{"id":12643,"date":"2016-03-03T18:15:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T00:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=12643"},"modified":"2016-03-03T18:15:56","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T00:15:56","slug":"literary-corner-great-interview-with-tom-ricks-on-writing-reading-and-military-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/03\/literary-corner-great-interview-with-tom-ricks-on-writing-reading-and-military-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary Corner: Great Interview with Tom Ricks on Writing, Reading and Military Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Ricks is without a doubt one of my favorite Military writers and historians. If you don’t already I seriously recommend subscribing to his Best Defense Blog on Foreign Policy.com. I also recommend his book Fiasco for a “blinders-off”, no bull look at the War in Iraq. -SF<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ricks\"<\/p>\n

So you\u2019ve been covering the US military for over twenty years.\u00a0 I\u2019m curious about your readers.\u00a0 You\u2019ve been blogging over at\u00a0Foreign Policy\u00a0for some time. Yet you don\u2019t talk about your readers much.\u00a0 I\u2019m curious about how many people stop by \u201cBest Defense\u201d?\u00a0 What types of readers are reading \u2018Best Defense\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know on the numbers, partly because Foreign Policy\u2019s editors keep the numbers close hold. When I ask them about the numbers I get gobbledygook about unique hits, and you know, \u201cpush only visitors\u201d and \u201cunique visitors,\u201d and all that stuff.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t tell me anything.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I believe I was told I was getting 30,000 to 40,000 readers a month. But that could be wildly wrong. I never really pushed the issue with my editors. Maybe they are afraid that if they tell me how many visitors I have, that I\u2019ll ask for a raise.<\/p>\n

Now, the types of readers I have, I\u2019m better on. Start with a big military audience.\u00a0 I\u2019d have to say concentrated on middle NCO\u2019s and junior and middle officers with a smattering of younger enlisted and a smattering of O6 and above. That\u2019s in the military.<\/p>\n

The second big group is academics. And military history is a pretty lonely field, so academics seem to like a place that welcomes military historians.<\/p>\n

The third group is defense journalists, think tank people, guys at corporations in northern Virginia, things like that. It kind of amuses my wife\u2014she says that within three miles of the Pentagon, I\u2019m a minor celebrity. Beyond that I\u2019m totally anonymous and very happy with that.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve probably been to more than a few archives.\u00a0 What is the most interesting thing you\u2019ve read or discovered?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are a lot of exciting things in the archives. It just amazes me that you can sit there and if you ask for the right files and explain what you are looking for, and the people in the archives that work there tend to be very helpful, you can sit and hold maps that guys held on the beaches on D-Day. The original maps that have their markings on them, the markings they are making in pencil as they figure out where a German machine gun nest is, or where the lines of communications are.<\/p>\n

But I gotta say, the single most moving thing I ever found were some letters by a general, Terry de la Mesa Allen, who was commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Sicily in August, 1943; a very good division commander, a very tough fighter. Terry Allen was relived of division command by Omar Bradley. It was very public and he didn\u2019t know why. He had just won the key battle of the campaign in central Sicily and then he got fired, along with his assistant division commander, who was Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., the son of the President. He writes back to his wife a series of letters in pencil on blue lined school notebook paper.\u00a0 And one day he writes to his wife, \u201cPatton dropped by, Patton thinks I\u2019m being promoted to something.\u201d Which is totally BS.\u00a0 And I think Patton knew it.\u00a0 Eventually Allen gets sent back to America without a job. George Marshall, the Army chief, admired Allen even though Allen was a very heavy drinker. When Marshall found out that Allen had been fired by Bradley, I found in the archives a note Marshall wrote to an aide that said: \u201cGive Allen another division that is going overseas. Give him the 82nd if that is next to go over.\u201d\u00a0 And when Marshall was told the 82nd was not the next, Marshall said: \u201cGive him the next division that comes up.\u201d So a year later Marshall has Terry Allen back in Europe commanding the 104th Infantry Division.<\/p>\n

To hold that series of letters where Allen is trying to figure out what is going on, in the midst of just having played a central role in the first American campaign against the Germans on European soil, is just amazing to me. That really was a heart stopping thing for me when doing research.<\/p>\n

Still, I have to mention that one of the hazards I didn\u2019t know about when doing research, is that I\u2019ll be sitting there in the Army archives, reading these things in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and frequently I\u2019ll go back to my hotel room and at night I\u2019d begin hacking, and I\u2019d realize that I\u2019d ingested a lot of dust looking at files that people that hadn\u2019t looked at for years and years. If I go again I think I will wear a mask next time.<\/p>\n

What books would you recommend to the next US President?\u00a0 The next Secretary of Defense?\u00a0 The next Joint Chiefs of Staff?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would recommend to all of them Cohen\u2019s\u00a0Supreme Command. For my money it is the best book about how the civilian leadership should run his military, and how military leaders should deal with their civilian overseers.\u00a0 It\u2019s also about strategy. Strategy is not easy. If you are not crying than you are not making strategy. If you are not asking hard questions you are not making strategy. If you are not prioritizing between the important and the essential, you are not making strategy. Eliot Cohen\u2019s book brings those points home and does it very well by examining a series of leaders and their decisions.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at Real Clear Defense<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Ricks is without a doubt one of my favorite Military writers and historians. If you don’t already I seriously recommend subscribing to his Best Defense Blog on Foreign Policy.com. I also recommend his book Fiasco for a “blinders-off”, no bull look at the War in Iraq. -SF So you\u2019ve been covering the US military…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[475,4634,1286,1898,1899],"tags":[2372,5120,5121,4541,2425,2375],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}