Cav > Books: military‎ (138)

"Users on X had already started to refer to the day as “Black Saturday,” and the term was being picked up by Israeli media, which also used “Black Shabbat.” Black because it was objectively the darkest day in Israel’s history, the largest surprise attack against the state since its founding. And the fact that it occurred on a Saturday—the one day during the week that Israelis have their guards down—held grave significance for the Jewish people. Sabbath: a day of rest. A day to reflect and spend time with loved ones. A day so important that observant Jews are forbidden to work or travel on that day. Most religious Israelis won’t even turn on a light switch after the sun goes down on Friday night..."

"So at 5:35 a.m., I put up photos of me with Hamas militants; with Israeli special forces; with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and with a former leader of Islamic Jihad. I wrote: Over the past few years, I’ve embedded with both the Israeli military and Hamas fighters. I’ve interviewed leaders from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the Israeli Prime Minister. This previous reporting is critical for you to understand the context of what is unfolding now.
I wanted to establish my voice with the new audience watching my reports—to have them understand that I take no sides in this conflict. I am not pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I am pro-truth. I speak with all sides to get a clear picture of what is unfolding, in any news context."

"Hamas gunmen were going door-to-door, systematically executing civilians. In some homes, grenades were thrown into living rooms and bedrooms. In others, children were shot in front of their parents, their bodies disfigured. Terrified residents clung to their bomb shelter doors as militants fired on the handles. When they were unsuccessful at breaching the rooms, Hamas burned houses down, reducing the people inside to ash after they suffocated from the smoke. Those not immediately killed were kidnapped and taken hostage into Gaza."

"...People seeking enlightenment or relief from stress, anxiety, and pain have been the primary audience.
Therefore, most mindfulness teachers have continued to discuss mindfulness within that frame. That frame has been so narrow for so long it might seem that mindfulness is only for the spiritually inclined, or for people with challenging medical issues, such as panic attacks, paralyzing anxiety, and deep depression, or people who just want some stress relief.
That couldn't be further from the truth..."

"I don't know why you picked up this book, but given the title it might be that you've had the thought, “What the hell is all the hype about mindfulness?” You may be one of the millions of people who have been curious about mindfulness but don't want to be associated with the spiritual crowd that so often drowns out its core meaning. Perhaps you recoil at the thought of listening to someone breathlessly guide meditations in a sickly sweet voice. Maybe you thought you'd need to join a yoga studio and get a subscription for monthly deliveries of incense. If any of those have been keeping you from trying out mindfulness, this book is for you. In these pages, I peel back the layers of hype and hyperbole about mindfulness and provide a practical and demystified approach to reaping the real benefits from a consistent mindfulness practice over just an 8-week period.
The concept of "Mindfulness" is not new, despite the many new Western practitioners who have emerged in the last few decades. Although mindful practices are just hitting an upswing here, they have been a component of Eastern philosophy, namely Hinduism and Buddhism, for a few thousand years."

"Mindfulness is an ability to keep attention on one's present moment experience without getting too caught up in automatic thoughts and judgments."

"Attending my first mindfulness teacher training course was quite a shock. In the morning on the first day, the teachers came into the room holding small bells, wearing Buddhist beads, and carrying special cushions on which they meditated. This struck me as odd, because I had signed up for the “secular” mindfulness teacher training. It did not take long to gather that this “secular” training was going to be deeply intertwined with overtly spiritual and new-age thoughts, positions, and perspectives. There were–I kid you not–even Tarot card readings at an evening event and scores of participant comments during the training were met with the response, “That's so beautiful.” If you want to turn off a corporate audience and never be invited back beyond what your original contract stipulated, just do what's in this paragraph."

"As you progress through the book and do the exercises, you can gain a greater ability to respond thoughtfully and calmly in the midst of high-pressure and complex situations, become more agile in the face of change, and pay more attention to the things you deem most important. You will learn practices that are known to lead to enhanced mental focus, empathy, and resilience. Through consistent practice, you can become aware of some of your self-created challenges and learn ways to avoid automatically falling into the same patterns so you can get out of your own way. You will learn ways to be less affected by unhelpful internal dialogue, limiting beliefs, and irrational feelings of fear (failure, embarrassment, and criticism), allowing you to see and seize opportunities to grow beyond what you previously thought possible and unlock your latent potential. Finally, you'll also begin to be able to connect with people around you more fully and effectively. These benefits cascade and compound, resulting in improvements in performance, leadership, and well-being."

"...It sets their stories against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s past as a battleground for outside powers, including the legacy of Britain’s 19thcentury colonial invasions, the Soviet occupation during the Cold War and America’s role in backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. And it interweaves their journeys with my own, as an outsider who spent two decades working and living in Afghanistan. In my work as a reporter, I was focused on the war. But in my day-to-day life, I was witness to a country changing and growing in spite of it. So this is also my perspective on that other side to Afghanistan’s story."

"Calling Afghanistan the graveyard of empires overlooks the fact that it was itself the foundation of empires, including that of its own 18th-century Durrani dynasty. The term is also inaccurate. While both Britain and the USSR were badly mauled in Afghanistan, that wasn’t the reason their two empires came to an end. Most important of all, the term ignores the reality that it is Afghanistan rather than its invaders that has always paid the heaviest price, becoming a graveyard for its own people. And that pattern continued after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989."

"...This is not to say that flying in these magnificent monstrosities provided me with some sort of spiritual moment or religious exaltation. This is to say that to be on a gunship, to carry out its mission, is to feel as powerful as any deity from the pantheons of old. But these gods, like all gods, are not interested in creation. To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with forty-five-pound bullets, a gun that, when fired, causes the 155,000-pound plane it’s mounted on to buck so far to the right that the pilot must actively correct the flight path, is to be Zeus hurling Hephaestus’s bolts. To fire a Griffin missile from an altitude so great that the men on the ground could only know of it in the same moment that it kills them is to be Mars flinging his spear."

"Being a DSO in Afghanistan meant making life and death decisions (and not or). We could decide who lived, and who died. When we had flown a mission, and done our job right, it was no lie or even an exaggeration to say we had done something that very few other people were capable of doing.
When I did it, I was one of only two DSOs who spoke both Dari and Pashto; there was only one other person on Earth who had received the training I had, who could do the work I did.
Because I experienced all of the things I did in the Air Force at a young age, it might have been impossible for them to be anything but formative.
Because very little else that followed was imbued with the same amount of life and death, other things will always pale in comparison. Or maybe it really was the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do. And so, though everything in this book is true, and most of it is about me, it is not a memoir, as I don’t know how to tell you who I am. Nor is it a war book, as I don’t know how to make you understand war. All this book can do—all I can do—is show you what I was.
I was a DSO.
And this is what I heard."

"Before the Second World War, military conflicts were fought under orthodox conditions, usually termed “conventional warfare,” but several innovations had significantly changed combat, leading inextricably to the race for a nuclear weapon in the 1930s and 1940s. Conflicts had been fought by armies on horseback with guns of varying sophistication since the 16th century, but mechanized warfare and machine guns changed this calculus and set the stage for future combat by the end of World War I. Other sinister changes entered the fray during this conflict, such as chemical weapons like chlorine and mustard gas. The total warfare brought about by World War I and ensuing wars like the Spanish Civil War made the quest for the most powerful weapons somewhat necessary."

"The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in the mass media.
Even when conventional wisdom ends up concluding that a war was unwise, the consequences for journalists who promoted it are essentially nil.
Reporters and pundits who enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion were not impeded in their careers as a result. Many advanced professionally. In medialand, being pro-war means never having to say you’re sorry. Journalists who have gone with the war program are ill positioned to throw stones from their glass houses later on; the same holds true for media outlets.n Strong challenges to the status quo of U.S. militarism rarely get into mainstream media."

"The “war on terror” became—for the White House, Pentagon, and Congress—a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries, rarely seen, much less understood.11 Whatever the intent, the resulting carnage often included civilians.12 The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds. As years went by, it turned out that the point wasn’t to win the multicontinent war so much as to keep waging it, a means with no plausible end; the quest, in search of enemies to confront if not defeat, made stopping unthinkable. No wonder Americans couldn’t be heard wondering aloud when the “war on terror” would end. It wasn’t supposed to..."

"In media frames, the routine exclusion of people harmed by U.S. warfare conveys that they don’t really matter much. Because we rarely see images of their suffering or hear their voices or encounter empathetic words about them, the implicit messaging comes through loud and clear. The silence ends up speaking at high volume: Those people hardly exist. They are others. They are not our concern. They don’t particularly matter, while our country is causing their misery."

"Charles Robert Jenkins is, quite simply, a figure of lasting historical importance. He has lived a life that’s unique in twentiethcentury history. No other Westerner has survived so long in the world’s least known, least visited, and least understood country on the planet and been able to return to tell the tale. And what he has to say is vitally important: Is there any country in the world harder to get a handle on than North Korea? And while there are certainly rivals when it comes to the intensity of American diplomatic bungling, has any country been a U.S. foreign relations debacle so consistently for so many years? While native North Korean defectors and escapees from its gulags have made some horrors of that nation known to the world, Jenkins is the first Westerner able to provide a long-term, detailed view of this secretive and brutal society from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its inner workings. I do not profess to know much about North Korea, but I’m confident Charles Robert Jenkins knows more about it than just about any foreigner on the planet."

"The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea."

"From nearby Seoul to faraway Washington, DC, many government officials and analysts boldly predicted—sometime in whispers, sometimes in shouts—widespread instability, a mass exodus into China, a military coup, imminent collapse. Behind all the doom mongering was one shared thought: surely this regime couldn’t survive the transition to a third totalitarian leader called Kim, much less to a twentysomething who’d been educated at fancy European schools and had an obsession about the Chicago Bulls—a young man with no known military or government background..."

"...As with so many things military, there was a secondary reason. The name “Skunk Works” had no direct or sensible translation into Russian. The workers at the Skunk Works were convinced that Russian trawlers off the California coast housed KGB spies who monitored the Skunk Works, more formerly known as Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects."

"...This is the reality of the world in which we all live. The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today.
“The world could end in the next couple of hours,” warns General Robert Kehler, the former commander of the United States Strategic Command."

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
"Since the early 1950s, the United States government has spent trillions of dollars preparing to fight a nuclear war, while also refining protocols meant to keep the U.S. government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of an apocalyptic-scale nuclear holocaust.
This scenario—of what the moments after an inbound nuclear missile launch could look like—is based on facts sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants, and others who have worked on these macabre scenarios over decades. Because the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the U.S. government, this book, and the scenario it postulates, takes the reader up to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known. Declassified documents—obfuscated for decades—fill in the details with terrifying clarity.
Because the Pentagon is a top target for a strike by America’s nucleararmed enemies, in the scenario that follows, Washington, D.C., gets hit first —with a 1-megaton thermonuclear bomb. “A Bolt out of the Blue attack against D.C. is what everyone in D.C. fears most,” says former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs Andrew Weber. “Bolt out of the Blue” is how U.S. Nuclear Command and Control refers to an “unwarned large [nuclear] attack.”
This strike on D.C. initiates the beginning of an Armageddon-like General Nuclear War that will almost certainly follow. “There is no such thing as a small nuclear war” is an oft repeated phrase in Washington..."

"The race to build even more atomic bombs now accelerated dramatically. By 1950, the U.S. added 129 atomic weapons to its stockpile, bringing the total from 170 to 299. At the time, the Soviet Union had five.
The following year, in 1951, the number climbed again—this time to an astonishing 438 atomic weapons in the U.S. arsenal. More than twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told could “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works...”
...The next year, there was a near-doubling of the near-doubling yet again. By 1952, there were 841 atomic weapons in the U.S. stockpile. By 1954, there were 1,703 nuclear weapons in the stockpile. The U.S. military-industrial complex was now churning out (on average) 1.5 nuclear weapons per day.
1955: 2,422. Almost two bombs per day, and with ten new systems introduced including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs.
1956: 3,692 bombs. The numbers continued to escalate to the point of dizziness. With production levels soaring, these mass-destruction weapons were now coming off literal assembly lines at an average pace of 3.5 nuclear bombs per day.
By 1957, there were 5,543 bombs in the U.S. stockpile. That is, 1,851 new nuclear weapons in a single year. More than five per day. And the numbers kept growing.
1958: 7,345.
1959: 12,298. By 1960, when the U.S. war planners met in the underground bunker in Nebraska, the U.S. stockpile contained 18,638 nuclear bombs. By 1967, it reached an all-time high of 31,255 nuclear bombs."

"...Its passion and parables, and its characters, are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Supper at Emmaus and the coming of the Holy Ghost in tongues of fire, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same. We have the betrayal at Munich, the miraculous survival of virtue amid defeat at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, and the resurrection of freedom and democracy on D-Day."

"...One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it."

"There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure on us to open a second front.
Pleasing Stalin – or at least avoiding his disfavour – would be one of Winston Churchill’s preoccupations in the years that followed...
...the killing of German civilians, and the disruption of German rule in central Europe, was an effective and practicable way of soothing the Soviet monster’s rages...
...Soon after his first ill-tempered encounter with Stalin, Churchill was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. But it was, Churchill said, ‘better than doing nothing’."

"March 1945. Tokyo hit by Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of this or any war. 16 square miles of central Tokyo annihilated, over 1 million made homeless, with an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. (To put these figures into context, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima some months later killed 70,000, and the one dropped on Nagasaki killed 35,000.)"

"It is true that nobody could have known at the time that the National Socialist persecution of Jews would end in the extermination camps. Even Hitler had not yet conceived of them. Yet when undoubted evidence of these camps later reached the USA and Britain, these countries took no direct action to prevent the murder, to destroy railway tracks leading to the murder camps or to rescue those who remained trapped in Europe. The Bermuda Conference of April 1943 likewise rejected any plans to relax immigration quotas, either in the USA or in Palestine, or to take special measures to allow Europe’s remaining Jews to escape Hitler. Yet by then many credible reports strongly suggesting large-scale murder had reached the outside world."

"And what can we say about World War II’s final settlement, at Yalta? Viewed coldly, this cynical action, a sort of large-scale protection racket in which Stalin played the racketeer and the Western Allies his cowed victims, was a far more disgraceful episode of appeasement than anything even contemplated at Munich in 1938. This unheroic pact meant the handing over of millions of innocent and defenceless people to a cruel foreign conqueror. Some of them – such as the Cossacks – were disgracefully sent in locked railway cars into the custody of Stalin’s NKVD execution squads. They had good reason to fear for their lives, but their frantic pleas to remain in the West were ignored. No doubt the penetration of our establishment by sympathisers of the Communist empire prevented us for many years from admitting the revolting nature of the Soviet state. But perhaps our embarrassment about having had such people as valued allies also played its part in that reticence."

"I am not saying that Britain should have remained neutral throughout the European War that began in 1939. I am saying that we might have done better to follow the wise example of the USA, and wait until we and our allies were militarily and diplomatically ready before entering that conflict. I am suggesting that our diplomacy, especially after March 1939, allowed others to dictate and hasten the timing of that war in ways that did not suit us or our main ally, France.
Above all, I am not saying that the war against Hitler was unnecessary. At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without. Even if you do not believe that the internal affairs of other countries are the business of other countries, you may hope that repulsive regimes may be brought to an end. And sometimes the most effective way of doing so is inflicting foreign policy defeats on them, robbing them of prestige at home.
The startling thing is that, as matters turned out, Britain ended up playing a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. It is still difficult to mention this, or to criticise aspects of our war effort. But it is so."

"...I was coming home to Marin County, California, a predominately liberal community critical of the war. And while Marin culture was tolerant, spiritual, and forward-looking in many respects, I doubted I’d get a free pass as a homegrown guy who spent a year of his young life in the jungles and bush of Vietnam, despite my in-step political leanings.
I wasn’t mistaken. Soon after landing on U.S. soil, I tasted the bitterness of what it was like being a Vietnam War veteran. It wasn’t pretty..."

"The numbers below, by themselves, tell their own story. They tell of pervasive and wanton destruction, profound human pain, and emotional isolation. They represent a repulsive legacy that will indelibly darken humanity. They need no embellishment to still the heart and shock the conscience.
• 2.7 million Americans served in uniform in Vietnam.
• 58,148 Americans were killed in action (KIA) in Vietnam (including medic Thomas P. Coffino, the brother of the coauthor of this book).
• Of those Americans KIA, the average age was twenty-three; more than 60 percent were twenty or younger; five were sixteen; the oldest was sixty-two; and more than 17,000 were married.
• It is estimated that almost 300,000 Vietnam veterans eventually died from Agent Orange exposure during the war.
• 2,338 Americans were missing in action; more than 1,600 are unaccounted for today.
• 766 Americans became prisoners of war (POW) and of them, 114 died in captivity.
• More than 303,000 Americans were wounded.
• More than 75,000 American soldiers were severely disabled as a result of the war. More than 5,200 lost limbs, and more than 1,000 suffered multiple amputations.
• Countless Vietnam veterans have committed suicide.
• One study shows that almost 20 percent of Vietnam veterans returned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in war.
• Approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange contamination during the war, of whom 400,000 have died from exposure.
• More than 300,000 Vietnamese “boat people” trying to flee Vietnam either died or were killed by pirates.
• As many as 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians (North and South) about 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers died during the war.
• South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 3,000, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.
• The number of families from all affected countries that were devastated is countless."

"Tomorrow I may be blown up by a rocket. Maybe an IED punctures the armor of my Hummer and rips my kidney apart. If I’m not wearing a colostomy bag at the end of the day, it’s a win..."

"In a military deployment, the first thing you’re told are the Rules of Engagement (ROE). Not here. We’re told through the grapevine we don’t have any because our mission is transporting diplomats by any means necessary.
Platitudes of not making enemies arise but if we get in trouble, Blackwater will get us out and claim diplomatic immunity. This is backed up by the State Department passports we have.."

"Contractors are stuck in a precarious position. They carry scars of war, but aren’t afforded public support given to military veterans. Yet contractors became critical in the Iraq war because no one planned for a protracted conflict.
Blackwater filled the void. With limited supervision and no repercussions, we became the epitome of mercenaries: highly paid men with a mission but no rules of engagement—Guns, Girls, and Greed drove us. Erik Prince stated repeatedly that we conducted over forty thousand missions with only two hundred shots fired. What he doesn’t report, and likely never knew, is the carnage we wreaked by smashing into cars and the actual number of shots we took because we never reported them.
I don’t blame Prince or Blackwater for how contractors acted, but future wars can’t be fought using unsupervised PMCs. The repercussions for local populations are too severe. This is not to say private security contractors don’t have a place in combat, but DoS and DoD need to get out of their ivory towers, get in harm’s way, and be part of missions. Until then, private security contracts will be a net negative."

"Do private contractors belong in combat? I doubt anyone entertained the idea until the US handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government, because we didn’t want to be seen as occupiers. The toppling of one government with replacement by a hastily-created, propped-up interim government created a gray area where no one understood where wars end and diplomacy began. To fill the leadership gap, we threw money at the problem with private security companies happy to profit. Blackwater wasn’t the only PMC—though it got much of the blame... ...My position is PMCs should never be in a place where US troops are not. If the government doesn’t have the balls to commit troops, they shouldn’t’ wage war by PMC proxy."

"US Government agencies, including private military contractors, must be held to strict standards and accountability in combat zones just as US Military forces are, as their conduct reflects US foreign policy and national defense.
There are PMC’s in Syria, Ukraine, and at the US / Mexico doing jobs no one has defined. This illustrates PMC’s have become a federal government line item with zero oversight. Nothing has changed in 22 years of the GWOT. It’s time for accountability."

"I am concerned to understand what happened, not to vindicate or to condemn. I was an anti-appeaser from the day that Hitler came to power; and no doubt should be again under similar circumstances. But the point has no relevance in the writing of history. In retrospect, though many were guilty, none was innocent. The purpose of political activity is to provide peace and prosperity; and in this every statesman failed, for whatever reason..."

"...As I walked up the steep hill into the Pechersk government quarter, municipal workers put up billboards advertising upcoming concerts. Cherry-liquor bars, a favorite of young Kyivites, were already full, with folk-rock music blasting. Parents took photos of their children enjoying pony rides around the park. In the domed parliament building, Ukrainian lawmakers gathered to debate emergency wartime legislation.
A few blocks away, I was meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s predecessor and one of the main leaders of the Ukrainian opposition, Petro Poroshenko. A chocolate-industry tycoon who had badly lost the 2019 election, Poroshenko was battling corruption charges that he decried as politically motivated. He had just been barred by the courts from traveling outside the Kyiv region. Our meeting had originally been scheduled for later in the week, but I had received a call: “Come right away.”

"...The same month, Putin published a lengthy treatise called “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he argued that Ukraine is an artificial country that could only be sovereign in partnership with Russia. He had the article read out to every member of the Russian Armed Forces. Weeks later, Putin started complaining about the imaginary “genocide” of Russian-speakers in Donbas and ordered troops to start deploying along Ukraine’s borders.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, who flew to Moscow to meet Putin in November 2021, came home convinced that an invasion was inevitable. “Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country?” Putin had told Burns all the way back in 2008, when the future CIA chief served as the American ambassador to Moscow. This conviction, at the core of Putin’s worldview, had now crystallized into a determination that Russia faced a unique window of opportunity, tactically and strategically, to eliminate Ukrainian statehood. At their meeting, Putin told Burns that Ukraine was too weak and divided to resist, and the Europeans were too risk-averse to interfere. As for Biden’s America, Putin had decided that it was impotent after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. As the year drew to a close, the Russian president was certain that his modernized and upgraded Russian army would score a quick and decisive victory, at a minimal cost."

"Putin’s war plan to capture Kyiv in a speedy blitzkrieg was premised on an obsessive idea, fueled by reading the wrong history books during months of self-isolation during the COVID pandemic. He believed that Ukraine was an artificial state, and that its people—and soldiers—wouldn’t fight when faced with the overwhelming strength of the Russian military. Documents later found on dead and captured Russian officers showed that Moscow expected the whole war to wrap up in ten days, with a new collaborations regime installed in Kyiv and most of the country pacified under Russian control."

"Courage is the ability to recognize fear and compartmentalize it where you can either be unhampered by it, or better yet, where you are able to use it for the ultimate fuel. Courage, in fact, requires fear...
...There is a science and process to using fear. Until recently, finding that formula has been through trial and error, or fortunate upbringing, or a perfect storm of circumstances that drove greatness. We have only had the technology to discover neural insights (the inner working of the brain) in the past few years. Fear is the most powerful force that affects our lives and our society."

"In Fear Is Fuel my goal is to give you the science and the tools to transform your life the same way Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the world. You can be a bike mechanic working in Dayton, an administrative assistant just starting at Google, or a high school teacher from Fort Worth— it doesn’t matter. You already have all you need to change the world if you find more fear and learn how to use it to fuel the life of your dreams. If you scare yourself every day."

"There are only two ways to make decisions: out of fear or out of opportunity. When you make a decision out of fear, it almost always leads to regret. When you make a choice based on opportunity, it will always lead to learning something and getting closer to your goal. When your amygdala —that small gland at the base of your brain—hijacks your body, it wants to make every decision based on simply surviving. The amygdala always wants to fight, flee, or freeze. It will do whatever it thinks gives you the better chance of living to send your gene pool on to the next generation.
Fear only helps you to survive; opportunity makes you thrive."

"...Why do so many leaders make catastrophic mistakes and lead their militaries and countries to defeat?
At the core of this book is the notion that winning wars is about understanding and following basic principles. Although war is fiendishly complex, wars are almost always lost due to the same simple ideas being misapplied or ignored. War is a psychological phenomenon—a competition between evolved human brains—and its core nature has altered hardly at all since humans first began to live in groups hundreds of thousands of years ago."

"How to Fight a War was written as a reference guide for the Commander in Chief of a nation’s military. In an age of inevitable and more frequent wars, our leaders must have the strategic, operational, and tactical skills to prosecute wars successfully. The ability to do so means that we may arrive at durable strategic answers to the pressing geopolitical questions of the day quicker and more efficiently than might otherwise be the case. This makes me sound like a warmonger, which I most certainly am not, having experienced war first-hand."

"The first key lesson is that war is political. In a famous encapsulation, war is simply politics by other means. Very often you will see war on the one hand, and politics and diplomacy on the other, discussed as if they were discrete spheres of activity, with only the narrowest of connections between them.
War is a subset of politics. It is how humans conduct politics when they have failed to reach a decision through talking. It is, some have called it, armed politics."

"...The Moon’s influence goes back to the sulfurous origins of this planet and everything that crawls, flaps, swims, or strains skyward on its surface. The Moon guides all of us from its vaulted position above us. But it’s not apart from us, not least because it is actually a part of Earth. It was sheared from Earth when the planet was still freshly baked. And its elliptical orbit does not technically circle Earth, at least not in the way you might think. Instead, Earth and the Moon orbit each other, pivoting around a combined center of gravity that guides them both and that shapes their shared history.
Today, the Moon directs migrations, reproductions, the movements of the leaves of plants, and possibly the very blood in your veins. The Moon conducts the symphony of life on Earth, from the people who wage war on one another to the coral polyps that built the reefs of Tarawa. It has guided evolution since the moment of life’s first stirrings, which occurred either inside deep ocean vents or in warm little pools at the water’s edge, both of which derive nutrients through the Moon’s tide.
The Moon makes Earth unique, certainly in our solar system and possibly in the broader cosmos. It made us who we are, in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand, from our physiology to our psychology. It taught us how to tell time, which we used to impose order on the world. The Moon inspired the human projects of religion, philosophy, science, and discovery."

"This book is the story of our journey with the Moon in three parts: how the Moon was made, how the Moon made us, and how we made the Moon in our image. This is not solely an astronomy book, and it is not an Apollo book, though astronomy and the Apollo missions are both inseparable from humanity’s journey with the Moon. This is a book about time, life on Earth, human civilization, our place in the universe, and how the Moon has made all of it possible. I hope this book changes your understanding of all these things. And I hope it changes the way you see the Moon, this partner world that has always been with you, and which I hope you notice anew the next time you go outside at night."

"...By 2010, increasing numbers of Americans were beginning to express fears that they were losing the country they grew up in, and that they had hoped—or perhaps too complacently assumed—that they would be passing on to their children and grandchildren.
No one issue and no one administration in Washington has been enough to create a perfect storm for a great nation that has weathered many storms in its more than two centuries of existence. But the Roman Empire lasted many times longer, and weathered many storms in its turbulent times—and yet it ultimately collapsed completely.
It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Europe rose again to the level it had achieved in Roman times. The collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins.
Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet—and that nothing is inevitable until it happens."

"When we look back at the decades-long erosions and distortions of our educational system, our legal system and our political system, we must acknowledge the chilling fact that the kinds of dangers we face now were always inherent in these degenerating trends. The essays that follow deal with these trends individually, but it may help to keep in mind that they were all going on at the same time, and that these are the dangers whose coming together can create a perfect storm."

"...They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. Packed so tightly onboard that they could barely move, they traveled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles—one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that “human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.”