Aerospace Power in the Twenty-first Century: A Basic Primer by Clayton K. S. Chun. Air University Press (http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/aupress), 131 West Shumacher Avenue, Maxwell AFB, Alabama 36112-5962, 2001, 356 pages, $29.00 (softcover). Available free from http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/aupress/ Books/ Chun/Chun.pdf.

A particular strength of Aerospace Power is its building-block approach to the topic. Dr. Chun begins by reviewing widely recognized principles of war, highlighting what he calls “specific missions that aircraft and spacecraft can accomplish or support”—specifically, “deterrence, compellence, denial, coercion, decapitation, and humanitarian missions” (p. 23). Not doctrinally recognized, these terms represent a thought-provoking departure in that the bulk of the book’s material matches nicely with US joint and Air Force doctrine in particular. Chun continues by establishing basic definitions and characteristics of air and space forces as well as the mediums in which they operate. From these foundations, he advances the reader’s knowledge by presenting airpower theorists from Giulio Douhet through John Warden. Aerospace Power benefits from the author’s inclusion of both non-US theorists such as John Slessor and non–Air Force thinkers such as William A. Moffett. He includes a limited discussion of emerging space-power theory; however, very little unclassified, published information exists from which Dr. Chun can draw, and there is no recognized advocate of a particular brand of space-power theory.

Chun uses the next four chapters to walk readers through the “Functions and Capabilities of Aerospace Power,” focusing each one on more doctrinally familiar topics such as air superiority, interdiction, and mobility. A particular strength of the author’s approach is his use of a case-study methodology to support the chapters’ conclusions, carefully including in each a notable failure of air and space power contrasted with two successful examples, thus highlighting his conclusions and bolstering the reader’s interest. Notably, he employs a number of examples outside the United States’ experience with air and space power—one of the most appealing aspects of the book.He also does an excellent job of referring back to the theorists and doctrinal ideas presented earlier, linking them to the case studies in each chapter. Doing so serves not only to reinforce the theorists and their ideas but also to demonstrate how those theories fared and evolved in practice.

More comprehensive than many similar works, Aerospace Power includes a chapter focused on the often-overlooked area of “Planning for Aerospace Operations.” Chun demonstrates an instructive approach to building an air and space campaign that supports a combatant commander’s campaign and integrates with other components.

The book suffers from some notable omissions, however. Chun mentions rotary-wing aviation only in passing, as is the case with some vital mission areas such as combat search and rescue. Indeed, the author himself points out that the efficacy of a number of the theoretical underpinnings of his book has not been evaluated against enemies employing guerrilla tactics. Nevertheless, readers familiar with current Air Force doctrine will find themselves very much at home with Aerospace Power, which admirably fulfills the author’s intention of writing a primer on current practice. That said, events since 9/11 as well as air and space power’s role in the global war on terrorism underscore the need for a second edition.

Col Thomas L. Gibson, USAF
Washington, DC

Honor: A History by James Bowman. Encounter Books (http://www.encounterbooks.com), 900 Broadway, Suite 400, New York, New York 10003, 2006, 381 pages, $25.95 (hardcover); 2007, 381 pages, $18.95 (softcover).

Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, which touts itself as an “institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” He earned his bachelor’s degree at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and his master’s at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, England, and taught school in London. Living in Virginia, he is a prolific author and critic, published in many newspapers and journals in the United States and England. Honor: A History is his second book. His grasp of literature and films is impressive—even astounding. Bowman’s father fought in the Philippines in World War II, and at the time of this writing, his son was serving in Iraq.

Bowman believes that honor comes in many shapes and sizes. Among them are personal and cultural honor. In its most primitive form, it involves having a high opinion of other people in one’s honor group, be it a military organization, street gang, or whatever. For males, it includes a reputation for effective fighting and truthfulness—for females, a reputation for fidelity to the spouse and chastity. This is the concept of honor for radical members of the Islamic world, and it yields a huge advantage to them, at least in the short run. But in the West, honor has evolved through several phases until in the early twenty-first century, it hardly exists at either the personal or societal level. The built-in contradiction between traditional concepts of honor and Christianity has contributed to this change: bravery, pride, and combativeness on the one hand and self-effacement, humility, and peace on the other. On the societal level, honor resembled prestige—states or rulers would possess it if the rest believed them formidable and motivated enough to defend themselves against insults.

For a time during the Victorian era, the two streams of ethics found an accommodation in manly Christianity, with the English gentleman serving as the model: a moral man who could stand up and fight for his principles. But according to Honor: A History, World War I, among other things, put that notion on the road to extinction (in the West). This horrible conflict discredited honor at the national level because young people perceived that a group of corrupt old men on all sides had put whole generations of youth on a slippery slope straight into the grave. Atop that, technology also played a role. The advent of the “pill” had a profound effect, coming as it did three decades after the “flappers” of the 1920s began the movement for sexual liberation. The second wave of feminism came along to achieve some worthy and even essential reforms—but also to help undermine what was left of honor. Vietnam pounded one of the final nails into the coffin of Western honor, and for the male, what emerged was the denigration of heroism or honor as inevitably a fake, and for the female, the end of chastity as a virtue worthy of honor. At the societal level, one could no longer claim to undertake a foreign-policy initiative for the sake of national honor or prestige. A kind of merging had occurred—one involving the need for prestige and the requirement that all war had to have a moral cause; everything else was phony. By our times, we had come to see heroism as fraudulent and victimhood as worthy of honor. Americans desperately sought reasons why their own country was at fault for provoking all sorts of outrages, such as the terrorist attacks of 1 September 2001. Feminism, psychotherapy, and Christianity had brought about the downfall of honor.

Bowman argues that honor must be made respectable at both the societal and personal levels if the West wishes to survive the onslaught of cultures that still follow the simple honor codes of ancient times. He argues that to prevail, the West must make personal honor a respectable motivator, allow its political leadership to take aggressive action to guarantee national honor, and move to make motherhood and fidelity to the family honorable for women who choose to follow that path (without repealing the real and necessary reforms that feminists have achieved since Vietnam). The West must also increase its efforts to make military service a more respectable badge of honor again. Air warriors should put Honor: A History near the top of their reading list and read it soon.

Dr. David R. Mets
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons by Joseph Cirincione. Columbia University Press (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup), 61 W. 62nd Street, New York, New York 10023, 2007, 224 pages, $27.95 (hardcover).

The modest size of this book belies its importance. In the compressed span of 157 pages of text, Joseph Cirincione provides an overview of nuclear weapons, the history of their development and deployment, the struggle to control their spread, and the dangers that they pose to us today in the form of nuclear terrorism. Well known in the field of nuclear strategy, he currently serves as senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress. Earlier, Cirincione served as director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Bomb Scare is clearly written and dispassionate. The work examines all facets of the nuclear equation, for instance, by giving the arguments for strong nuclear arsenals and then looking at the case for their reduction. Early on, Cirincione does make clear one assumption: that “the proliferation of nuclear weapons is undesirable” (p. xi). Especially useful for the military professional is the author’s tracing of attempts to control nuclear weaponry from the Baruch Plan of 1946 through downsizing of Cold War arsenals during the 1990s and beyond. Cirincione highlights the success of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Going into effect in 1970, the treaty today counts 188 signatories, including the five countries (United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China) allowed nuclear weaponry; only India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan remain outside the NPT tent. The author estimates that without this agreement, as many as 40 countries—rather than the current nine—would be armed with nuclear weapons. The author argues that the NPT thus represents history’s greatest success in arms limitations by diplomatic means.

Cirincione gives credit for lessening the dangers of nuclear proliferation and reducing nuclear arsenals to countries as diverse as Ireland, South Africa, and Libya, as well as to a bipartisan slate of US presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. The author also singles out for their effective, albeit disparate, roles Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell, Richard Lugar, and Sam Nunn. These last two, both US senators, were key figures in establishing the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program in 1991 to secure nuclear stockpiles in former Soviet republics. Most people have forgotten that in 1992, Ukraine figured as the world’s third-largest nuclear power with about 5,000 warheads in its inventory. Today, that country, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, is no longer a member of the nuclear club. In fact, the world’s arsenal has dropped in the past 20 years from 65,000 warheads in 1986 to 27,000 in 2006 (with Russia holding 16,000; the United States 9,900; and the seven other nations about 1,000).

Today, of course, the greatest menace facing the United States is no longer a Cold War–style Armageddon but nuclear terrorism. Cirincione puts it well: “We no longer worry about the fate of the earth, but we still worry about the fate of our cities” (p. 85). As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden began hunting for nuclear weaponry; by the end of 2004, the author counts 18 confirmed incidents in which terrorists attempted to acquire highly enriched uranium or plutonium. In 2006 the author calculates that there is enough fissile material in the world for 300,000 bombs.

Given the scale of the problem, is a nuclear blow at one of our cities inevitable? Cirincione argues strongly that it is not. He believes that this threat can be reduced significantly by keeping the nuclear club small, by further cutting back existing stockpiles, and by tightly securing fissile materials. The author argues that the Bush administration should have pushed much harder for an acceleration of these measures and that its strategy of regime change rather than of weapons reduction was deeply flawed.

Among the many virtues of this slim volume are its excellent glossary, its thorough documentation, and its reliance on key primary and secondary materials. Its illustrative tables include those on nuclear stockpiles and the 50 countries possessing weapons-usable uranium. The debit side of the ledger looks slender. Too frequently, scholars known only in their fields are named without identification in the text. Although the author’s treatment of the role of the United States is appropriately strong, he does not examine the Soviet “side of the hill” in similar depth. Cirincione gives ample attention to the flurry of arms-control agreements that Ronald Reagan achieved during his second term but does not mention the president’s radical—and almost attained—goal of abolishing all nuclear weapons held by the United States and USSR. The deal seemed on the verge of consummation at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 but foundered over Reagan’s refusal to restrict the Strategic Defense Initiative to the laboratory. Indeed, the author overlooks the key work on this important topic: Paul Lettow’s ­Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005).

But place these few quibbles aside. Cirincione’s Bomb Scare is a first-rate book. Accessible to the layman while offering fresh insights to the military professional and particularly to the Air Force community, this volume examines one of the most important challenges facing Americans today. It is essential reading.

Dr. Malcolm Muir Jr.
Virginia Military Institute

The Jet Race and the Second World War by Sterling Michael Pavelec. Praeger Security International, Greenwood Publishing Group (http://www.praeger.com/psi), 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2007, 248 pages, $49.95 (hardcover).

Before receiving this book for review, I assumed it would just be one of many similar books describing the early age of gas-turbine engines in the 1930s and 1940s. I prepared myself for a relaxing read and did not expect much more than a rehash of often-cited information. I could not have been more wrong. Sterling Pavelec has extensively researched and written a very thorough historical examination of the early days of the gas-turbine engine in Germany, Britain, and the United States.

The Jet Race weaves the technical and political issues facing each program into a complete, historically accurate story. Other books on this subject dwell on the technical aspects and spend little time describing the “how” and “why” of decision making. As a result, those studies tell only half the story. To Pavelec’s credit, he gives the reader a unique view of real-life issues faced by engineers struggling to develop a new technology and the problems they encountered with their political and industrial bureaucracies. For example, on pages 56–58, the author describes the ongoing feud between Whittle’s Power Jets and two other companies (BTH and Rover) contracted by the British Ministry of Aircraft Production to build the Whittle W.2 engine. During one dispute concerning Power Jet’s technical drawings, Whittle discovered “that Rover had removed all reference to Power Jets from the blueprints” (p. 58).

Germany’s military goals in the prewar years minimized many of the bureaucratic and industrial feuding problems faced by Whittle in Britain. Germany had a clear, overriding goal of developing advanced weapon systems, and many people recognized the gas-turbine engine as a key to aircraft superiority. Hans von Ohain’s success with his centrifugal-flow engine helped fuel Germany’s development of the more efficient axial-flow engine. Despite many early successes, the German turbine-engine program almost failed to mature when Hitler decreed in 1940 “that all military production projects that would not be operational in six months were to be scrapped” (p. 26). Both Heinkel and Messerschmitt ignored the order and continued development of their respective jet aircraft since both companies recognized the extreme advantage of this revolutionary propulsion system.

In contrast to Britain and Germany, who maintained active turbine-engine development programs, the United States lagged far behind in developing viable jet engines. As late as 1940, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics had decided that “they were unsuitable for aircraft propulsion, and research had been discontinued” (p. 74). Luckily, during a visit to Britain in 1941, Gen Henry “Hap” Arnold recognized the importance of the jet engine and quickly arranged an agreement for the United States to produce Whittle engines secretly at the General Electric (GE) plant in West Lynn, Massachusetts (p. 77). General Arnold also awarded contracts to GE and Bell Aircraft to build the first US jet aircraft—the XP-59A. Pavelec appropriately ends the chapter on the United States’ early development by identifying the general as “the single most influential element in the . . . American jet program” (p. 90).

This book contains a wealth of information on early jet engines and their development. Besides the chapters that describe the three programs, the author includes a very interesting chapter on the operational record of the German jets. The book’s appendices offer comparisons of the three early jet engines, call signs of the early experimental aircraft, biographical information about the main proponents, comprehensive notes that provide additional background to each chapter, and a superb bibliography for further reading. Individuals interested in the early history of the turbine engine should definitely add The Jet Race to their libraries. I am sure they will read it more than once.

Rick Kamykowski
Arnold Engineering Development Center, Tennessee

Rockets and People, vol. 1, and Rockets and People: Creating a Rocket Industry, vol. 2, by Boris Chertok. NASA History Office (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/index.html), 300 E Street SW, Washington, DC 20546, 2005, 402 pages, $42.00 (hardcover) (vol. 1); 2006, 669 pages, $25.00 (hardcover) (vol. 2). Available free online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4110/vol1.pdf and http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4110/vol2.pdf.

In this initial two-volume set, Boris Chertok chronicles Soviet air and space development through approximately 1960, drawing on his six decades of experience as one of Moscow’s foremost air and space engineers, engaged in nearly all major projects. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to publish volumes three and four (concerning Moscow’s space program in the early-to-mid 1960s and the moon shot in the late 1960s, respectively) in 2008–9. Translated from the original Russian (published in Moscow as Rakety i lyudi, 1994–99) and substantially revised, the series is edited by noted space historian Asif Siddiqi. In these volumes, Chertok offers unique historical insights and documentary references, many previously unavailable in the West, thus giving the reader penetrating views into an era in which “rocket-space technology became one of the determining factors in the politics of the leading nations” (vol. 1, p. 8).

In one interesting revelation, Chertok writes that China is not the only nation to have conducted a live test of a nuclear warhead atop a missile (as suggested in Thread of the Silkworm, Iris Chang’s biography of Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s missile program, p. 222). A decade earlier, on 2 February 1956, the Soviet Union fired a nuclear-armed R-5M missile 1,200 miles to create a nuclear explosion near the Aral Sea (vol. 2, p. 284). Chertok later recounts a proposal, fortunately abandoned, to “deliver an atomic bomb to the Moon and detonate it on its surface” (vol. 2, p. 440).

Volume one covers Chertok’s early career, including his assistance in relocating Soviet aeronautical infrastructure to the Urals to avoid Nazi attacks and his assessment and extraction of Nazi rocket expertise in postwar Germany. He recounts early Soviet development of aviation, which Stalin regarded as a critical industry in the 1930s and renewed support for during World War II. Chertok acknowledges that despite this prioritization, many important Soviet military leaders did not fully appreciate the military significance of rockets and aircraft at the war’s outset. Later they reversed their position and inhibited space developments, fearing that they interfered with the progress of weapons systems.

Volume two details Chertok’s return to Moscow in 1946 to fulfill Stalin’s charge to develop a missile program and his subsequent role in establishing Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Chertok also records the development and launch of such satellites as Sputnik (in 1957) and of lunar and interplanetary probes. In addition to these successes, he acknowledges such failures as the R-16 rocket explosion in 1960 that killed Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, head of Soviet strategic missiles, and scores of top engineers. Throughout volume two, Chertok recounts relations with former boss and chief designer Sergey Korolev, long recognized as having led the Soviet space program until his untimely death in 1966. The author offers probing insights into the political system that facilitated Nazi Germany’s cutting-edge missile advances, which in some ways actually helped Hitler lose World War II by diverting resources from the development of aircraft and atomic capability.

Some will undoubtedly disagree with Chertok’s views concerning many critical issues of his time, particularly his somewhat utopian characterization of technocratic policies as a panacea and of Soviet militarism as primarily a reaction to provocative American policies. In Chertok’s assessment, Moscow “won the nuclear missile race, but lost the moon race” (vol. 1, p. 27). The latter point will meet with little disagreement in the West, but his insistence that “according to some indicators, we passed the United States in terms of nuclear missile armaments” (vol. 1, p. 27) seems insufficient to support the former statement, given Moscow’s inability to sustain funding for its inefficient military-industrial complex. Chertok arguably exaggerates the benefits of centralized technological development in isolation from the West, insisting that his country “by the end of the 1970s . . . had the strongest technocratic elite in the world” (vol. 1, p. 7). He minimizes unduly the contributions of German engineers to Soviet rocket development—German V-2 technology was essential to the Soviet Union, just as it was to the United States. Many veterans of the Apollo program would also differ with Chertok’s assessment that the structure of Moscow’s centralized design bureau was superior to Washington’s private-contractor system, which “wasted weeks coordinating complex issues between companies and drawing up protocols” (vol. 2, p. 513).

Nevertheless, Chertok is to be commended for his frank acknowledgement of many of the Soviet Union’s shortcomings, such as those of its political system. These included the terrible cost of purges, stifling ideological repression, censorship of key technological knowledge, falsification of rocket-reliability figures, and systematic suppression of even the most talented Jewish technocrats under Stalin: “Even scientific problems that were far removed from politics and ideology, such as matters of rocket stability, could acquire political overtones” (vol. 2, p. 64). Later, even under Khrushchev, a major supporter of rocket development at the expense of aviation, superficial space spectaculars were prioritized, often with unrealistic deadlines, and “the fate of intercontinental . . . missiles was decided at such a high governmental level and at such a low scientific and military technical level” (vol. 2, p. 236).

At the same time, Chertok’s minute detail helps explain not only the failures engendered by the Soviet system but also the many air and space successes. Specialists striving to understand why China has yet to emulate Soviet development of manifold, relatively sophisticated indigenous weapons systems will notice (1) Moscow’s significant human and natural resources, which it harnessed—particularly following World War II—in the development of a massive scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure; (2) the postwar emergence of a generation of technocrats with formidable prestige and power to administer this prioritized establishment; and (3) following Khrushchev’s courageous de-Stalinization efforts, the relative protection of the best Soviet minds from repression and turmoil—provided that they did not, like foremost nuclear physicist and later Nobel Peace Prize–winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, seek political change. Of particular note are the significant financial and material incentives provided to the best Russian experts and even the German specialists who initially served them. Chief designers such as Korolev not only were authorized substantial bonuses by the Council of Ministers but also were empowered to confer modest cash awards on subordinates.

Despite the staggering amount of data conveyed, Chertok’s numerous technological analogies and vivid anecdotes make for lively, accessible reading. He thus succeeds in his mission to document the contributions of a cadre of Soviet men and women to humankind’s initial steps into the heavens, despite great turmoil and trials back on Earth. While it is tragic that communist policies prevented many of these talented and dedicated individuals from being recognized internationally during their own lifetimes, Chertok has ensured that their legacies will not be lost to history.

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson
Newport, Rhode Island

George C. Marshall: Rubrics of Leadership by Stewart W. Husted. Army War College Foundation Press and Stackpole Books (http://www.stackpolebooks.com), 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055-6921, 2007, 300 pages, $23.95 (hardcover).

Prof. Stewart Husted’s book on George C. Marshall is a college leadership textbook based on the general’s life. The “architect of America’s Victory” in World War II, Marshall served as secretary of state and, later, secretary of defense. His plan to rebuild Europe after World War II earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

The general’s long and successful career includes many examples of leadership. Drawing on Marshall’s life, Husted selects between four and nine rubrics of leadership for each of the 11 chapters of the book. The 71 rubrics offer excellent material for initiating class discussions.

Such discussions could emphasize Marshall’s life or some of the more current historical events mentioned in the book. Students could apply and debate the American traditions of military leadership that Husted covers, such as courage, self-discipline, integrity, civilian control of the military, and the importance of military members taking a nonpartisan view of political issues. The author includes both positive and negative examples from Marshall’s career so students can discuss and learn from his successes as well as mistakes.

Having previously written a book on Marshall (George C. Marshall: A Marshall Plan for Leadership and Selfless Service, 2004), Husted knows his subject well. He uses the general’s life and papers to write a text similar to some of the recent books about the leadership of great men such as Lincoln, Grant, Lee, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and others (including a humorous text on Attila the Hun). Although many of these studies focus on tips for executives and businessmen, Husted’s primary audience is the college student planning a military career.

Granted, Marshall’s life of service offers an incredible role model for leaders, but this book’s focus is so narrow that it will appeal only to college students and professors who use it for leadership classes. In it, they will find wonderful examples, 24 photographs, an index, and numerous footnotes. Others should seek out a detailed biography of Marshall to learn more about the life of this great American hero and to reach their own conclusions about the lessons that his life illustrates.

Maj Herman Reinhold, USAF, Retired
Athens, New York

Dealing with Dictators: Dilemmas of U.S. Diplomacy and Intelligence Analysis, 1945–1990 edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. The MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu), 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142-1493, 2007, 243 pages, $54.00 (hardcover), $27.00 (softcover).

This book is a collection of case studies developed for the intelligence and policy course offered between 1986 and 2002 at Harvard University to senior government and military intelligence officials to make them more adept at analyzing situations in which intelligence drives policy—and more aware of the cloudy environment in which such decision making occurs. The introductory material explains the nature of the course and defines the decision-making process that it teaches. Then the authors present six case studies—cowritten by the editors and other professionals. Arranged chronologically, the cases include the collapse of China, the United Nations intervention in the Congo, the removal of the Shah of Iran, the US relationship with Nicaragua’s Somozas, the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the run-up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The studies cover both Democratic and Republican administrations from President Truman to the first President Bush.

The editors claim that the case studies are straight reporting. For the most part, that seems to be the case. There is little opinion or analysis in the text. In the footnotes, however, the authors sometimes cite players whose assessment of a given situation may or may not be fully objective. Overall, the studies avoid bias or Monday-morning quarterbacking—and the avoidance of bias or second-guessing is one of the goals of the program.

The final chapter purports to deliver lessons learned—to apply the paradigm to the cases. It provides a rationale for including each particular case but fails to explain what in each case fails to meet the model. This section seems a bit perfunctory, including little more than two pages per case study. The recommendation for the fall of China calls for the analyst to think like George Marshall. That’s all well and good, but nowhere does the work define Marshall sufficiently to allow that.

The book does not hold together as a stand-alone study. The descriptions of the crises show them unfolding as decision makers and advisers work from their differing perspectives with their different levels of information, insight, and under­standing. Complicating the process is the inevitable partial or erroneous information that US personnel have to deal with. This part of the book is extremely good, but it provides little information that is really new. We have long known about the fog of war and the inadequacy of intelligence gathering with too few native-seeming boots on the intelligence ground. We have also known about hidden agendas and flat-out mistakes by both the intelligence community and the political leadership. What we need is something to help us detect and overcome these flaws.

This book does not provide any new answers. It works on a descriptive level but fails in analysis. That seems to have been largely the case with American intelligence gathering for many decades now.

Assessing Dealing with Dictators as a stand-alone document is unfair. The true test comes in a classroom when analysts shed long years of experience and role-play the crises as decision makers. Assuming a competent instructor, these scenarios will serve as the basis for raising awareness of how much harder it is to handle a crisis in real time than in retrospect.

Dr. John H. Barnhill
Houston, Texas