Source: http://www.historicalnovels.info/Gates-of-Fire.html

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The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield

"The Afghan Campaign treats the hardest military challenge ever faced by Alexander the Great from the standpoint of the men who marched off to fight with him. The title, which chooses a modern name for a war in lands then called Bactria and Sogdiana, makes clear from the outset the parallels the author sees between a war fought in the fourth century B.C. and another fought some twenty-four centuries later. The novel is one of many admirable works showing a naïve young recruit marching off in hope of glory only to find his soul slowly destroyed by the horrors of combat: atrocities witnessed, endured and committed. In this case the novice soldier is a Macedonian who arrives as Alexander begins his efforts to subdue the still-rebellious northwestern provinces of the Persian Empire."

Source:  http://www.historicalnovels.info/Afghan-Campaign.html

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Future War by Robert M. Latiff

"The evolving, complex world of conflict and technology demands that we pay more attention to the issues that will confront us, before it is too late to control them. Decrying what he describes as a "broken" relationship between the military and the public it serves, Latiff issues a bold wake-up call to military planners and weapons technologists, decision makers, and the nation as a whole as we prepare for a very different future."

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Wired for War by P.W. Singer

"While his analysis is unnerving, there's an irresistible gee-whiz quality to the innovations Singer uncovers. Wired for War travels from Iraq to see these robots in combat to the latter-day "skunk works" in America's suburbia, where tomorrow's technologies of war are quietly being designed. In Singer's hands, the future of war is as fascinating as it is frightening."

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6098718-wired-for-war

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The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zeihan

"Within 30 years, Zeihan predicts, some nations (Greece, Libya, Yemen) will collapse, others (Brazil, India, Canada) will shrink, some (Britain, France, Sweden) will muddle through, and a few (Russia, Germany, Japan, Turkey) will become aggressive. Self-sufficient in food and energy, America will turn inward, reverting to the role it played before World War II: a global power without global interests. Historical prognostication has a dismal record, but readers will find it difficult to put down this fascinating addition to the 'rise and fall of nations' genre."

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Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

"Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll tells the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, from its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, to the rise of the Taliban and the emergence of bin Laden, to the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive firsthand accounts, Ghost Wars is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It chronicles the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and top spy masters such as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George Tenet. And it describes heated debates within the American government and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies."

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Fixing Failed States by Ashraf Ghani

"Failed States – the home of the world’s so-called Bottom Billion – are largely beyond the help of traditional aid and development. Leadership is corrupt, social institutions are virtually non-existent; aid money disappears before it can be used; ethnic conflict, absolute poverty, terrorism, and trafficking hold sway. International approaches to date - whether humanitarian, aid or military, have rarely proven successful. Ghani and Lockhart’s Framework rebuilds from the ground up, putting finances, democratic accountability, and know-how into the hands of those who are most motivated to make it work – ordinary citizens. Instead of relying on the aid bureaucracies that were designed for a bygone era, their Framework links countries to different networks of knowledge, information and financing in the global system. The grass-roots approach proves to be a catalyst for rebuilding national governments."

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Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks

"Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on the unprecedented candor of key participants. The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster."

Source: https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/1851/fiasco

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Not a Good Day to Die by Sean Naylor

"Operation Anaconda was the largest battle fought by American conventional forces in Afghanistan. It took place in a remote valley at very high altitude where the thin air hampered helicopter operations and the lack of oxygen sometimes wore down the men. It took place largely out of the sight of TV cameras, partly due to security and partly due to the forbidding environment, which was pretty far from the hotels with room service from which most reporting on this war has been done. But Sean Naylor, a correspondent from the Army Times, was there as an embedded reporter and witnessed the battle. Now he has produced Not a Good Day to Die, a fascinating and disturbing account of one of the hardest fights American soldiers have faced in living memory. Naylor claims in the introduction to his book that the Army at first gave only grudging cooperation with his efforts to research the battle. Reading the book, one can easily understand why."

Source: https://www.strategypage.com/bookreviews/290.asp

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Disjointed Ways, Disunified Means by Lewis G. Irwin

"Specifically, inconsistencies and a lack of coherence in the U.S. Government’s strategic planning processes and products, as well as fundamental flaws in the U.S. Government’s structures and systems for coordinating and integrating the efforts of its various agencies, are largely responsible for this adverse and dangerous situation. This book explores these strategic and interagency shortfalls, while proposing potential reforms that would enable the United States to achieve the strategic coherence and genuine unity of effort that will be needed in an era of constrained resources and emerging new threats."

Source:  http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/americas-struggle-to-build-an-afghan-nation

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Bureaucracy by James Q. Wilson

"In what I think is the best part of the book (a roughly-two-hundred-page section ending on p. 378) Wilson distinguishes in detail among the behaviors of three different kinds of bureaucrats: operators, managers, and executives. He skillfully demonstrates how these different layers of employees in public bureaucracies have different mixes of incentives, goals, constraints, and opportunities and why their behavior varies among types as well as among individuals within each type."

Source:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1962832.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ade24a4006db881a322799b4b84986ba7

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 Essence of Decision by Graham Allison

"The updated edition of Graham Allison’s 1972 work reconsiders the historical account of the Cuban Missile Crisis with new information from Soviet and American archives and post-Cold War events. Allison and Zelikow maintain the central premise that an awareness of how different analytical lenses shape assumptions, inquiries, and conclusions can improve our understanding of foreign policy crisis decision-making. The authors introduce three analytical models and assess each in corresponding chapters to demonstrate how American and Soviet leaders processed a course of action and how each vantage point can produce “a different image of the same fundamental reality."

Source:  https://static.dma.mil/usaf/csafreadinglist/zessence.html

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American Icon by Bryce G. Hoffman

"At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself. Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, Ford had already put together a bold plan to unify its divided global operations, transform its lackluster product lineup, and overcome a dysfunctional culture of infighting, backstabbing, and excuses. It was an extraordinary risk, but it was the only way the Ford family—America’s last great industrial dynasty—could hold on to their company.  Mulally and his team pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in business history. As the rest of Detroit collapsed, Ford went from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most profitable automaker in the world."

Source:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13132620-american-icon

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Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer

"The concluding section of Albion's Seed explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations."

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32081.Albion_s_Seed

 

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Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

"BLINK is about human rapid cognition, a thinking that is a lot faster than we can realize it, and a thinking that operates quite mysteriously in comparison to our commonly used careful, planned, and thoughtful decision making. And that's the major hypothesis in this book. Along with this variable, through his extensive research and analysis, Gladwell (2005) introduces several other variables that are interdependent with rapid cognition—such as emotions, attitude, judgments, snap decisions, role of time, frugality of information, and role of past experiences in perception."

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4541302/

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Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

"Leviathan, Hobbes's most important work and one of the most influential philosophical texts produced during the seventeenth century, was written partly as a response to the fear Hobbes experienced during the political turmoil of the English Civil Wars. In the 1640s, it was clear to Hobbes that Parliament was going to turn against King Charles I, so he fled to France for eleven years, terrified that, as a Royalist, he would be persecuted for his support of the king. Hobbes composed Leviathan while in France, brilliantly articulating the philosophy of political and natural science that he had been developing since the 1630s. Hobbes's masterwork was finally published in 1651, two years after Parliament ordered the beheading of Charles I and took over administration of the English nation in the name of the Commonwealth."

Source: https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/leviathan/context/

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Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

"The Second Treatise of Government, subtitled An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, stands today as an extremely influential work that shaped political philosophy and provided a basis for later political doctrines, such as those set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution."

Source: https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/locke/context/

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The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli

"The Prince is Machiavelli’s most famous philosophical book. It was begun in 1513 and probably completed by 1515…The Prince is composed of twenty-six chapters which are preceded by a Dedicatory Letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici (1492-1519), the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92)…Whatever interpretation one holds to, the subject matter of the book seems to be arranged into roughly four parts: Chapters 1-11 treat principalities (with the possible exception of Chapter 5); Chapters 12-14 treat the art of war; Chapters 15-19 treat princes; and Chapters 20-26 treat what we may call the art of princes."

Source: https://www.iep.utm.edu/machiave/

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The Social Animal by David Brooks

"Viewing people's actions through the lens of the unconscious feelings and how they're influenced by the people closest to them has caused Brooks to see events like those unfolding in the Middle East in a new way. He notes that in situations like the one in Egypt, signals transferred from person to person affected the mood and emotions of the entire country. A key way to understand why individuals make the choices they do, Brooks says, is to "think of the models in their heads, to think of the way they see the world."

Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/03/07/134329412/david-brooks-defines-the-new-social-animal

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Tribe by Sebastian Junger

"There are ancient tribal human behaviors-loyalty, inter-reliance, cooperation-that flare up in communities during times of turmoil and suffering. These are the very same behaviors that typify good soldiering and foster a sense of belonging among troops, whether they’re fighting on the front lines or engaged in non-combat activities away from the action. Drawing from history, psychology, and anthropology, bestselling author Sebastian Junger shows us just how at odds the structure of modern society is with our tribal instincts, arguing that the difficulties many veterans face upon returning home from war do not stem entirely from the trauma they’ve suffered, but also from the individualist societies they must reintegrate into."

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40940205-tribe

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Congress: The Electoral Connection by David R. Mayhew

"David R. Mayhew argues that the principal motivation of legislators is reelection and that the pursuit of this goal affects the way they behave and the way that they make public policy."

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/550388.Congress

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My American Journey by Colin Powell

"Colin Powell talked about his book, My American Journey, published by Random House, which chronicles his life, including his military service in Vietnam and the Gulf War and the rebuilding effort between the two conflicts. He also talked about the process of writing, including his cooperation with Joseph E. Persico, who collaborated with him on the book, and his tour around the U.S. to promote the book. He also commented on his political views and future plans."

Source:  http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/68953-1/Colin-Powell

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Duty by Robert M. Gates

"Duty is an excellent memoir of a free-speaking and self-critical former Secretary of Defense. It lays bare the emotional and bureaucratic grit involved with spearheading a complex contingency operation in hostile parallel environments: at home and in the field."

Source:  https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-80/Article/643232/book-review-duty/

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The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

“At the end of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.”

Source: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Johnstown-Flood/David-McCullough/9780671207144