Urban warfare. Near-peer adversaries. Russia. Korea.
Those buzz words are in the news constantly, so Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley wants bookworm soldiers to brush up on what they mean for the future of the military.
Milley released his 2017 professional reading list on Wednesday, and it is stacked with expert warnings about what’s to come.
“We are the strongest land force in the world, and that strength is not only found in our physical prowess, but also in our intellectual capacity,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Titles include:
- The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
- Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare
- The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force
- Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq
- The Future Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action
- Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World
The list isn’t all doom and gloom, though.
This year’s books are organized into six categories: Strategic Environment, Regional Studies, History and Military History, Leadership, Army Profession and Fiction.
For those looking for a leg up on their career or read a good story rather than wanting to mastermind future warfare, there are titles like ”Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t” and ”Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.”
And for those just getting into military literature, there are the old standbys: Carl von Clausewitz’s ”On War” and Sun Tzu’s ”The Art of War.”
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
