Manual

Background Reading:

First-Person Accounts
Nate Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (Mariner, 2006)

Victor Krulak, First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps (US Naval Institute, 1999).

GEN Douglas MacArthur, “Duty Honor Country,” (Sylvanus Thayer Award Acceptance Address), available at: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurthayeraward.html

Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, We were Soldiers Once...And Young: Ia Drang--The Battle That Changed The War In Vietnam (Random House, 1992).

Craig Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education (Penguin Press, 2009).

Jim Webb, Fields of Fire (Bantam, 2001).

 

Second-Person Accounts
Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 (Holt, 1999).

Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Atlantic, 1999).

James Jones, The Thin Red Line.

Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle (Harper Torch, 2001).

Tim O'Brien, The Things they Carried (Broadway, 1998).

Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (Bantam, 2000).

Thomas Ricks. Making the Corps (Touchstone Books, 1998). 

 

Strategy
Carl von Clausewitz, On War.

Barry Posen. "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony." International Security 28 1 (Summer 2003): 5-46.

Sun Zu, The Art of War.

 

Analysis
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Harvard University Press, 1957).

Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (W. W. Norton, 2003).

Marybeth Ulrich, “A Primer on Civil-Military Relations for Senior Leaders,” in U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Issues, Volume II: National

Security Policy and Strategy, ed. J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr. (June 2008), available at http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/.

Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Indiana University Press, 1977).

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, “A Failure in Generalship,” Armed Forces Journal (May 2007), available at: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198. 

 

Further Reading
The Armed Forces Officer, available at http://www.usna.edu/Ethics/Publications/Armed%20Forces%20Officer%20(Final)-29%20April%2005.pdf.

Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf .

 

Movies

• Gardens of Stone
• Glory
  
• Saving Private Ryan
  
• We Were Soldiers Once… and Young: Ia Drang – The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam