The Insurgents, Fred Kaplan
The Insurgents, Fred Kaplan
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The Insurgents
David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

Author: Fred Kaplan

Narrator: Kevin Foley

Unabridged: 15 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/04/2013


Synopsis

Based on previously unavailable documents and interviews with more than one hundred key players, including General David Petraeus, The Insurgents

unfolds against the backdrop of two wars waged against insurgencies in

Iraq and Afghanistan. But the main insurgency is the one led at home by

a new generation of officers—including Petraeus, John Nagl, David

Kilcullen, and H. R. McMaster—who were seized with an idea on how to

fight these kinds of "small wars" and who adapted their enemies'

techniques to overhaul their own army. Fred Kaplan explains where their

idea came from and how the men and women who latched onto this idea

created a community (some would refer to themselves as a "cabal") and

maneuvered the idea through the highest echelons of power. This

is a cautionary tale about how creative ideas can harden into dogma,

how smart strategists—"the best and the brightest" of today—can win

bureaucratic battles but still lose the wars. The Insurgents made the

U.S. military more adaptive to the conflicts of the post–Cold War era,

but their self-confidence led us deeper into wars we shouldn't have

fought and couldn't help but lose.

Author Bio

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column in Slate and has also written many articles on politics and culture in for the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York magazine, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. A Pulitzer Prize winner and a former reporter for the Boston Globe, he is the author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed; Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power; and The Wizards of Armageddon. He graduated from Oberlin College and has a Ph.D. from M.I.T. Fred lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

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