Why read How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything?

Book cover of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

Book description

"A dynamic work of reportage" (The New York Times) written "with clarity and...wit" (The New York Times Book Review) about what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased.

Once, war was a temporary state of affairs. Today, America's wars are everywhere and forever: our enemies change…

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Why read it?

1 author picked How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

David J. Dunford

Author

This book entertains while recounting the militarization of our foreign policy. Post-retirement, I worked briefly for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and later as a contractor helping to train military units headed for Iraq and Afghanistan. Our professional military is a superb fighting machine but the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan inevitably resulted in challenges diplomats and development workers are best equipped to handle. The budget-slashing reinvention of government during the Clinton years meant there weren’t enough trained civilians to handle existing priorities much less a surge to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. As Rosa Brooks writes, from the…

From David's list on The best books to help understand how to fix U.S. diplomacy.