OT: Military reform for the holidays

If you have time to catch-up with the doings of our broken (modern) military, here are two articles and two free books to help pass an hour or two.

A new CBSA report, "An Army at the Crossroads," notices that the Pentagon, forced by war to commit to light forces, forced by threat analysis to commit to heavy forces, has decided to split the difference.

Meanwhile, David Betz, of the Kings of War blog, notes that the U.S. Army has designed a force structure without any significant light infantry. Forces you would need in Aghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kossovo, etc...

Col. John Boyd's still-living students have assembled between book covers to offer fresh advice to the new president in an anthology called America's Defense Meltdown. The title suggests an emphasis on the Pentagon's famous procurement spiral of death (where more money buys less and less), however there is plenty of doctrinal stuff here to amuse those not interested in "The Acquistion Train Wreck."

For a really fun historical analytic, foreign area specialist Maj. Patrick Kelley offers Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire. Kelley provides an amusing tour through imperial informatics with special note taken of types of information that empires cannot collect or process and how it affects their functioning. Thought provoking and cross-disciplinary, this is reader-friendly enough for even the laziest non-fiction browser.

Let me note also that Savas Beatie is having a success with Once A Marine and that this memoir enables the reader to experience military casualty care vicariously. Not the happiest of holiday topics but an indispensible artifact of our general military deshabille.