Cheap War: Ends and Means (Book) (Paul Seabury, Angelo Codevilla) Price

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Customer Reviews of War: Ends and Means

Title says it all
Read this book and the thought may occur to you: "This is so bloody obvious, who needs to read it in a book?" But then put the book down, read the newspapers, listen to the talking heads on TV, or attend a university lecture on the same subjects, and you quickly realize: none of it is obvious to anyone that matters. On second or third reading, you realize that what it's saying is not "obvious" at all; the book's genius consists in making a radical and controversial thesis sound self-evident.

I have one quibble, but the quibble doesn't detract sufficiently from the book to subtract a star: because the authors discuss warfare out of relation to morality, an incautious reader could easily get the impression that they are "Machiavellian" amoralists whose advice can be dismissed as "amoral realism." It isn't true, but they might have been more explicit about why not.

It really is a sad commentary on our culture that this book is as obscure as it is.

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Primer
The authors refer to their book as a primer on war. It is the clearest, most useful book for those who nothing of war (or who only know things which are wrong)I have ever read. I recommended it, to no avail, to a committee of faith-based Social Justice and Peacemaking types. They, no doubt clinging to their useful errors, avoided the subject. The authors specifically refer to those who know little or nothing of war (most students these days)and they say the book is written for these folks.

One myth or old chestnut after another is analyzed and demolished. Their use of simple (and I emphasize "simple"--nothing complex) logic and historical examples known to almost all of us--nothing abstruse here--are brutal in the rapid and total destruction of some of the most commonly-accepted misunderstandings of war. For example, they discuss the Phoenix program of Viet Nam days. While acknowledging that it turned sour, they make plain what those involved knew. The Phoenix program worked, killing the cadres, the troublemakers, without killing scores or hundreds of unwilling conscripts and unlucky civilians. While being successful, it deprived the anti-war side of their masses of civilian casualties they needed to make their case. It was a two-fer. Thus, it had to be, as it was, demonized. They make frequent use of Aquinas and Augustine and the Just War Doctrine. It is not that we like war, Augustine said, but that our enemy's peace may be deadly to us. People may be murdered en masse, as we see in this century, without being in war, and fighting to avoid that is certainly moral. This book suffers from one disadvantage: Those who need it most may feel themselves superior to its message.

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The best war primer known to modern man
Angelo Codevilla introduced me to the worlds of war in the late 1980's and later to intelligence in the ealry 1990's, leading partly to my career.

This book is what a modern Clauswhitz would write. Speaking in plain english on diverse subjects, he collects the type of thinking necessary to war in one book. I give this book (which is hard to find, but I managed) to every student of modern affairs.

It is hard to find the correct praise to lavish on this book without gushing. It is simply the best book of a primer on war that exists anywhere. More than introducing the student to war, it introduces him to thinking in war's pragmatic thought patterns- to the necessity that war demands.

Better, Codevilla uses his talent in context of historical necessity, drawing carefully from a bevy of beautifully chosen historical people and sitations.

You can do no better on the subject. Start thinking about war with War.