Charlie Dunlap on Lawfare reviews Rosa Brooks’ How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon:
Though subtitled “Tales from the Pentagon,” this book is not some sort of mindless “tell-all” by a former government official. Instead it’s a thoughtful analysis of national security in a capacious sense, as seen by a former journalist turned Georgetown law professor turned Pentagon official turned defense thinker. How Everything Became Waris one of those rare books in which there is no part not worth reading; moreover, it addresses an astonishing number of issues for a volume of this length. You’ll learn about such diverse security issues as piracy, military detention, our strategic deafness about Africa, stability operations, drones, covert operations, cyber, nonlethal weapons, the militarization of foreign policy, and much more.
The wide range of topics in the How Everything Became War is perhaps less for its own sake than to point to the interconnections between them, and also to show the structure of national security decision-making on a day-to-day basis and the many offices of government and officials—far beyond simply the Department of Defense and a handful of intelligence agencies—involved in making them. These are weighty topics, but the book proceeds in a deceptively easy narrative tone, revealing Rosa’s skill’s as a journalist. It opens, for example, with an account of sitting in an “anonymous Pentagon conference room … listening as briefers from the military’s Special Operations command went over plans for an impending strike against a terrorist operative.”
I’ve put it on my Christmas list.
