As part of Steen library's collection development efforts, librarians will often use tools such as bibliographies and professional reading lists when purchasing materials to support learning, instruction, and research at SFA. For Military Science, the library has made a specific effort to acquire all of the books on "The U.S. Army Chief of Staff's Professional Reading List." (2004, this list has been superseded by the U.S. Army Center for Military History Professional Reading List) In addition many other titles from other military reading lists are part of the library collection. In an effort to make locating the hundreds of titles available at Steen Library from several of these lists, I recently created a spreadsheet this information and posted it on the web. The page "Combined Military Professional Reading List" provides easy access to titles owned by the library from many different lists. Links to some of the official lists are on the "List of Lists" page of the spreadsheet. The library owns almost all the titles from "The U.S. Army Chief of Staff's Professional Reading List", as well as many or most of the titles found on other reading lists. Through inter-library loan any additional titles not currently owned by Steen Library are readily available to the SFA community.
If you would like to recommend a favorite title or list of titles for Steen Library, contact your reference librarian.
 | R. Philip Reynolds preynolds (AT) sfasu.edu rm. 202b 936.468.1453 Subjects - Computer Science, Military Science, Philosophy, Religion, Political Science, Geography, Kinesiology |
5 comments:
Readers may also find this military reading list site useful. I've put up this site to allow folks to track their progress through the various reading lists. For example, here's my progress so far.
Thanks for the pointer to the CARL "list of lists"; I'll be adding more of those to my site soon!
I Like your application it is very interesting. You might want to check out the USJFCOM Pre-Deployment Afghanistan Reading List. Much of the material is not publicly accesable but it gives estimated reading times based on words per minute.
Thanks much! Interesting to see how many lists Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace" shows up on... and there it is again in the "Small Unit Leaders" section. Good stuff!
Yes there are a lot of interesting things about the choices on various lists. Once I collect more data I plan to do some basic analysis of the titles and authors. I will probably do a blog post with what I find. Later I hope to do a more serious bibliometric analysis of the titles on the lists and possibly thesis and dissertations on STInet or in other government documents. A more thorough textual analysis would be interesting. Clausewitz talks about the importance of intuition in a commander combined with the ability to communicate a good argument to support what he knows needs to be done intuitively. In "Blink" Gladwell essentially wrote his entire book on that very concept almost 200 years later. It is also interesting that the Joint Chief of Staffs reading list for 2001 includes "On War" and at leas two titles discussing Gallipoli. Clausewitz clearly states that one quick decisive blow will not decide a war and the battle of Gallipoli resulted from the theory that the Ottoman empire would surrender when the British Navy bombarded Turkey. When I read some of these I kept hearing the words "Shock and Awe" in my head. I don't want to be a Monday morning quarterback but on the surface it seems a bit creepy.
That sounds like a good post, I'll keep an eye out for it!
And yeah, along the same lines, it seems like a lot of the "small wars" lessons have to be relearned by each generation. Such is life...
Post a Comment