Booklist Reviews
In this provocatively titled peek inside the Pentagon's day-to-day operations, law professor and former military adviser Brooks makes the unnerving case that modern warfare has expanded into areas of society that our founding fathers could have neither imagined or desired. As recent as a generation ago, Brooks observes, soldiers and officers were almost exclusively engaged in either training for a battle or fighting one. In today's post–9/11 world, our armed forces are just as likely to be working on computers, fighting cyberterrorism, or constructing isolation wards in Ebola-afflicted Liberia. Drawing on personal experience and interviews with the rank and file of every armed services branch, Brooks probes controversial topics, such as drone strikes and Guantanamo detainees, while asking the key question, If the lines between military and civilian operations are unrecognizably blurred, are we really any safer? By turns unsettling and brilliantly insightful, Brooks work is a must-read for everyone concerned about national security and troubled by the U.S. military's steadily expanding budget at the expense of social programs. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
PW Annex Reviews
Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and Foreign Policy columnist, reflects on her years of service as a senior advisor to an undersecretary of defense in this personal, if haphazard, account that is "part journalism, part policy, part history, part anthropology, part law, leavened with occasional stories." Brooks digests the meaning of war, the potential nature of future threats, and the realities of soldiering while she reports on sitting in on councils of war that track down terrorists via drones and other surreal features of America's vast national security framework. She includes snippets of historical warfare, from ancient societies up through America's disastrous forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. As Brooks jets around the world to such distant places as Uganda and Afghanistan, she often comes across as naive, and each episode ends up feeling like "a strange sort of tourism," as she describes a visit to the Guantánamo Bay detention center. She refreshingly concludes that Americans must insist on new frameworks to replace the thinking that has put the U.S. on an Orwellian path toward permanent war. Brooks crams too much into her unfocused work, but she does provide a thought-provoking glimpse inside America's vast post-9/11 national security apparatus. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM. (Aug.) Copyright 2016 Publisher Weekly Annex.