Impressive!
Good list. I have read many of them.
I would add “The Siege of Mecca”
The man is a tactical genius and middle-east expert and will make America and President Trump proud!
I read this one for a college course in Middle East studies a decade ago.
“A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
by David Fromkin”
Many of Mattis’s recommendations are about the ME and Islam, which makes sense as the former CentCom commander. It’s a good book to read as a foundation for the other recommended works.
PFL
Bookmark.
My entire Army career, all the Colonels and senior officers always had a "reading list."
It's a waste of time for 99% of military officers, who will spend the balance of their careers doing Powerpoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, sending emails and sitting around in meetings.
I appreciate the intent, though.
Some of them are books I have read and they run the gamut, which is not a bad thing. I have to admit others of them are books I have half read until I threw them across the room in disgust that so-called "experts" could be so blind and bigoted.
The Thomas Friedman and Amin Maalouf books should not be tossed aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force into a burn barrel.
Ok, you need to read the Amin Maalouf to understand what fairy tales the mohammedans tell themselves.
To hear them tell it they were peacefully minding their own business in their own land when those evil crusaders decided to invade them.
Read with a bucket handy and consider eating only bananas before reading.
Friedman? Just don't bother.
Around 30 books are in my home collection.
Only limited books are from native to that region.
Get out the popcorn. This is going to be fun watching Liberal heads explode.
Why on earth would he recommend Montgomery and not Patton? Montgomery was far too overrated. The disaster of Dieppe, The Fiasco of Market Garden, his blunders in Sicily, his failure to make his goal at Caen after D Day, and he didn’t beat Rommel at El Alamein, the boys at Bletchley Park and the Brit Navy were overwhelmingly the cause of Rommel’s loss.
I’d add Carlo D’Este’s book on Patton, A Genius of War, to the list.
I never had a commander who did not have a reading list.
Wow, and my wife yells at me for going to barnes and noble!