Absurd Harvest: On Michael Jerome Plunkett’s Zone Rouge

America’s power to wage war hangs more on the sex life of the greater sage-grouse than you might guess. You wouldn’t want to overstate the case. If you were to rank determinants of wartime readiness, the greater sage-grouse’s amorous entanglements would probably place behind things like defense outlays and the upkeep of stealth bombers. But those entanglements do play a small role, and that’s still more than most imagine. It is certainly more than I did until only a few years ago. Then I took command of a cavalry troop in the U.S. Army and lost my innocence forever.

Wouk Backlash: On The Caine Mutiny and the Literature of War

In 1958, a young and fast-rising political scientist named Samuel Huntington was denied tenure at Harvard because of a book he wrote. Huntington had penned it in the wake of the Korean War, just as Americans were, for the first time in their history, reconciling themselves to the idea of a large peacetime army. For past wars, the country had mustered a large army, then all but disbanded it when the fighting ended. But the emergent Cold War seemed to call for a standing reserve of military might. Nervous Americans, ill-practiced at living in the shadow of a garrison army, wondered what to make of it.