Jargon and dogma: what reading list reveals about military

THE publication of a reading list for candidates to the UK Defence Academy reveals just how much modern strategic thinking has fallen prey to the jargon and dogma of management.

The list, compiled by Britain's most senior officer, General Sir David Richards, mentions 90 titles. One of them is by the general himself: Victory Among the People: Lessons from Countering Insurgency and Stabilising Fragile States.

Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, according to Wellington, but this reading list suggests that any future Waterloos will be fought by commanders who resemble graduates of Harvard Business School. Most of the works are secondary – very few original sources are mentioned – and I have found many of them secondhand in their thinking.

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The list is very Anglo-American – with very few works from Europe, none from China and Russia. Only five books are by women.

The buzzy volumes that have caught the headlines are the biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and Blink – The Power of Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. The list also includes The Black Swan - Nicholas Taleb's repetitive thesis about chaos and improbability – and Win! by the English rugby tsar Clive Woodward.

Sadly there is almost nothing by the sharpest witnesses of the Arab Spring, Afghanistan or Iraq – those who have seen what they have seen and continued to ask awkward questions about it. None of Ahmed Rashid's books on the Taliban, Afghanistan and central Asia are mentioned; and there's nothing on jihadism.

The reading list reflects the new British military fad - following the lead of America - for 'doctrine.' Everything in the UK military needs a doctrine nowadays, from hygiene to handling the media. It all has to have a rule, a rubric, a dogma. As my Croatian interpreter in Bosnia used to say – "it was easier under the communists because every question 'why?' had the answer 'because' and no one gave a damn whether it was true or false.' Dogma, a military pal used to warn me, is for the instruction of fools and the guidance of the wise.

The aim of such a list surely is to encourage reading that will lead to original and courageous thinking, and expression. Many of these books are glosses on much greater work. For example, Jonathan Powell's The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World – which spectacularly fails to match Machiavelli's The Prince for originality, power of thought and brevity.

While the story of Steve Jobs and Woodward's Win! have their quotient of inspiration, they cannot match the spirit and exuberance of such eccentric gems as James Fergusson's Kandahar Cockney, A Million Bullets, or Patrick Hennessy's Junior Officer's Reading Club – the only piece to have sprung from the latest British escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan with a claim to being English literature.

Insight and understanding need a bit of inspiration to make them digestible. Perhaps, after all, the adventures of Captain Marvel and the works of G. A. Henty - the king of Victorian derring-do - deserve space on General Richards's bookshelf.