The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies
Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, U.S. Army (Retired), and Michael Ledeen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 208 pp. Intro. Biblio. Index. $26.99.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Paul Becker, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Iserved on the “field of fight” with Lieutenant General Flynn in southwest Asia and in Washington, D.C. His perspectives in print are as hard-hitting as his arguments are in person. The thesis of this book, written with historian and foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen, is twofold. First, a war is being waged against the United States by radical Islamic extremists to which the United States is not responding in kind. Second, a winning strategy is possible if all elements of national power are applied appropriately against the threat. It is a narrative not to be missed this fall, as a change in national leadership is coming, and this issue will be front and center for the new administration.
The concise text is just 180 pages and parallels the format of a combat intelligence presentation: introduction, establishing the orator’s bona fides (“The Making of an Intel Officer” and “War Fighting”); the problem (“The Enemy Alliance”); a solution (“How to Win”); and a conclusion. Flynn’s blunt style reads like he talks, with energy-infused short paragraphs. This type of delivery is a metaphor for the urgency Flynn thinks must be applied in confronting the threat, either in the form of a transnational terrorist group like ISIS or a nation-state such as Iran.
You do not need to search for Flynn’s assumptions and biases. He states up front, “I’m not a devotee of political correctness. I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think America is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral than the system our main enemies want to impose on us.” In his opinion, the failure to adequately address the threat is most acute at the executive level of our government. Flynn methodically lays out the case that this administration’s senior leaders fail to understand the nature of the enemy, conceal the truth about the enemy from the public, and lack a comprehensive strategy to effectively confront the enemy.
A career intelligence officer, Flynn stresses the imperative for honest, incisive intelligence in war. He assigns a failing grade to this administration for neither understanding nor addressing the underlying nature of radical Islam (he does not criticize the religion itself, just its violent and radical strain); for actively preventing the dissemination of facts because they run counter to the administration’s other efforts, such as a nuclear deal with Tehran (“nowadays we call this ‘politicization of intelligence,’ but its older name is ‘don’t deliver bad news’”); and for not changing what he believes to be a failing strategy.
This is not the first time Flynn’s writings have disrupted the status quo. In 2009, while serving as the International Security Assistance Force’s Director for Intelligence in Afghanistan, he wrote, along with Marine Corps Captain Matt Pottinger and Paul D. Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” a report for the Center for a New American Security. It examined the relevance of the U.S. intelligence community to the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan. “Fixing Intelligence” parallels Field of Fight in both method and content.
Field of Fight’s subtitle is, “How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.” Flynn devotes a chapter to each key item. In “Enemy Alliance,” he emphasizes that radical Islam is being facilitated by a combination of antagonist nation-states (Russia and North Korea in particular) with a lethal nexus in Iran. He also focuses on Tehran’s duplicity in harboring al Qaeda extremists and their support of murderous Shia surrogates in Iraq who have American blood on their hands. The author’s scant mention of Pakistan as an enabler of violent Islamic extremism is an omission; that nation’s effective sanctuary for al Qaeda leaders, the Taliban, and the Haqqani network is well documented and warrants appropriate comment as a dimension to the radical Islamic threat.
The pillars of a comprehensive, successful strategy (diplomatic, information, military, and economic) are contained in the chapter “How to Win.” This is a formula that Flynn notes the United States has used successfully in past wars against Nazism, communism, and al Qaeda a decade ago.
Field of Fight is a full-throated denunciation of this administration’s Middle East policy. According to Flynn, it is not failure of intelligence that has led to this threat; it is a failure of leadership in neglecting to act. Flynn leaves no room for doubt that he believes this administration is actively attempting to obscure the truth regarding the radical Islamic extremist threat from reaching the American public. Several former Secretaries of Defense have criticized this administration’s decision-making style and policies in their recent memoirs, but Lieutenant General Flynn is the most outspoken senior uniformed officer explicitly to do so. Count on Field of Fight to be referenced for decades to come as an example of a former military intelligence official who was not afraid to speak his mind.
The Kamikaze Hunters: Fighting for the Pacific,1945
Will Iredale. New York: Pegasus Books, 2016. 386 pp. Illus. Maps. Biblio. Notes. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by David Hobbs
The idea for The Kamikaze Hunters, Will Iredale’s first book, came to him after a chance meeting with Keith Quilter, a former Royal Navy fighter pilot, at a village fête in the British county of Kent. Quilter told him that he had been shot down by antiaircraft fire in a Royal Navy Chance Vought Corsair while carrying out a low-level strafing attack on a Japanese harbor in July 1945. He ditched just yards off the coast and was rescued by the USS Scabbardfish (SS-397).
Quilter’s story captivated Iredale, but what interested him just as much was the fact that the British Pacific Fleet (BPF), with its task force of fast carriers, had fought alongside the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1945. Like many other Britons, he had assumed the Pacific war was an all-American affair. This revelation led him to inquire more deeply into Quilter’s war and to talk to several other BPF veterans about their experiences flying fighters against the Japanese. The result is this fascinating account.
The Kamikaze Hunters is not intended to be a history of the BPF, although it is clear from the bibliography that Iredale has read deeply in the subject to add context and background to the recalled experiences of those he interviewed, all of whom joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to become pilots. All were still at school when war broke out in 1939 and volunteered to join the Navy some years later. They underwent basic flight training in the United Kingdom, and, in most cases, went to the United States under the “Towers Scheme”—a complicated agreement under which Royal Navy student pilots were trained as fighter pilots in the United States under the supervision of then-Vice Admiral John Henry Tower. The majority of these men went on to frontline squadrons equipped with Corsairs provided to the Royal Navy under lend/lease arrangements. Most flew from HMS Formidable, although there are references to others who flew Corsairs from HMS Victorious and Seafires and Fireflies from HMS Indefatigable.
Iredale presents the pilots’ first-hand accounts of air combat, which are truly gripping. This technique has its weaknesses, however, since he repeats some of their phrases without qualifying them. For example, on page 27, the Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bomber is described as being “constructed from wood, rope and canvas.” However much fighter pilots might have disdained it, the structure was not made of wood or rope—although the tubular-metal framework was indeed covered in fabric.
By 1945, about 90 percent of the Royal Navy’s aircrew were reservists, mobilized for the duration of hostilities. All the pilots the author discusses fit into this category. None had squadron command or served in the air departments of the carriers, and so the viewpoint that comes across is a restricted one that does not always allow for the broader picture more senior officers would have possessed.
This criticism aside, Iredale describes the operational flying tours of several young men in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm very well, and undoubtedly there were many more like them. From an American perspective, The Kamikaze Hunters gives fascinating insight into the training of British fighter pilots and their squadrons of Corsairs in the United States before they joined British carriers in the Pacific to fight the Japanese. Similar close cooperation between the two nations continues today, with British pilots being trained in the United States to fly F-35Bs from a new generation of British aircraft carriers.
Having written and lectured for many years about the creation and operation of the BPF, I was delighted to find a book published in both the United States and the United Kingdom that focuses attention on the Royal Navy’s close cooperation with the U.S. Navy’s 5th and 3rd fleets in the Pacific in 1945. Iredale writes in his introduction that one old pilot told him that “everybody has a story . . . but unless somebody writes it down, when they die the story goes with them.” He hoped his book would go some way toward preventing that. It certainly deserves to, because it is a fascinating tale, well told.
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Mary Roach. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. 288 pp. Intro. Illus. Biblio. $26.95.
Reviewed by Captain Arthur Smith, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)
Many defense agencies today are dedicated to maintaining a force capable of combat in its many dimensions and exist primarily to support the combat arms of all services. These support agencies bear the responsibility of fighting a host of stressors—including infectious diseases and gruesome injuries—and provide the means for coping with less-than-ideal environmental factors, such as punishing heat and cold, deafening noise, sleep deprivation, extreme altitudes, filth, and the hazardous, life-threatening organisms that fighting forces often encounter in quantities never experienced during peacetime.
In her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Mary Roach not only acquaints the reader with such issues, but also throws us (metaphorically) onto the front lines, where we can almost see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the very materials of her research. In 14 chapters, many irreverently titled, Roach treats the areas in which the science of the lab tries to improve the science of warfare: “Second Skin: What to Wear to War,” “The Maggot Paradox: Flies on the Battlefield, for Better or Worse,” and “What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek: A Brief History of Stink Bombs”—to name but a few.
Roach’s inclusion of the topic of contemporary research into the problems of dysentery/diarrhea, heat-related stress, and the daily impact of the ubiquitous flies and the illnesses they propagate in combat and desert environments is particularly interesting. These issues always have had enormous relevance, and given current combat operations in the Middle East, they continue to be important. Grunt touches on and gives many of them their due.
For example, over the centuries, dysentery has had a profound influence on the fortunes of nations. The British campaign in Mesopotamia around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lasted from 1915 until 1918. The total British casualties were 21,621 dead, with a high proportion of deaths from disease. The outbreaks of dysentery and other diseases took a terrible toll. Concurrently, the high incidence of heat casualties in combat almost became a decisive factor against the British Army. Likewise, during the World War II campaign in North Africa, the second battle of El Alamein is rightly perceived to have been the turning point of the war and the first signal that the formidable German and Italian war machine was not, after all, invincible. Credit for the victory usually is attributed to the combination of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s military genius and the fighting spirit of the British Eighth Army, although Field Marshal Erwin Rommel blamed his defeat upon diarrhea! Why?
Virtually nonexistent field sanitation and a host of associated preventable diseases had a disastrous impact on the Afrika Korps in 1942. Of the 40,867 German troops medically evacuated from North Africa in 1942, disease was the cause in 28,488 cases. Even during the climactic second battle at El Alamein, sickness was second only to being taken prisoner as a source of German personnel attrition. Rommel himself had been struck down by amoebic dysentery and hepatitis and was convalescing in a hospital when the battle began. Weakened by illness, he lacked the stamina to face the physical and mental demands of resisting the Allied onslaught.
The areas occupied by Rommel’s Panzerarmee were “badly fouled” because of a slacking of personal standards of hygiene. Flies were a serious plague. The German camps were noted as being in an indescribably filthy condition, revolting in the amount of human feces and camp debris lying everywhere. The Germans paid for their contempt of hygiene with a phenomenally high incidence of diarrheal disease, which affected more than half their troops. In the two months preceding the second battle of El Alamein, more than one in every five Germans had become ill. No wonder elite units such as the 15th Panzer Division were terribly under strength (3,840 versus a standard of more than 10,000 men).
Paradoxically, Roach’s wide-ranging method brings together in the text many seemingly unrelated subjects, which she describes in often visceral detail and occasionally using off-color language. A sample of the outlier subjects she covers in graphic detail include:
• Methods for preserving the sperm of dead men
• The use of maggot-embedded bandages for cleansing wounds—a historic practice that has been reintroduced in modern field hospitals
• The use of dead bodies as crash-test dummies in armored vehicles.
Unfortunately, while the author acknowledges the painstaking activities of various military research facilities and alludes to many contemporary influences on the preservation of the fighting forces, she does so superficially, adding little historic perspective.
Perhaps her text was written to be an interesting diversion rather than a serious reference?
Grunt’s themes, although presented in a style apparently meant to amuse as well as to instruct, are hardly the stuff of entertainment.
New & Noteworthy Books
China’s Quest for Great Power: Ships, Oil, and Foreign Policy
Bernard D. Cole. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016. 320 pp. Intro. Notes. Biblio. Index. $34.95.
In his eighth book on Asian energy security and maritime affairs, retired U.S. Navy Captain Cole, professor emeritus at the National War College and former commanding officer of the USS Rathburner (FF-1057) and Destroyer Squadron 35, examines three major elements of China’s national security strategy—foreign policy, energy security, and naval power—and analyzes their influences on China’s future and relations with the United States.
Veterans Voices: Remarkable Stories of Heroism, Sacrifice, and Honor
Robert H. Miller and Andrew Wakeford. Foreword by Bob Woodruff. Washington, DC: National Geographic Books, 2016. 254 pp. Photos. $35.
The moving experiences of American veterans come to life in Veterans Voices. Through text and photos, the book celebrates a diverse group of men and women, representing all military branches, who have served their country—many of them through multiple conflicts.
Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents
Douglas Carl Peifer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 332 pp. Intro. Illus. Notes. Biblio. Index. $35.95.
Naval incidents have provoked a wide variety of reactions from U.S. presidents. Some episodes have been resolved diplomatically, while others have escalated into full-scale war. In this volume, Professor Peifer, who teaches history and strategy at the U.S. Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, examines and compares the responses of several presidential administrations to crises involving the loss of American lives at sea.
New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Seventeenth McMullen Naval History Symposium Held at the United States Naval Academy, 15-16 September 2011
Edited by Marcus O. Jones. Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2016. 202 pp. Foreword. Preface. $45.
This volume contains 11 papers presented at the U.S. Naval Academy’s 2011 naval history symposium. The subjects range from studies on ancient Rome to China in the 21st century to 17th century piracy and topics in British, German, and U.S. naval history.