Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy Book

There were some good points in Fighting Talk which I shall mention, but unfortunately the book is devestated by it's author's lack of knowledge. Colin Gray's fails to consult with experts from fields in which he has made bold, unscientific, and even ahistorical claims.

To our benefit, Mr Gray makes useful analogy to Strategists being the "bridge" between policy and the battlespace. Maxim 15 also innovatively realizes the effect of the Military-Industrial Complex (though he is unfamiliar with the concept itself) and it's effect of watering down military academia.

But in failing to consult with experts before making claims on Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, Colin Gray fails to live up to his potential. The result is unscientific claims about human nature, individual motives, societal motives, diplomacy, and genetics (he is of the dangerously unscientific view that a nation's "gene pool" influences it's stock of capable strategists)

It leads also to his ahistorical claims on Vietnam and most Islamic countries. At one point, while referring to the Resistance War Against America (Vietnam) he claims that the United States was fighting "for a noble cause". He is deathly afraid of Islam, failing to make the connection between overaggressive US foreign policy through the 20th century, and 21st century extremism.

By failing to consult with experts, Colin Gray limits Fighting Talk to his own limited worldview, a worldview that is entirely Westernized, and localized to the epoch in which he has developed. By limiting himself in this way, he is incapable of noticing the development of the Military-Industrial Complex, and how that would influence his own thoughts on appropriate military spending. As a product of the MIC, Gray advocated for $527 billion in military spending in 2007. It is now 2020, the US now spends $686 billion as a result of such lack of historical perspective. Limited by his blind nationalism and lack of historical perspective, Gray repeatedly labels any small inconvenience to the Military-Industrial Complex as a major threat to world peace. This goes so far, that in Maxim 33, the author makes four categories of national interests: Survival, Vital, Major, and Other. Human rights, such as to bread, life, shelter, he files under category 4: Other.