Embrace the Suck

by Austin Bay

Col. Austin Bay: Iraq war vet, renowned blogger, syndicated columnist, novelist, radio commentator. No writer is more respected on military matters. Now Col. Bay has turned his talents toward creating this first dictionary of “Milspeak”--the soldier's argot that is rich in irony, brutally efficient in conveying the immediacy and dangers of warfare, and can be a shorthand way for separating combat soldiers from fobbits.* The perfect gift for the soldier, sailor, marine or airman in your life—or for the Beltway Clerk** who yearns to sound like one. Also includes a select glossary of Pentagonese drawn from the official Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.

*Fobbit: Derogatory term for soldiers who never leave an FOB (Forward Operating Base)

**Beltway Clerk: A derisive term for a Washington political operative or civilian political hatchet man – in other words, someone who trades on his supposed political connections. May refer to so-called “Washington defense experts” who have never served in the armed forces.

Author and columnist Austin Bay has a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A colonel (retired) in the U.S. Army Reserve, in 2004 Austin served on active duty in Iraq.

The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Amazon.com review:
This bold and important book strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century." In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization "this country’s gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is "the defining security task of our age." His stunning predictions of a U.S. annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future—this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen