Shashank Joshi Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Shashank Joshi

This thread is drawn from Gordon Barrass’ excellent book “The Great Cold War”, pub’d in 2009. Based on interviews with over 100 people, as well as his own experience as the “principal Kremlinologist” (https://t.co/gt1pBVo5wa) for MI6 in the late cold war. https://t.co/rqBXro6oCb

Shashank Joshi

In September I reviewed Lawrence Freedman's good & timely book on military command, good and bad. https://t.co/8Yda0MZFBU

Shashank Joshi

Re-reading The Face of Battle by John Keegan. "Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out, and the strongest fear with which every commander lives—stronger than his fear of defeat or even of mutiny—is that of his army reverting to a crowd". And just how thin the line is: https://t.co/2Mbe1TCw57

Shashank Joshi

Flipping back through Stephen Budiansky’s excellent book Code Warriors and came across this. “Trying to spot a security risk by keeping an eye out for unconventional behaviour at a SIGINT agency was like trying to find a KGB agent by looking for someone with a Russian accent” https://t.co/TVFQtEfqXL

Shashank Joshi

🧵 A very good conversation from yesterday (Sep 21) between Rob Lee, Michael Kofman and Dmitri Alperovitch on Putin's mobilisation announcement and the limits to what it can achieve, given constraints on training, leadership and motivation. https://t.co/4rgsO0OaZJ

Out of stock

Shashank Joshi

“The only other statesman I could think of who had turned to a history book in a similar situation was John F Kennedy, who was hugely influenced by Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August at the time of the Cuban missile crisis” https://t.co/kMbAFws2a4

Shashank Joshi

“What to a NATO officer is a dirt track, a forest ride, a narrow path through a forest is, to a Russian, almost as much of a ‘road’ as an autobahn.” (From John Stone’s excellent book “The Tank Debate”, published in 2000 & recommended to me by @Ajatollah_MAP) https://t.co/Wmx92gHcPo

Shashank Joshi

@havethelastward @Sandbagger_01 Wonderful book. Along with Steven Levy’s “Crypto” perhaps the best accessible introductions to cryptology. Also loved Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing.

Shashank Joshi

Cathal Nolan’s “The Allure of Battle”—‘We seek clarity in war … More often, war results in something clouded, neither triumph nor defeat .. Exhaustion of morale and matériel rather than finality through battles marks the endgame of many wars. Even of most wars’ https://t.co/ZdofcuM9ef

Shashank Joshi

‘In a draft paper…Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, & Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be “probes” from an extraterrestrial “parent craft”’ https://t.co/AFHAIKejsw