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New Publications
Mastering the Art of Command
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific
September 2022
448 pp. | 6 x 9 Hardcover |
978-1-68247-595-9
$39.95 | Holiday Price: $19.98 “Trent Hone perceptively analyzes how America’s finest admiral not only carefully honed his own approach to leadership, but fostered it by example among everyone he led. Only an officer with Nimitz’s managerial brilliance would have been capable of creating the agile command organization that efficiently waged the U.S. Navy’s sprawling Pacific War. Engagingly and incisively written, this is a superb sequel to Hone’s innovative Learning War.”
—Jonathan Parshall, co-author Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
Mastering the Art of Command is a detailed examination of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s leadership during World War II. It describes how he used his talents to guide the Pacific Fleet following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, win crucial victories against the forces of Imperial Japan, and then seize the initiative in the Pacific. Once Nimitz’s forces held the initiative, they maintained it through an offensive campaign of unparalleled speed that overcame Japanese defenses and created the conditions for victory.
As a command and operational history, Mastering the Art of Command explores how Nimitz used his leadership skills, command talents, and strategic acumen to achieve these decisive results. Hone recounts how Nimitz, as both Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC) and Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas (CINCPOA), revised and adapted his organizational structure to capitalize on lessons and newly emerging information. Hone argues that Nimitz—because he served simultaneously as CINCPAC and CINCPOA—was able to couple tactical successes to strategic outcomes and more effectively plan and execute operations that brought victory at Midway, Guadalcanal, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
As a study of leadership, uses modern management theories, and builds upon the approach in his award-winning Learning War. Trent Hone explores the challenge of leadership in complex adaptive systems through Nimitz’s behavior and causes us to reassess the inevitability of Allied victory and the reasons for its ultimate accomplishment. A new narrative history of the Pacific war, this book demonstrates effective patterns for complexity-informed leadership by highlighting how Nimitz maintained coherence within his organization, established the conditions for his subordinates to succeed, and fostered collaborative sensemaking to identify and pursue options more rapidly. Nimitz’s “strategic artistry” is a pattern worthy of study and emulation, for today’s military officers, civilian leaders, and managers in large organizations.
TRENT HONE is an authority on the U.S. Navy of the early twentieth century and a leader in the application of complexity science to organizational design. He studied religion and archaeology at Carleton College in Northfield, MN and works as a consultant helping a variety of organizations improve their processes and techniques. Mr. Hone regularly writes and speaks about leadership, sensemaking, organizational learning, and complexity. His talents are uniquely suited to integrate the history of the Navy with modern management theories, generating new insights relevant to both disciplines.
U.S. Navy Attack Aircraft, 1920–2020
May 2022
480 pp. | 11 x 8½ Hardcover
978-168-247-417-4 $125.00 | Holiday Price: $62.50
—Christoph Bergs, Military Aviation History YouTube channel
U.S. Navy Attack Aircraft, 1920–2020 is uniquely told from the point of view of the Navy, as understood through its previously-classified documents. Spanning a century from the earliest airplanes conceived to operate from U.S. carriers in 1920, to the current F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Both the requirements and the available technology kept changing. In many cases the Navy drove the technology. Norman Friedman is the first to take the requirements and the available technology into account to explain the choices the Navy made. The airplanes the Navy bought were always designers’ attempts to meet specific demands set by the kind of warfare the Navy expected. The reader sees Navy successes and failures in guessing at the future. This is a unique way to understand the panoply of airplanes the Navy has relied on through the years, and why some succeeded but others failed. This history includes not only the airplanes adopted by the Navy, but also alternative proposals presented in design competitions that never made it to the flight deck. In many cases these other planes have been completely forgotten; they have never previously been published.
Friedman not only examines the airplanes but also their weapons and their tactics— which in turn shaped other aircraft and the nature of air operations. In the case of Vietnam, with the declassification of key documents it is now possible to see how and why the Navy’s innovative approach to air operations triumphed over the integrated air defense system built by the North Vietnamese, with important implications for later successes, such as the attack on Libya in 1986. As told through the 1970s (as limited by security), the story is based almost entirely on the Navy’s own internal documents, including those setting carrier and aircraft policy and those describing design competitions. Later developments are described on the basis of public information.
NORMAN FRIEDMAN is a prominent international defense analyst and historian specializing in the intersection between policy, strategy, and technology. He has published more than forty books, including The Fifty-Year War, an award-winning history of the Cold War; a history of naval fighter aircraft; and design histories of many U.S. and British warships.
Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West
September 2022
312 pp. | 6 x 9 Hardcover |
978-1-68247-719-9 $34.95 | Holiday Price: $17.48
“If you think Russia is limited to fake Facebook accounts, Lilly’s Russian Information Warfare will change your perspective. This well-researched book lays out Russia’s approach to a critical part of modern conflict – the information space. Anyone interested in cybersecurity, disinformation, or Russia’s foreign policy would benefit from reading this book.”
—J. Michael Daniel, president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance
Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West examines how Moscow tries to trample the very principles on which democracies are founded and what we can do to stop it. In particular, the book analyzes how the Russian government uses cyber operations, disinformation, protests, assassinations, coup d’états, and perhaps even explosions to destroy democracies from within, and what the United States and other NATO countries can do to defend themselves from Russia’s onslaught.
The Kremlin has been using cyber operations as a tool of foreign policy against the political infrastructure of NATO member states for over a decade. Alongside these cyber operations, the Russian government has launched a diverse and devious set of activities which at first glance may appear chaotic. Russian military scholars and doctrine elegantly categorizes these activities as components of a single strategic playbook — information warfare. This concept breaks down the binary boundaries of war and peace and views war as a continuous sliding scale of conflict, vacillating between the two extremes of peace and war but never quite reaching either. The Russian government has applied information warfare activities across NATO members to achieve various objectives. What are these objectives? What are the factors that most likely influence Russia’s decision to launch certain types of cyber operations against political infrastructure and how are they integrated with the Kremlin’s other information warfare activities? To what extent are these cyber operations and information warfare campaigns effective in achieving Moscow’s purported goals?
Dr. Bilyana Lilly addresses these questions and uses her findings to recommend improvements in the design of U.S. policy to counter Russian adversarial behavior in cyberspace by understanding under what conditions, against what election components, and for what purposes within broader information warfare campaigns Russia uses specific types of cyber operations against political infrastructure.
Denounced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DR. BILYANA LILLY managed projects on ransomware, cyber threat intelligence, AI, disinformation, and information warfare. She was a cyber expert for the RAND Corporation and has spoken at DefCon, CyCon, the Executive Women’s Forum and the Warsaw Security Forum. Dr. Lilly is the author of over a dozen peer-reviewed publications and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and ZDNet.
April 2022
248 pp. | 6 x 9 Hardcover |
978-1-68247-772-4 $40.00 | Holiday Price: $20.00
September 2022
248 pp. | 6 x 9 Hardcover |
978-1-68247-778-6 $34.95 | Holiday Price: $17.48 Analysts and Decision Makers
BY JONATHAN M. HOUSE
“Jonathan House sheds new light and understanding on an important, but little understood subject. Threats to national security are expanding and so are demands on the intelligence community. Intelligence and the State explains the essential elements of effective warning and decision at the nexus of senior intelligence professionals and government policymakers. It is a must-read for intelligence professionals and those who depend on or oversee them.”
—H.R. McMaster, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Battlegrounds and Dereliction of Duty
In the eighty years since Pearl Harbor, the United States has developed a professional intelligence community that is far more effective than most people acknowledge—in part because only intelligence failures see the light of day, while successful collection and analysis remain secret for decades.
Intelligence and the State explores the relationship between the community tasked to research and assess intelligence and the national decision makers it serves. The book argues that in order to accept intelligence as a profession, it must be viewed as a non-partisan resource to assist key players in understanding foreign societies and leaders.
JONATHAN M. HOUSE is a retired Army intelligence officer and military historian. He received his doctorate and his commission at the University of Michigan. House served as an intelligence analyst on the Joint Staff during both the 1991 and 2003 conflicts and is the author or co-author of numerous military histories, most notably When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler and A Military History of the Cold War (2 vols.).
Reagan’s War Stories
A Cold War Presidency
BY BENJAMIN GRIFFIN
“Masterful behind-the-scenes look into what made Reagan tick! Why did he cast the U.S. and Soviet Union in stark contrasts, and what made him the ‘Great Communicator’? Griffin’s book lays out the ‘rest of the story’ in an engaging fashion to answer these important questions.”
—Col. Bryan Groves, PhD, strategist & CIG director, Army Forces Command
Reagan’s War Stories examines the relationship between Ronald Reagan, the public and popular culture. From an overview of Reagan’s youth and the pulp fiction he consumed, we get a sense of the future president’s good/evil outlook. Carrying that over into Reagan’s reading and choices as president, Griffin situates narrative at the center of Reagan’s political formation and leadership providing a compelling account of both Reagan’s life, his presidency, and a lens into non-traditional strategy formulation.
Reagan treated fictional portrayals seriously, believing they shaped public views and offered valid ways to think through geo-political issues. Seeking to shape the reading habits of the public, his administration sought to highlight authors who shared his worldview like Tom Clancy. As both a consumer and a communicator, Griffin notes that Reagan identified with certain stories, and they shaped him as a political leader and later influenced his approach to complex issues.
BEN GRIFFIN is an Army officer who earned his PhD in history from the University of Texas. He is currently teaching in the Department of History at the United States Military Academy and resides at West Point with his family.
