Reviews for The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

The average rating for The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-22 00:00:00 Ashley Wilson I got 68% through this book, which I had great hope for, but it is so filled with opinions that are so far out there, that I could not go on. Presented as an overview of war from the time of the Greeks through present and the ways wars have changed. taken from this historian's lectures and articles. I began to have problems with the chapter How we fight...which was about American Exceptionalism, how we saw in Europe innovations and brought them home from the wars and created the greatest nation with the greatest infrastructure, excelling in transportation, manufacturing, innovation and utilities...as though this was still true, our infrastructure is getting close to third world stature. He believes firmly that our all volunteer military is the best fighting force in the world because our 16 year olds get to have and work on cars, which allows them at a young age to drive and work on Abram tanks...and because we are a gun culture our youth are so familiar with the use of guns that they have a head start over our European allies youth. It is obvious that he has not served in this volunteer military which is pulled primarily from lower income families, ones whose children don't get new cars on their 16th birthday, and he obviously has never worked on cars, because newer cars unlike vehicles of old are not things you can tinker with, as we did in our youth...you cannot adjust the carburetor with a hairpin....most young lower middle-class kids do not have gun arsenals at home where they get all of this pre-enlistment training. Then where I couldn't go on anymore was his look at the Iraq war where his revisionist history was something I almost choked on and infuriated me to the extent that I couldn't turn another page. He implied that our military was the impetus of the concept of nation building and "might see democratization as a means of reducing the likelihood of its own deployment in dangerous foreign wars to come." Our military has been very clear that they are not the tool to implement nation building. He believes that "For a full generation now, the all volunteer American military has trained an entire cadre of officers who have received advance degrees in our finest academic institutions and thus possess proconsul skills that far exceed those necessary to command men in battle." My son an retired officer would be very interested to hear this, that the military is training men to become proconsuls ruling the citizens of defeated enemies and leading them to democratization. But the straw that broke the camels back was after his defense of Bush his belief that "...military liberalism's failure to democratize Iraq has made 'nation building' the new slur." First it was civilian neo-con belief that drove the concept of democratizing Iraq, in spite of many Generals telling them that their 'shock and awe war" conducted by a force that did not have enough strength to insure law and order after the regime fell would lead to failure. Wolfowiz, Chenney, Rumsfeld and the neo-con cadre knew that they knew better than any of our best military minds and shuttled these men aside. I was really paying attention to every utterance of any Bush spokesmen as a mother of a soon to be deployed officer...knowing full well that their 3 month war with overwhelming victory which could take as little as a few weeks, a war which would easily pay for itself from the revenues of the oil profits, as we intended to bill the Iraqis for their liberation and on and on, was going to be an abysmal failure as it was asking of our military the near impossible task, that was more political in nature than is within their purview. It was not the 'military liberalism' that failed in Iraq...we don't have a liberalized military...a concept that is laughable at best. Almost everything that went wrong in Iraq can be laid at the feet of the neo-con civilians who bought into a dogma which sounded so good on paper and in theory and had no precedent in the real world, a group who denigrated the Generals who objected to their folly and dismissed them. How this person is touted as a 'historian' is quite beyond me.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-14 00:00:00 Paul Sobel This collection of essays will probably be read only by students of history, but its wisdom would benefit us all. The author, a Stanford professor and renowned scholar, examines the question of why wars exist: Why did wars occur in the past? The present? Most important, will they continue to exist in the future? With remarkable breadth of knowledge, Hanson reaches back to ancient times, to the Peloponnesian War between Greece and Sparta, then walks us through history'Caesar, Napoleon, the American Civil War, the World Wars of the twentieth century, the present-day war on terror'and draws correlations that provide us the answers. There is far too much here to touch on in a blog post or review, but I can list a few select highlights: -The field of military history itself is of vast importance, yet it is increasingly isolated and hard to find in today's college environment. As a formal academic discipline it is atrophied, shunned by political correctness that finds the subject distasteful. Yet only by objectively studying past military conflict can we prevent or minimize future conflict. -The balance between war and democracy, freedom and security. Are dictatorships, with their command structure, innately superior in fighting wars? Fortunately, no. The political and economic freedoms of the United States, and the resulting innovation and dynamism, have produced the world's finest fighting forces. -The rise of "utopian pacifism." This is the belief that wars are the result of a misunderstanding, and that future wars can be eliminated through reason, education, and diplomacy. Such a myth has cycled throughout history, as it appeals to the romantic yearning for the perfectibility of human nature. Such beliefs are prevalent again today, despite the disconnect from reality. The truth is that war has always been a part of the human condition, and always will be. War should always be a last resort, but will always be necessary for the survival of civilization. As the author points out, the United States of America was "born through war, reunited in war, and saved from destruction by war." Moreover, "Our freedom is not entirely our own, in some sense it is mortgaged by those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance." America today, with its prosperity and its principles of personal freedom, market capitalism, and constitutional government, is ipso facto envied and hated by the various warlords, dictators, and tribalists that litter the globe. For this reason, our continued existence is best assured by military preparedness, deterrence-based diplomacy, and the courage to fight and defeat our enemies.