Stardate 20011016.1030 (Crew, this is the Captain): Jim Dunnigan knows more about the current state of war and military science than any other writer I know; I have found his books and those he's written with Al Nofi to be endlessly informative and fascinating. His writing style is unpretentious; it's loaded with facts and pithy observations without coming off as stuffy and academic. What with current events, I'm rereading his book
How to Make War, so as to come back up to speed on the current and future state of the art in every aspect of modern warmaking capabilities. It has separate chapters on the infantry, armor, artillery, air defense, fighters, bombers, various kinds of naval vessels, and special ops. In each case he describes in details the weapons and tactics each uses, and compares and contrasts how different nations use each one. Once I'm done with that,, I'm going to reread
A Quick and Dirty Guide to War, which is a political analysis of every part of the world which identifies the parties who are in conflict or who might be in conflict, and the various aspects of their struggles; it also identifies various outcomes and assigns probabilities to them. One thing he pays attention to in every theater is the chance that nuclear weapons will be used. It's interesting that of all the places in the world where that's a possibility, he identified a future war between Pakistan and India as being the most likely -- and this was before either nation had actually set a bomb off, thus admitting that they had them. Even there he put had a low probability, but it was considerably higher than the chance of it happening in Israel or one of its neighbors. Dunnigan has
a web site and it's an excellent source of insight. He and a couple of other people are updating it regularly, and I recommend it highly. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any anchors for links, or I'd be using it as a source. Right now as I look at it there's an article about biowarfare. A couple of days ago there was a briefing on how military factions in Afghanistan operate and what they think war is like; it's much different than what we think of. Oddly enough, they don't tend to have a lot of casualties; it's more like a board game with constantly shifting alliances.
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