Armed Humanitarians
The Rise of the Nation Builders
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Narrated by:
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Tom Parks
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By:
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Nathan Hodge
About this listen
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with theshortcomings of "shock and awe", the U.S. military shifted its focus to"stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.
Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action.
Ultimately seeing this new era in foreign relations as a noble but flawed experiment, he shows how armed humanitarianism strains our resources, deepens our reliance on outsourcing and private contractors, and leads to perceptions of a new imperialism, arguably a major factor in any number of new conflicts around the world. As we attempt to build nations, we may in fact be weakening our own.
Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.
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Surge is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.
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Helpful for the Army War College
- By BBP on 02-24-18
By: Peter R. Mansoor, and others
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My Share of the Task
- A Memoir
- By: General Stanley McChrystal
- Narrated by: Kevin Collins
- Length: 19 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating memoir, McChrystal frankly explores the major episodes and controversies of his eventful career. He delves candidly into the intersection of history, leadership, and his own experience to produce a book of enduring value. Joining the troubled post-Vietnam army as a young officer, McChrystal witnessed and participated in some of our military’s most difficult struggles. He describes the many outstanding leaders he served with and the handful of bad leaders he learned not to emulate.
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Incomplete ending
- By Jfadams on 04-23-13
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The Gamble
- General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
- By: Thomas E. Ricks
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks's #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq - The Gamble is the next news-breaking installment. Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself.
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A Sure Bet
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Thomas E. Ricks
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Ghost Wars
- The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
- By: Steve Coll
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 26 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan. With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.
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An Exceptional Accomplishment
- By Joe on 11-08-13
By: Steve Coll
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Kill Chain
- The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins
- By: Andrew Cockburn
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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This essential, pause-resister narrative on the history of drone warfare by the acclaimed author of Rumsfeld explores how this practice emerged, who made it happen, and the real consequences of targeted killing.
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Introduction
- By Batman on 03-24-15
By: Andrew Cockburn
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A Great Place to Have a War
- America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA
- By: Joshua Kurlantzick
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1960 President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to Communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight Communist forces in Laos. While remaining hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States.
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illuminating read of Laos' relationship with USA
- By Daniel on 12-28-18
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The American War in Afghanistan
- A History 1st Edition
- By: Carter Malkasian
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 27 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon - but only after a stay of nearly two decades.
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A superb summary of the Afghan war
- By Charles Olmsted on 06-18-22
By: Carter Malkasian
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Civilian Warriors
- The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror
- By: Erik Prince
- Narrated by: Jeff Gurner
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Blackwater is one of the most misunderstood companies of our time. As Erik Prince, its founder and former CEO, writes: "Hundreds of American citizens employed by private military contractors, or PMCs, would lose their lives helping our government wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have their memory tarnished by the unfair and/or ignorant depiction of PMCs as profiteers, jackbooted thugs, or worse."
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A different look a Security Contractors
- By Ryan on 01-20-14
By: Erik Prince
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Good Hunting
- An American Spymaster's Story
- By: Jack Devine
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story is the spellbinding memoir of Devine's time in the CIA, where he served for more than 30 years, rising to become the acting deputy director of operations, responsible for all of the agency's spying operations. This is a story of intrigue and high-stakes maneuvering - all the more gripping when the fate of our geopolitical order hangs in the balance. But this audiobook also sounds a warning to our nation's decision makers.
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Fascinating, An education on spying
- By Anthony on 12-13-15
By: Jack Devine
What listeners say about Armed Humanitarians
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- megan S
- 06-15-15
intrigueing look at civil military relations
A new look ,with healthy criticism, at Civil Military Realtionships between the United States, her allies, and fragile countries.
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- Theo Horesh
- 01-29-22
Critical Reporting on American Nation Building
Armed Humanitarians is a well packaged and meaningful work of journalism on American nation building efforts going back at least as far as the Vietnam War. In particular, it focuses on the dramatic changes the military has seen since it took on major post-9-11 nation building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it covers a whole lot more than just these ventures.
The book argues that the military has become dramatically more humane because that is what’s needed to win against insurgencies. In short, the military needs to get out of their bases, meet the locals, learn the culture, talk with tribal and village leaders, and ultimately win hearts and minds. In the absence of a civilian bureaucracy capable of carrying out large missions, they also need to focus on nation building. That means training police forces and engaging in development aid. But while countless books have been written on nation building, this one gets at a deeper change in military culture.
Nathan Hodge covered the material for this book as a reporter for Jane’s Defense, the respected military news site. So, the reporting has the feel of a critical insider’s view. The changes that occurred in the American approach to war making were spurred by criticisms of the Vietnam War, reaching back to its earliest stages, the work of David Petraus and David Kilcullin in theorizing counter-insurgency, and the efforts of the Obama administration to minimize civilian harm. In short, they spring from a range of sources and the author leaves no stone unturned in uncovering their origins—from within the United States.
However, Hodge failed to mention a wide range of global forces that have been at work in making war more humane for well over a century. These are covered by the human rights critic Samuel Moyn in his more recent work, Humane, which argues that war has become more humane and that in the process it has become more acceptable. These forces pertain more to an increasingly globalized society, the historical emergence of human rights campaigning, an abundance of human rights treaties, the greater prominence of international institutions, and the greater scrutiny that military ventures now receive from the press.
Hodge’s concerns are more with the use of American military forces and whether or not their recent emphasis on nation building serves their purposes. To that end, he asks some important questions like whether nation building is even appropriate in far flung places where we don’t know the culture and whether it can be sustained in the midst of other bigger geopolitical concerns like the increasing belligerence of China and Russia. The point is all the more salient as Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border as I write this review. But while the critical analysis that is found at the end of the book is in many ways the best part of it, his criticisms are not altogether convincing. Failed states tend to generate the very problems the American military is being called on to put and end to. Their failure leads to genocide, famine, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, civil war, and wider regional wars. There is simply no way around the indispensable nation, along with the wider international community, engaging in nation building in the twenty-first century. Fortunately, he leaves open this possibility, suggesting some ways to do it better, though.
But with this book, the emphasis is first and foremost on top notch intelligent reporting. So, wherever you may fall on the question of whether or not to engage in nation building, Armed Humanitarians can deepen your arguments and understanding. And for those who have been tracking the forever wars forever, it is a refreshingly different slant on the topic.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny
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