Lying beneath this humanity is the unrelenting belief that each day of tedium, each crippling struggle, progresses one toward that individual peak. It’s the foundation that built Bush into a steward that led the U.S. through shifting times, though he scarcely heaped much praise from it in the moment. Rather, he bore through it, finding solace in the records he took on paper and in dictation: his journals. The ones with which Meacham has used to fill the pages of Destiny and Power, and in doing so, craft a legacy in a time with even less certainty and even more fear than the one George H.W. Bush occupied.
Innovation & the Army Vision: Responding to the Soufflé Conundrum
In the course of thirteen pages, the Army lays out how the world’s most powerful land force must look one decade from now. This already difficult task is complicated by the fact that those ambitious (or crazy) enough to take on a document of this scope find themselves in an international environment where threats span the gamut of non-state actors to world superpowers, with a healthy dose of the latest Department of Defense buzzword, “hybrid,” thrown into the mix. To respond to these oftentimes still nebulous threats, the Army advocates for eight characteristics of a force for the future.Innovation is the most alluring of these characteristics to policymakers and the public alike. However, it could also prove to be the vision’s undoing should the conditions on the ground change.
#Reviewing Ghost Fleet: The Successes (and Shortcomings) of Informed Fiction and Strategy
Ghost Fleet is an enjoyable book. It is a fun book. What’s more, it is an insightful and prescient book, without forcing the reader to ever acknowledge that fact. Sure, it suffers, as many popular works do, with things that literary critics will nitpick over. But if there’s one thing that’s been made abundantly clear to me over the course of reading the work and discussing it with colleagues, it’s that Cole and Singer have accomplished the difficult feat of merging knowledge with storytelling, insight with invention.