn't tell you what the thesis was. I did enjoy the thought experiments, but I feel like this is the type of logic a sophomore in college uses in a paper-- not something suited for a 360-page text, where I'd hoped to come away with new insight. Like a sophomore in college, she included far too many irrelevant quotes to try to make her point (Lewis Carroll?? really?), and it was hard to follow.
To get through this book faster, I rented the physical book and audiobook from the library. The audiobook narrator did a good job, and I would recommend it if the content weren't so difficult to follow.
I didn't loathe this book as much as the review suggests, but I became annoyed at it, and was frustrated that I learned so little in what could have been an interesting read.
2/5 stars for effort and the topic. There is a thorough bibliography so you can learn more if you choose. I'm sad to give a bad review, since I really try to empathize with how hard it is to be a writer, but this book was extremely hard to glean anything from.
September 8, 2016
This is a pretty entertaining read for a wonky book about war and law. Rosa Brooks is an engaging writer and (for me, at least) an ideal candidate to navigate the corridors of the Pentagon and explain (more or less) how we got into the military clusterfuck we're in. She's smart, clear-eyed, funny and about as sane as a person can possibly be when discussing what is honestly a pretty damn bleak state of affairs.
November 14, 2016
Despite starting up a bit slower I was surprised how interesting the book became later on. The author has a very interesting life story which works wonderfully for the subject matter: coming from a family of anti-war advocates and being herself against it and then moving to working inside the military gives her a very nice overview position, being able to represent and understand interestingly both sides. In particular I was surprised later on in the book just how well she spoke the military jargon and understood both the strategies and bureaucratic imperatives and logic of war even as her heart was still against it and criticizing it... yet interestingly enough rather from the inside in the later part.
The book does and amazing job chronicling and explaining the transition from wars limited in time and space to non-stop eternal wars, the incentives and logic behind it, the problems and possible paths, as well as the commodification of the military in the political system
Random memories:
- some really fantastic historical and anthropological facts
- one of my favorite stories she tells is that of a previous life job interview where when asked what a mom&pop store should do if Walmart moves near them and she responds very shockingly that they should close shop, and this leading into the discussion how the military has become a one-stop-shopping Walmart point with politicians both of all persuasions and views, left and right and center denying it in principle but always using the unlimited budget and no-opposition of military projects to get things done more and more often as normal politics they no longer want to do with the difficult choices.
- the interesting transition story from outsider to insider at the Pentagon.
- a LOT of interesting international military data (of course from an american perspective), ranging from anti-piracy to government flipping and ally support
- fascinating insights into the expenses and costs
- interesting the story how the author had like many others high hopes that Obama would close Guantanamo Bay and was disappointed. Interesting insights about how/why this happened despite the strong mandate. Also interesting insights about the place and it's geopolitics.
- the book wonderfully explains the tensions between the complex and contradictory desires of the politicians from the military, and on the other hand the military's attitude of wanting clear do-able tasks, desire to be a tool with clear orders as opposed to contradictory ones like simultaneously hurting and helping the enemy, all this at high costs in material and human terms.
- some nice insights about the war sense of propaganda budgets and mixed civilian agencies
- she had some really nice commentary about the great harms done with best intentions. In this sense it reminded me of the book "A conflict of visions" by Sowell in the idea that through hard and traumatic experiences the author concludes that good intentions can actually very much produce bad results and the other way around... if i understand that position it would seem like the author is shifting from a "unconstrained" to a constrained vision of the world in that theory's sense.
- some interesting conflicting observations about the dilemmas and the positions of the opposing sides on difficult topics such as torture and detention, both on the battlefield and the new style "continuous war" that the world has been shifting into (war on drugs, war on terrorism, war on ideologies... )
- interesting commentaries to subjects like mission creep
- presents some wonderful examples where the legality of things becomes very fuzzy even in issues of human rights and military-civilian
- great insights both in the evolution of the technology of killing and the social implications of the personalization of war, the switch from indiscriminate killing to precise targeted killing like drones and precision missiles, and the much deeper than you'd think human and social shifts this brings with it.
- great discussions on the past techs of war and the taboos they brought with, going as far as bows and spears considered dishonorable at times.
- consideration on the shifts of military from separated to integrated into the local populations (makes me think a lot of the kinds of problems and solutions the roman empire developed and used to similar situations of dealing with distinct cultural local populations)
- there's that quite interesting case of the soldier who did mass mass killing but unlike the rest from his unit he wanted to be judged, and the judges made him ironically into an example punishment although everybody understood that he wasn't giving the orders and he would've been killed otherwise. Many kinds of such contradictions of the logic of military and civilian life.
- am i remembering correctly? i think the author at some point even has some insights that the modern nation state while the evolution of a long history is not necessarily an permanently durable form of organization. Didn't expect that insights from the author. Insights into how war made the state and the state made war.
- although overall the book has an american perspective, it often acknowledges how different parts in a conflict see things differently and act rationally based on their beliefs.
- great insights into how all the american population has come to admire and treat with sanctitude anything relating to the military, thereby that aura of credibility being useful from anything from education to morality basking in the aura of heroism and justness that comes even just by association with the military, with politicians particularly recognizing and using this trend.
- even as she talks of many politically incorrect insightful observation there's other areas the book stays very safely conservatively mainstream such as climate change and the related global government tendency.
- insights into "the war economy" (yeah, I did a MGS reference joke)
- funny-cool insights about the concept of failed-state(s) because of the extension of the discussion of what if you took the whole planet, could you or couldn't you call it a failed state. Nice lawyer-ish argumentation
- many interesting insight observations, for example the one how for all intents and purposes people in the military and their families live in a different America, a much more centrally planned socialistic one
All in all the book blew me away with a lot of insights that were way behind what I would've expected her to have. I was drawn to the book due to a fascinating Tom Woods interview, but then the book turned out even better in it's insights than just the historical and sociological observations. The points where I might see things slightly differently were often related to the author's tendency to see well intentioned laws as sources of say human rights while it seems to me a lot of these things might also be very well explained via the logic of the self interests of the involved warring parties, ranging from govs wanting better PR with their populations for interests of decreasing costs of population control/uprising to opposing armies having mutual interests of not doing the kinds of atrocities that could get soldiers on both sides to question their beyond-moral-values loyalty to their respective superiors to their own deaths.
Overall a fantastic book, with many many surprises I believe regardless from the position and mind-framework one's coming from, it plays like an interesting movie with great twists, that despite being often philosophical and with deep legal discussions. I warmly recommend it for great data and some nice mind-opening exercise examples for both sides of the positions on war.
The book does and amazing job chronicling and explaining the transition from wars limited in time and space to non-stop eternal wars, the incentives and logic behind it, the problems and possible paths, as well as the commodification of the military in the political system
Random memories:
- some really fantastic historical and anthropological facts
- one of my favorite stories she tells is that of a previous life job interview where when asked what a mom&pop store should do if Walmart moves near them and she responds very shockingly that they should close shop, and this leading into the discussion how the military has become a one-stop-shopping Walmart point with politicians both of all persuasions and views, left and right and center denying it in principle but always using the unlimited budget and no-opposition of military projects to get things done more and more often as normal politics they no longer want to do with the difficult choices.
- the interesting transition story from outsider to insider at the Pentagon.
- a LOT of interesting international military data (of course from an american perspective), ranging from anti-piracy to government flipping and ally support
- fascinating insights into the expenses and costs
- interesting the story how the author had like many others high hopes that Obama would close Guantanamo Bay and was disappointed. Interesting insights about how/why this happened despite the strong mandate. Also interesting insights about the place and it's geopolitics.
- the book wonderfully explains the tensions between the complex and contradictory desires of the politicians from the military, and on the other hand the military's attitude of wanting clear do-able tasks, desire to be a tool with clear orders as opposed to contradictory ones like simultaneously hurting and helping the enemy, all this at high costs in material and human terms.
- some nice insights about the war sense of propaganda budgets and mixed civilian agencies
- she had some really nice commentary about the great harms done with best intentions. In this sense it reminded me of the book "A conflict of visions" by Sowell in the idea that through hard and traumatic experiences the author concludes that good intentions can actually very much produce bad results and the other way around... if i understand that position it would seem like the author is shifting from a "unconstrained" to a constrained vision of the world in that theory's sense.
- some interesting conflicting observations about the dilemmas and the positions of the opposing sides on difficult topics such as torture and detention, both on the battlefield and the new style "continuous war" that the world has been shifting into (war on drugs, war on terrorism, war on ideologies... )
- interesting commentaries to subjects like mission creep
- presents some wonderful examples where the legality of things becomes very fuzzy even in issues of human rights and military-civilian
- great insights both in the evolution of the technology of killing and the social implications of the personalization of war, the switch from indiscriminate killing to precise targeted killing like drones and precision missiles, and the much deeper than you'd think human and social shifts this brings with it.
- great discussions on the past techs of war and the taboos they brought with, going as far as bows and spears considered dishonorable at times.
- consideration on the shifts of military from separated to integrated into the local populations (makes me think a lot of the kinds of problems and solutions the roman empire developed and used to similar situations of dealing with distinct cultural local populations)
- there's that quite interesting case of the soldier who did mass mass killing but unlike the rest from his unit he wanted to be judged, and the judges made him ironically into an example punishment although everybody understood that he wasn't giving the orders and he would've been killed otherwise. Many kinds of such contradictions of the logic of military and civilian life.
- am i remembering correctly? i think the author at some point even has some insights that the modern nation state while the evolution of a long history is not necessarily an permanently durable form of organization. Didn't expect that insights from the author. Insights into how war made the state and the state made war.
- although overall the book has an american perspective, it often acknowledges how different parts in a conflict see things differently and act rationally based on their beliefs.
- great insights into how all the american population has come to admire and treat with sanctitude anything relating to the military, thereby that aura of credibility being useful from anything from education to morality basking in the aura of heroism and justness that comes even just by association with the military, with politicians particularly recognizing and using this trend.
- even as she talks of many politically incorrect insightful observation there's other areas the book stays very safely conservatively mainstream such as climate change and the related global government tendency.
- insights into "the war economy" (yeah, I did a MGS reference joke)
- funny-cool insights about the concept of failed-state(s) because of the extension of the discussion of what if you took the whole planet, could you or couldn't you call it a failed state. Nice lawyer-ish argumentation
- many interesting insight observations, for example the one how for all intents and purposes people in the military and their families live in a different America, a much more centrally planned socialistic one
All in all the book blew me away with a lot of insights that were way behind what I would've expected her to have. I was drawn to the book due to a fascinating Tom Woods interview, but then the book turned out even better in it's insights than just the historical and sociological observations. The points where I might see things slightly differently were often related to the author's tendency to see well intentioned laws as sources of say human rights while it seems to me a lot of these things might also be very well explained via the logic of the self interests of the involved warring parties, ranging from govs wanting better PR with their populations for interests of decreasing costs of population control/uprising to opposing armies having mutual interests of not doing the kinds of atrocities that could get soldiers on both sides to question their beyond-moral-values loyalty to their respective superiors to their own deaths.
Overall a fantastic book, with many many surprises I believe regardless from the position and mind-framework one's coming from, it plays like an interesting movie with great twists, that despite being often philosophical and with deep legal discussions. I warmly recommend it for great data and some nice mind-opening exercise examples for both sides of the positions on war.
June 21, 2021
This book did not end up where I thought it was going when I initially started reading it, and I couldn't be more happy about that, actually. The author's ultimate conclusion is something that I've tossed around for a while in my own mind, but haven't been as capable of explaining or articulating as well as something with her depth and breadth of experience, training, and education could.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in future civilian-military governmental relations.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in future civilian-military governmental relations.
December 8, 2016
At first glance this book seems to state what gets parroted frequently namely that war is being fought by a fraction of the population and an even smaller portion of the military itself. The oft-cited gulf between civilian and military personnel is alluded to in this book repeatedly. However, the book provides a unique perspective on this issue by pointing to the changing nature of war itself and focusing on technological changes and legal challenges that make war increasingly impersonal and far removed not only from civilians but also from many service members.
To provide some context on the author, Rosa Brooks, she is a contributor to Foreign Policy, a legal scholar and Georgetown law professor, who spent several years working at the Pentagon under Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Additionally, Ms. Brooks met her husband, an Army Colonel, while at the Pentagon, and became immersed in the culture of the military as a spouse. Due to this fact, the book provides an exposition of military culture and reads like an epiphany of the difference between civilian and military life. This should appeal to civilians reading the book, but not so much to active service members. Although I did enjoy the statistics on military recruiting and I hadn’t thought about the correlation between geography of military bases and the geography of recruiting trends.
This book’s strength occurs in its focus on war in the twenty-first century under the umbrella of the overarching and seemingly unending war on terror. The author suggests that military actions like drone strikes against suspected terrorists have far reaching implications which we have not fully begun to appreciate. The most obvious implication is what might happen when other nations adopt their own equally capable drone technology to carry out similar attacks all over the world under the banner of their own “war on terrorism.” This is where the author draws on her legal background to make the case that a clear legal framework, right or wrong, needs to be established for this kind of ever increasing activity. She also focuses on detainee detention at Guantanamo Bay, and makes a clear and strong human rights case for shuttering the base.
The second point of her book is that over the past fifteen years of counterinsurgency campaigns the military has been asked to take on a range of tasks that are traditionally reserved for the State Department, USAID, and NGO’s. But, as the American response to the war on terror has been overwhelmingly a military one, the DOD budget has ballooned and has vastly eclipsed that of any other government agency. Thus, the military is asked to do tasks that it is not trained to do nor is it truly prepared to do. She mentions everything from infrastructure building and public works projects included but not limited to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Her description of the military as a “Wal-Mart” for policy makers is provocative, yet when one considers the number of missions the military conducts across the “range of military operations,” it seems to be a fair assessment.
The book touches on a lot of issues beyond the central thesis of “how everything became war and the military became everything.” Some parts of the book seem to be disjointed from the thesis and are included as one or more of her “tales from the Pentagon.” I am thinking of one of her earlier chapters on piracy. She alludes to a clear historical precedent for the Navy’s anti-piracy campaigns, but I don’t think that this means that fighting piracy has to fall under the “everything becoming war” taxonomy. I think this vignette simply becomes one of those juicy little “tales from the Pentagon” as she recalls the entire episode surrounding the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. On the other hand, I found this history to be interesting, and there are a few other historical vignettes to wet the military historian palette. The tales from the Pentagon are well written too, and occasionally build her case for the military becoming everything. For example, a White House national security staffer called to order immediate drone surveillance in Kyrgyzstan. When she raised practical questions about the utility of the drone surveillance, the staffer blasted her for not getting some “CentCom [Central Command] Colonel” to order the drone immediately. This is one of the more eyebrow raising examples of the civilian and military disconnect not to mention civilians putting unreasonable expectations on military capabilities.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the current state of the American military and with an interest in thinking about the role the military should play in American geo-political strategy.
To provide some context on the author, Rosa Brooks, she is a contributor to Foreign Policy, a legal scholar and Georgetown law professor, who spent several years working at the Pentagon under Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Additionally, Ms. Brooks met her husband, an Army Colonel, while at the Pentagon, and became immersed in the culture of the military as a spouse. Due to this fact, the book provides an exposition of military culture and reads like an epiphany of the difference between civilian and military life. This should appeal to civilians reading the book, but not so much to active service members. Although I did enjoy the statistics on military recruiting and I hadn’t thought about the correlation between geography of military bases and the geography of recruiting trends.
This book’s strength occurs in its focus on war in the twenty-first century under the umbrella of the overarching and seemingly unending war on terror. The author suggests that military actions like drone strikes against suspected terrorists have far reaching implications which we have not fully begun to appreciate. The most obvious implication is what might happen when other nations adopt their own equally capable drone technology to carry out similar attacks all over the world under the banner of their own “war on terrorism.” This is where the author draws on her legal background to make the case that a clear legal framework, right or wrong, needs to be established for this kind of ever increasing activity. She also focuses on detainee detention at Guantanamo Bay, and makes a clear and strong human rights case for shuttering the base.
The second point of her book is that over the past fifteen years of counterinsurgency campaigns the military has been asked to take on a range of tasks that are traditionally reserved for the State Department, USAID, and NGO’s. But, as the American response to the war on terror has been overwhelmingly a military one, the DOD budget has ballooned and has vastly eclipsed that of any other government agency. Thus, the military is asked to do tasks that it is not trained to do nor is it truly prepared to do. She mentions everything from infrastructure building and public works projects included but not limited to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Her description of the military as a “Wal-Mart” for policy makers is provocative, yet when one considers the number of missions the military conducts across the “range of military operations,” it seems to be a fair assessment.
The book touches on a lot of issues beyond the central thesis of “how everything became war and the military became everything.” Some parts of the book seem to be disjointed from the thesis and are included as one or more of her “tales from the Pentagon.” I am thinking of one of her earlier chapters on piracy. She alludes to a clear historical precedent for the Navy’s anti-piracy campaigns, but I don’t think that this means that fighting piracy has to fall under the “everything becoming war” taxonomy. I think this vignette simply becomes one of those juicy little “tales from the Pentagon” as she recalls the entire episode surrounding the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. On the other hand, I found this history to be interesting, and there are a few other historical vignettes to wet the military historian palette. The tales from the Pentagon are well written too, and occasionally build her case for the military becoming everything. For example, a White House national security staffer called to order immediate drone surveillance in Kyrgyzstan. When she raised practical questions about the utility of the drone surveillance, the staffer blasted her for not getting some “CentCom [Central Command] Colonel” to order the drone immediately. This is one of the more eyebrow raising examples of the civilian and military disconnect not to mention civilians putting unreasonable expectations on military capabilities.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the current state of the American military and with an interest in thinking about the role the military should play in American geo-political strategy.
August 21, 2018
A very interesting examination of the US Military and it’s role, especially since 9/11. Worth a read.
November 13, 2016
This is a book by an International Law Professor at Georgetown that is a mix of memoir, history, and policy argument about the role of law in the evolving US National Security state as it has evolved since the 2001 attacks and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Professor Brooks served as a legal advisory to the Undersecretary of Defense in the Obama administration and was deeply moved by the experience, especially given her expertise in Human Rights Law and the Law of War.
There is a huge literature on these issues that has arisen since 2001. Some of it has come from the memoirs of politicians and administrators, some has come from the memoirs of retired generals, some has come from the observations of dissatisfied middle level military commanders, and some has come from lawyers and other policy analysts, of which this book is an example.
Brooks ties together two very macro level developments since 2001.
The first development that Brooks focuses on is that technology, global media, global terror networks, and related economic and political forces have combined to produce a situation in which it is increasingly difficult to demarcate between peace and war - with the implication that we have moved into a time when war is likely to continue indefinitely. Gitmo has been hard to close, peace has not bubbled up in Iraq or Afghanistan, ISIL has morphed into a new threat out of earlier groups, cyber war is happening, etc. The point that Brooks draws from this is based on the law traditionally meaning different regimes during war and peace. We all presume peace as the foundation for our political order but in an environment of continual war, law is certain to take on the characteristics of wartime exigencies, with all of their threats to our own political values.
The second development that is core to Brooks' book is that given US political dysfunctions and the financial crises following 2008, the government has been cutting budgets on all things non-military and increasing military spending to a point where the Pentagon comes to dominate the rest of the government. Her analogy is that DOD is becoming the Wal-Mart that is threatening the viability of the other smaller (Mom and Pop?) departments in the government. As the mission of the DOD expands, the range of actions falling under its control increases and with it comes the threat of the increasing militarization of the government and the national culture. The past successes of the armed forces has come back to threaten them by a grand mission keep that puts basic missions in jeopardy even as more lawmakers look to the military and its culture of performance.
The story is more complex than summarized here, but this is an interesting argument, made even more interesting by the results of the recent presidential election. I am not sure if I am fully persuaded but it is an engaging book that makes one think about these issues.
Brooks is at her best in arguing about legal issues - an providing the reader with a fine introduction to how the law fits into military issues and why it is important for a strong and self-critical legal to develop and be maintained.
If there is a weakness, it is that perhaps too much is being put on the plate for integration into the story. This is very complex stuff and Brooks is working several of her prior pieces into the book. Less of an agenda might have worked better. This is a minor critique, however, and anyone concerned about how the new administration will engage to modernize the military while trying to clean up the mess in Washington will do well to read what Rosa Brooks has to say about the military-industrial complex in 2016.
There is a huge literature on these issues that has arisen since 2001. Some of it has come from the memoirs of politicians and administrators, some has come from the memoirs of retired generals, some has come from the observations of dissatisfied middle level military commanders, and some has come from lawyers and other policy analysts, of which this book is an example.
Brooks ties together two very macro level developments since 2001.
The first development that Brooks focuses on is that technology, global media, global terror networks, and related economic and political forces have combined to produce a situation in which it is increasingly difficult to demarcate between peace and war - with the implication that we have moved into a time when war is likely to continue indefinitely. Gitmo has been hard to close, peace has not bubbled up in Iraq or Afghanistan, ISIL has morphed into a new threat out of earlier groups, cyber war is happening, etc. The point that Brooks draws from this is based on the law traditionally meaning different regimes during war and peace. We all presume peace as the foundation for our political order but in an environment of continual war, law is certain to take on the characteristics of wartime exigencies, with all of their threats to our own political values.
The second development that is core to Brooks' book is that given US political dysfunctions and the financial crises following 2008, the government has been cutting budgets on all things non-military and increasing military spending to a point where the Pentagon comes to dominate the rest of the government. Her analogy is that DOD is becoming the Wal-Mart that is threatening the viability of the other smaller (Mom and Pop?) departments in the government. As the mission of the DOD expands, the range of actions falling under its control increases and with it comes the threat of the increasing militarization of the government and the national culture. The past successes of the armed forces has come back to threaten them by a grand mission keep that puts basic missions in jeopardy even as more lawmakers look to the military and its culture of performance.
The story is more complex than summarized here, but this is an interesting argument, made even more interesting by the results of the recent presidential election. I am not sure if I am fully persuaded but it is an engaging book that makes one think about these issues.
Brooks is at her best in arguing about legal issues - an providing the reader with a fine introduction to how the law fits into military issues and why it is important for a strong and self-critical legal to develop and be maintained.
If there is a weakness, it is that perhaps too much is being put on the plate for integration into the story. This is very complex stuff and Brooks is working several of her prior pieces into the book. Less of an agenda might have worked better. This is a minor critique, however, and anyone concerned about how the new administration will engage to modernize the military while trying to clean up the mess in Washington will do well to read what Rosa Brooks has to say about the military-industrial complex in 2016.
September 29, 2016
A model non-fiction blockbuster: well written, comprehensive, but with a clear argument. As the US government defunds almost everything other than the military, the military is required to take on jobs that it is poorly prepared to do. And as open ended wars on drugs, terror, black people etc etc... proliferate, there seems to be nothing and nobody immune from the military's attention. Well worth reading this back to back with Fred Jameson's essay on the army as offering a possible site of political resistance.
November 2, 2019
This is outright, sappy, oozing-gooey neoliberal (imperialist) propaganda. The point: the military is a good, well meaning outreach for democracy. We have to make tough decisions sometimes but everything we do is for benevolent reasons so go back to your football and have some nachos cuz everything’s great. We will take care of it.
If you’re the type of person who believes this crap, you’ll love this ridiculous book. If you love it, you either profit from this tyranny or you’re really really dumb.
If you’re the type of person who believes this crap, you’ll love this ridiculous book. If you love it, you either profit from this tyranny or you’re really really dumb.
September 29, 2017
An outstanding read of the military industrial complex in a post 9/11 context. For being a self-proclaimed military outsider who spent 2009-11 as Michele Flournoy's deputy at USD(P), she has well captured the essence of much national security decision making challenges involving the military's use. A must read for national security professionals as she asks and grapples with many of the questions and issues most people would rather avoid!
January 19, 2019
Yes, this book took me a longtime to slog through but in the end it was very good and thought provoking. Ms Brooks is an obviously talented writer and law professor. 2019 and the events she writes about from 2001 still are in play...sad commentary or a portend of how wars will be waged in future years?!
March 24, 2022
Enjoyed this one: very balanced and comprehensive look at the national security scene during the War on Terror. Brooks has served in a variety of DoD and State roles, and she brings an outsider's perspective to the book's core concerns. She's good at explaining things for people who might not have a working knowledge of defense/national security issues, but the book is also challenging and informing for experts in that realm.
Brooks has two core concerns in this book. The first is that we increasingly ask the military to take on more and more roles that might be better assigned to civilian agencies. She goes through issues such as nation-building, counterinsurgency, training police overseas, providing humanitarian aid, addressing disease outbreaks, fighting pirates, cyberwarfare issues, and so on. As someone who has moved from State to DoD, she can see how the military has absorbed many civilian agencies' functions while also having a whopping budget. The core issue here is that as the US plays growing set of roles in the world, there's a feedback loop wherein tasking the military with all kinds of non-war roles then makes the military better at these things which makes them more likely to be tasked with those things. Brooks' search for clarity on the question of what exactly the military should do and not do is excellent.
The second main concern of this book is the increasingly fuzz line between war and peace. Societies have always sought to make this line distinct even thought this has always been incredibly hard. However, in the age of the war on terrorism, this becomes even fuzzier. The Bush administration got us off on the wrong foot by immediately declaring that this was a war without really thinking through what that meant, post-911. Then, they defined the enemies as neither prisoners of war nor criminals but as illegal non-combatants, which meant that they were somehow outside the Geneva Conventions and could be detained indefinitely. Moreover, the original authorizations of military force have been dramatically inflated to justify warfare against pretty much any terrorist group of militias, including ones that did not exist on 911/ The war paradigm for terrorism also doesn't really work for this conflict because terrorism is a tactic more than a tangible enemy, but keeping the US on a legal war footing justifies huge spending, extensive surveillance, drone wars, and a broad global deployment presence.
Brooks' best point is that we need a legal structure for the fuzzy, liminal kind of conflict that is modern warfare in general, not just terrorism. The rights of combatants, captives, and civilians, questions of sovereignty, when and where force can be used, and other issues can't be dealt with through older paradigms. We need critical and creative minds like hers to think of ways to restrain modern warfare rather that lawyers like John Yoo who simply seek to justify the US no matter what it does. I think this is a realistic assessment of the law of warfare today and a good critique of how the US has conducted its foreign and military policy since 911.
My main disagreement with Brooks is one of degree. I am just not that concerned about the drone war or surveillance. Drones seem like a decent and precise enough way to solve a really tough problem: how do you stop people who are plotting against the US or its allies or who have already attacked us when they are in the territories of states that can't or won't go after them? Do you send in special forces each time, putting more American lives at risk and not necessarily lowering civilian casualties? Informed assessment of the drone war show that it actually has been pretty discriminate and that it has made it far harder for many major terrorist groups to operate. I agree that the murky moral and legal status of these programs is worth close examination, but I don't think they are on the surface human rights violations or clear violations of the Constitution. We have to put the fight against terrorism in clearer boundaries, but we also have to fight that fight, and there's no perfect weapon to do so. I don't fundamentally disagree with Brooks on these issues, I just don't see them as a huge problem the way she does.
Brooks is the perfect person to tackle these questions. She has both academic and government experience, she's a lawyer by training but also uses history, polisci, and anthropology well. She grew up in a quite left wing and anti-war family and is skeptical of US interventions, but she doesn't hate or fear the military and sees many ways that US power is needed in the world. In short, she isn't ideologically driven although she is principled, and she recognizes that policy makers never have total freedom of action and often have to choose between bad and worse options. Even when I disagreed with her, I appreciated her fairness and her overall approach. This is a good read both for experts and relative beginners to questions about the US global role today, especially regarding the military.
Brooks has two core concerns in this book. The first is that we increasingly ask the military to take on more and more roles that might be better assigned to civilian agencies. She goes through issues such as nation-building, counterinsurgency, training police overseas, providing humanitarian aid, addressing disease outbreaks, fighting pirates, cyberwarfare issues, and so on. As someone who has moved from State to DoD, she can see how the military has absorbed many civilian agencies' functions while also having a whopping budget. The core issue here is that as the US plays growing set of roles in the world, there's a feedback loop wherein tasking the military with all kinds of non-war roles then makes the military better at these things which makes them more likely to be tasked with those things. Brooks' search for clarity on the question of what exactly the military should do and not do is excellent.
The second main concern of this book is the increasingly fuzz line between war and peace. Societies have always sought to make this line distinct even thought this has always been incredibly hard. However, in the age of the war on terrorism, this becomes even fuzzier. The Bush administration got us off on the wrong foot by immediately declaring that this was a war without really thinking through what that meant, post-911. Then, they defined the enemies as neither prisoners of war nor criminals but as illegal non-combatants, which meant that they were somehow outside the Geneva Conventions and could be detained indefinitely. Moreover, the original authorizations of military force have been dramatically inflated to justify warfare against pretty much any terrorist group of militias, including ones that did not exist on 911/ The war paradigm for terrorism also doesn't really work for this conflict because terrorism is a tactic more than a tangible enemy, but keeping the US on a legal war footing justifies huge spending, extensive surveillance, drone wars, and a broad global deployment presence.
Brooks' best point is that we need a legal structure for the fuzzy, liminal kind of conflict that is modern warfare in general, not just terrorism. The rights of combatants, captives, and civilians, questions of sovereignty, when and where force can be used, and other issues can't be dealt with through older paradigms. We need critical and creative minds like hers to think of ways to restrain modern warfare rather that lawyers like John Yoo who simply seek to justify the US no matter what it does. I think this is a realistic assessment of the law of warfare today and a good critique of how the US has conducted its foreign and military policy since 911.
My main disagreement with Brooks is one of degree. I am just not that concerned about the drone war or surveillance. Drones seem like a decent and precise enough way to solve a really tough problem: how do you stop people who are plotting against the US or its allies or who have already attacked us when they are in the territories of states that can't or won't go after them? Do you send in special forces each time, putting more American lives at risk and not necessarily lowering civilian casualties? Informed assessment of the drone war show that it actually has been pretty discriminate and that it has made it far harder for many major terrorist groups to operate. I agree that the murky moral and legal status of these programs is worth close examination, but I don't think they are on the surface human rights violations or clear violations of the Constitution. We have to put the fight against terrorism in clearer boundaries, but we also have to fight that fight, and there's no perfect weapon to do so. I don't fundamentally disagree with Brooks on these issues, I just don't see them as a huge problem the way she does.
Brooks is the perfect person to tackle these questions. She has both academic and government experience, she's a lawyer by training but also uses history, polisci, and anthropology well. She grew up in a quite left wing and anti-war family and is skeptical of US interventions, but she doesn't hate or fear the military and sees many ways that US power is needed in the world. In short, she isn't ideologically driven although she is principled, and she recognizes that policy makers never have total freedom of action and often have to choose between bad and worse options. Even when I disagreed with her, I appreciated her fairness and her overall approach. This is a good read both for experts and relative beginners to questions about the US global role today, especially regarding the military.
June 11, 2022
This book draws on a number of sources—the author’s time working in the Defense Department, travel with Human Rights Watch, and her work as a law professor with a specialization on international law.
The key point of this book is the difficulty of defining war. Legally, this is a huge problem because the law that is applicable in times of war is quite different than that applicable during times of peace. Consequently, a clear delineation between the two is legally critical.
This matters because international law should function to limit the war. For example, civilians should be protected, but soldiers can be legitimately targeted simply because they are soldiers. In peacetime, of course, people cannot be punished without some proof of guilt or innocence; during wars, combatants can be killed merely because they are combatants.
The problem has been acute for the United States especially since the declaration of a War on Terror. Neither the enemy nor the scope of operations is not well-defined. The issue is clearest when considering drone strikes outside Iraq and Afghanistan. The public must simply take the government’s word that these strikes were against individuals who were a threat to the United States, and many of these strikes are in countries that do not necessarily consent to the operation.
The final chapter notes that war and peace can be considered as end-points on a continuum and argues that we need to define rules for the intermediate points, for example, situations in which conflict consists of small anonymous attacks on IT. The author acknowledges that definitions are almost necessarily arbitrary but argues that they are necessary in order to constrain the violence of war.
I think the contrast war and violent crime is also useful; we rely on the military to fight wars and the police to fight crime. The two could be also considered on a continuum, and any given violent event can be classified as one or the other depending on whether a more or less organized group is challenging the government’s authority.
An intermediate stage on this continuum could be called “irregular” wars, situations in which one of the parties is not a recognized governmental entity. Guerrilla wars and rebellions have been an issue throughout history. Most of the author’s discussion focuses on these intermediate cases.
When these non-state parties are large and the violence is widespread, one could say that the violence constitutes a war. The Algerian War of Independence is an example. When the group is smaller and there is a lower level of violence, the violence is often considered criminal. Germany dealt with the Red Army Faction / Baader Meinhof Gang as criminals. Similarly, the United States has dealt with the Mafia as a criminal organization.
Because there is a continuum, any delineation has to be somewhat arbitrary. Organizations like the Mexican cartels could easily be considered a criminal organization or a hostile power challenging the government’s authority.
Conflicts involving these organizations can last for decades. Sometimes, they are concluded when an agreement is reached; sometimes the rebels or guerrillas are eradicated.
Often guerrillas and rebels operate in secret, so an outsider can readily identify who is a guerrilla or rebel. In addition, the secrecy complicates the distinguishing between combatants and covert supporters.
The structures of these organizations tend to be somewhat amorphous as well. Most recently, the fracturing of Islamic terrorist organizations make these problems even more significant because there is not a well-defined enemy. When violence occurs, the responsible party cannot easily be identified.
Again, these problems are hardly new. Max Boot’s book, Invisible Armies, documents that irregular warfare has been extremely common throughout history.
The new aspect of irregular warfare is the globalization of conflict. Instead of a group operating in limited geography, terrorist organizations can operate almost anywhere in the world. The War on Terror has made that painfully clear.
My point is that the author’s conclusion about intermediate stages between peace and full-fledged warfare is a bit vague. In contrast, there is a very important type of conflicts, quite different than wars between states, that needs to be governed by some sort of law. Establishing a law for these wars is considerably less ambitious than handling the multitude of situations in which there is some sort of conflict.
I give this book five stars. The author’s analysis is extremely perceptive, and I think the problems that she identifies are critical.
The key point of this book is the difficulty of defining war. Legally, this is a huge problem because the law that is applicable in times of war is quite different than that applicable during times of peace. Consequently, a clear delineation between the two is legally critical.
This matters because international law should function to limit the war. For example, civilians should be protected, but soldiers can be legitimately targeted simply because they are soldiers. In peacetime, of course, people cannot be punished without some proof of guilt or innocence; during wars, combatants can be killed merely because they are combatants.
The problem has been acute for the United States especially since the declaration of a War on Terror. Neither the enemy nor the scope of operations is not well-defined. The issue is clearest when considering drone strikes outside Iraq and Afghanistan. The public must simply take the government’s word that these strikes were against individuals who were a threat to the United States, and many of these strikes are in countries that do not necessarily consent to the operation.
The final chapter notes that war and peace can be considered as end-points on a continuum and argues that we need to define rules for the intermediate points, for example, situations in which conflict consists of small anonymous attacks on IT. The author acknowledges that definitions are almost necessarily arbitrary but argues that they are necessary in order to constrain the violence of war.
I think the contrast war and violent crime is also useful; we rely on the military to fight wars and the police to fight crime. The two could be also considered on a continuum, and any given violent event can be classified as one or the other depending on whether a more or less organized group is challenging the government’s authority.
An intermediate stage on this continuum could be called “irregular” wars, situations in which one of the parties is not a recognized governmental entity. Guerrilla wars and rebellions have been an issue throughout history. Most of the author’s discussion focuses on these intermediate cases.
When these non-state parties are large and the violence is widespread, one could say that the violence constitutes a war. The Algerian War of Independence is an example. When the group is smaller and there is a lower level of violence, the violence is often considered criminal. Germany dealt with the Red Army Faction / Baader Meinhof Gang as criminals. Similarly, the United States has dealt with the Mafia as a criminal organization.
Because there is a continuum, any delineation has to be somewhat arbitrary. Organizations like the Mexican cartels could easily be considered a criminal organization or a hostile power challenging the government’s authority.
Conflicts involving these organizations can last for decades. Sometimes, they are concluded when an agreement is reached; sometimes the rebels or guerrillas are eradicated.
Often guerrillas and rebels operate in secret, so an outsider can readily identify who is a guerrilla or rebel. In addition, the secrecy complicates the distinguishing between combatants and covert supporters.
The structures of these organizations tend to be somewhat amorphous as well. Most recently, the fracturing of Islamic terrorist organizations make these problems even more significant because there is not a well-defined enemy. When violence occurs, the responsible party cannot easily be identified.
Again, these problems are hardly new. Max Boot’s book, Invisible Armies, documents that irregular warfare has been extremely common throughout history.
The new aspect of irregular warfare is the globalization of conflict. Instead of a group operating in limited geography, terrorist organizations can operate almost anywhere in the world. The War on Terror has made that painfully clear.
My point is that the author’s conclusion about intermediate stages between peace and full-fledged warfare is a bit vague. In contrast, there is a very important type of conflicts, quite different than wars between states, that needs to be governed by some sort of law. Establishing a law for these wars is considerably less ambitious than handling the multitude of situations in which there is some sort of conflict.
I give this book five stars. The author’s analysis is extremely perceptive, and I think the problems that she identifies are critical.
November 7, 2023
If you are coming into this book looking for a hard hitting deconstruction of how the US Military has, for lack of a better term, vored the entire state department and caused the world to live in a perpetual state of war - then you will walk away from this book feeling only slightly disappointed.
What interesting about this book is the conclusion that Brooks brings. That the military, in the 21st century, has become the state department in that it must handle not only the hot war of bullets and killing, but of building up nations and maintaining peace. Maintaining peace with a military force is a juxtaposition that I find ironic, and Brooks describes as something that is not going to change anytime soon. The military is now responsible for roads, education, clean water, building infrastructure, more so that the USDOS ever was. Because of this we must change the way we vies the military and its function within conflicts in the world.
The other conclusion Brooks came to which I found interesting, was the movement from viewing what war is and how we define war as a concrete thing, to something that is more fluid. There will always be "an amount" of war happening anywhere in the world now. Conflict as we know it from WWII has changed due to the nature of fighting. No longer is war fought between nation state v, nation state, but between a nation and often a group of unmarked people. How do you defeat terrorism? what does a terrorist look like? how do you know when you have all the terrorists? if you kill the terrorist and leave behind their family, are you not just making terrorism 2.0?
These are the questions Brooks poses while discussing the fact that we are always going to be at war, because we have chosen to be at war with ideas instead of things. When Ronald Regean declared the war on drugs, it was a symbolic war in attempts to keep the US as white and sterile as possible in an era when America was feeling the effects of the civil rights movement - attempting to suppress what strides Black American had made.
I am not sure I agree with Brooks in her belief that the Military can eventually become an effective tool for peace keeping. I think the thing you need to have an effective military and an effective civilian sector are two things that are so opposed to each other, you are always going to be winning physical conflicts and then having those areas fall into ruin due to the lack of humanitarian aid and rebuilding given. I don't think the US Military will ever be able to be an effective force in rebuilding any eras they have just bombed the shit out of - phycologically, those wounds don't heal.
What interesting about this book is the conclusion that Brooks brings. That the military, in the 21st century, has become the state department in that it must handle not only the hot war of bullets and killing, but of building up nations and maintaining peace. Maintaining peace with a military force is a juxtaposition that I find ironic, and Brooks describes as something that is not going to change anytime soon. The military is now responsible for roads, education, clean water, building infrastructure, more so that the USDOS ever was. Because of this we must change the way we vies the military and its function within conflicts in the world.
The other conclusion Brooks came to which I found interesting, was the movement from viewing what war is and how we define war as a concrete thing, to something that is more fluid. There will always be "an amount" of war happening anywhere in the world now. Conflict as we know it from WWII has changed due to the nature of fighting. No longer is war fought between nation state v, nation state, but between a nation and often a group of unmarked people. How do you defeat terrorism? what does a terrorist look like? how do you know when you have all the terrorists? if you kill the terrorist and leave behind their family, are you not just making terrorism 2.0?
These are the questions Brooks poses while discussing the fact that we are always going to be at war, because we have chosen to be at war with ideas instead of things. When Ronald Regean declared the war on drugs, it was a symbolic war in attempts to keep the US as white and sterile as possible in an era when America was feeling the effects of the civil rights movement - attempting to suppress what strides Black American had made.
I am not sure I agree with Brooks in her belief that the Military can eventually become an effective tool for peace keeping. I think the thing you need to have an effective military and an effective civilian sector are two things that are so opposed to each other, you are always going to be winning physical conflicts and then having those areas fall into ruin due to the lack of humanitarian aid and rebuilding given. I don't think the US Military will ever be able to be an effective force in rebuilding any eras they have just bombed the shit out of - phycologically, those wounds don't heal.
February 27, 2018
This very important book provides a wide-ranging view of the American military and American civil-military relations, historical, critical, descriptive, and prescriptive. It is liberal but not ideological, with outside-the-box ideas that fall far short of calling for a reduced military role in our culture. The writing is good but not great, and the book is overlong and repetitive, so that the messages are too often lost (fortunately, the conclusion does a good job of quickly bringing everything together). But this is a subject that receives far too little attention, and it's a great thing that Brooks has used her experiences and knowledge to enlighten us ignorant citizens.
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