The best books on national security decision-making

This book is the most detailed description of the largest deception operation of the Second World War, the landings at D-Day, with a higher secrecy priority than even Ultra, the cryptanalysis effort. In general terms, it is the most satisfyingly detailed examination of any intelligence operation (at 850 pages), loaded with interviews, and should be a template for studying any operation.

It explains the contradiction of German military efficiency and arrogant incompetence, as both Hitler and the German General Staff gradually came to realize that Normandy was the likely landing spot and that their Enigma intercepts were compromised. It digresses perfectly, leaving no subject unturned, and makes associations and personality assessments only possible in a text of this size. 

John Ranelagh’s history of the CIA should be the very first book read on U.S. espionage. At 800 pages, heavily grounded in interviews, it covers the period from before the Second World War to the mid-1980s. It convincingly overturns every misconception about the CIA, including its exaggerated roles in coups, assassinations, and the Phoenix Program.

Actually, the book is a detailed sociological study of the U.S. elite, Presidential governance, and intra-agency biases. Surprisingly, with its foundation in the O.S.S. and recruits from American communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, the CIA is a highly professional but liberal institution, sometimes stubbornly out of alignment with the establishment, such as over Vietnam. 

This book is the most systematic examination of how leaders achieve power and exercise it, and should be the first book read by all political scientists.

The author, a professor of political science, walked across the street from Yale University into the city hall of New Haven, and proceeded to test an exhaustive list of variables in a three-century survey of the city’s Mayorship. What matters? Ethnicity, religion, race, unions, clubs, personality, family, reputation, service, experience? The answer is that the political winners are the product of complex interactions, with plenty of unexpected links and the important role of the timely exploitation of passing opportunities.

This text is the ultimate antidote to conspiracy theorists.   

If Hitler had obtained a nuclear weapon, it would have had a dramatic geopolitical impact on world history. Hitler is poorly understood, especially in the United States, and is often miscaricatured as Charlie Chaplin, or brushed off superficially as evil, mad or sick.

John Toland’s definitive account, based on over 150 interviews with persons who had known or worked with Adolf Hitler, puts into sharp focus Hitler’s energy and tremendous memory, his high emotional quotient, manipulativeness, his doubts, and consequently the danger he posed in a far more vivid and creditable manner than are achieved by cosmetic popular accounts.

It is an important text because Hitler’s fantasies and mistakes are predictably reproduced by so many other dictators, especially those who find themselves among vulnerable people who share those fantasies. 

This is the most compelling explanation for why major wars have started over the last half-millennium. His thesis is very simple: countries are tempted to start wars to conquer their own continents, even if there is a low prospect of success, because the payoff is tremendous.

The U.S., which is the only country to have achieved continental hegemony, pays very little for the cost of its defense because of the protection of the Oceans, and is able to project power to support smaller countries draining the resources of the regional hegemonic candidates on other continents.

This book does not explain most wars, just the ones most likely to involve all of the great powers, nuclear weapons, and to have the greatest impact in terms of the deaths of millions, post-war international institutions, and the most wide-sweeping territorial changes.