Review: Lethal Incompetence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Civil Affairs, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle
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Jeff Bordin

5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic, Credible, Legitimate, and Damning of All Who Betray the Public Trust, August 24, 2013

I have this book in front of me, and will be doing a detailed review over the next week or so. I have already gone through it quickly, and concluded that it offers the single best compilation or literature review of all of the psychological and social reasons why military “leaders” end up being treasonous gerbils, combined with the deepest direct field research I know of to buttress the author's speculative hypotheses and proven conclusions.

I swung by here to check what others have said, and am quite disappointed by the shallow ignorance of the only review present. Here are a couple of quotes that capture my philosophy and hence my valuation of this book:

When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it. Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York)

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell

This book is a tad hyper-critical (of Dick Cheney for example — certainly a traitor but by no means stupid) and too close in format to the original thesis, or it would be a six star book. If I were Czar, every person responsible for the public interest would receive the wisdom and ethical instruction in this book, in one form or another, to include comic book form if necessary.

My detailed review will be posted within the week. I could not let the first review stand uncontested.

I met the author while traveling to Afghanistan, where we are both serving (he for the eighth time, me for the first), and we found that we both started from the same book: Norman Dixon's On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.

My final review will provide nine other book links here at Amazon that fully complement the author — he is the tip of the spear, the bleeding edge of the truth, and to dismiss his hard-earned views and the wisdom that he can offer to leaders across all militaries (and all civilian agencies) is to be ignorant, arrogant, and destined for failure as so many have demonstrated these past ten years. We crucify privates for losing rifles — we do nothing to over-promoted morons that lose wars, or worse, agree to go to war on the basis of 935 known lies.

INTEGRITY MATTERS. This book is Ref A on how to LACK integrity. Sadly, it is also an auto-biographical account of all of our generals. I am not impressed when generals ignore me, as they did in the Marine Corps, and then parrot me when they retire. INTEGRITY MATTERS.

See Also:

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005
The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

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