The Adventures of Chester: Professional Reading

[Have searched high and low for notes on this topic, but four moves in five years forces it to be posted from memory. After reading the below, if you buy any books, consider using Chester's amazon portal in the sidebar. Chester will receive a very small fee.]

At the Basic School, Brigadier General (then Colonel) Allen detailed methods to use for professional reading success. While the context was professional military reading, the same methods apply for any body of knowledge. They are actually quite simple.

1. You cannot control the age of your body -- you may be 20 or 60, but there is no excuse for a military officer not to have a 5000-year-old mind. General Allen was quoting the military historian Jay Luvaas.

2. Have a general and broad knowledge of military history from ancient times to the present, but:

3. Choose one single campaign and make that your focus. Choose a campaign about which there are sufficient resources for in-depth, maybe even lifelong study. Make yourself an expert on that campaign. For this reason, it is often best to choose one in which one or both sides spoke and wrote in English. When one side is in another language, sufficient translated resources can be hard to come by. Choose a campaign such that the battlefields are easy to visit. Your learning will be enhanced if you can walk the terrain. General Allen recommended the Civil War for these reasons. He chose Lee's invasion of Maryland because he knew that as a Marine officer, he would return to Quantico several times in his career and be able to visit the battlefields a good bit. General Allen emphasized that by studying a single campaign in-depth, no question of maneuver, tactics, logistics or communications would be left a mystery. By becoming a specialist in the campaign, all of these fields and their interaction would become clear.

4. General Allen recommended reading for two purposes: to understand combat decisionmaking, and to human factors in combat.

On decisionmaking: What did key leaders think they knew at given points? What choices did they make given that knowledge and why?

On human factors: How did the troops deal with being tired, hungry, cold, sick, injured, mentally exhausted, dehydrated, etc? Understanding how human beings react in extremely stressful situations is part and parcel of leading them.

5. When taking notes, use Patton's method: on passages that are of interest, draw one line in the margin, perpendicular to the text. For those that offer great insight, draw two. For those that are the key to understanding the overall message and tone of the book, and which are the key points to be distilled, draw three lines and underline. This way, when you return to a book, you will see what you thought was important at the time and see how your thinking may have changed, and also be reminded quickly of the most important points in the book.

6. Return to books. Find key texts and re-read them every year. Soon they will have shaped your thinking more than you can imagine.

7. Don't force a book. If it is not interesting you, don't force yourself to read it. It will in time. Choose something else. [Another instructor, at another school described a method of leaving five books on his night-stand: three on military topics, two on completely different topics. Every night he switched books. In this way he accustomed his brain to keeping track of various self-contained situations -- much as a commander must in combat.]

8. When choosing a book, examine it closely. Ask yourself: why did the author write this book? There are many reasons for authors to write: prestige, tenure, and to make money are among them. Those books can be good as well, but be forewarned.

9. A life spent reading certain texts again and again will have profound effects on your thinking, writing, and even the way you speak. Choose carefully.

10. General Allen's recommended authors: Tuchman, Fuller, Luvaas, S.L.A. Marshall, B.H. Liddell Hart [and some others. This list is incomplete.]

***
How did this work for Chester?
A personal anecdote:

Early on, I decided to choose a campaign. Vicksburg was an easy choice, as one of its battles was fought in my hometown. I read Shelby Foote's "The Beleagured City" to start and found it a great overview and fascinating. Next I planned to read "Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer's View of the Vicksburg Campaign," by Walter Grabau, a retired geologist. Grabau's maps alone are worth the cost of the book. He created all 68 of them himself and they are perfect: show terrain and even contour lines, but are not too busy; excellent descriptions of maneuver and the units involved. And get this: he used his knowledge of geology to model what the terrain was like during the campaign, not as it is now. Fascinating.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it far in Grabau's book. September 11th happened, and as the writing on the wall became clear, my focus shifted to reading everything I could get my hands on about the Gulf War. Every book in the Camp Pendleton library got a good skimming. As such, the Gulf War soon became by de facto campaign of focus. My Marines no doubt still hate me for forcing passages of Desert Storm books on them. The most frustrating thing about this effort was that it was very difficult to find any writing about engineering or logisitcs. I soon found myself searching through the command chronologies of my own battalion -- and these were a good source.

I could soon see the division-level maneuvers happening in my head. When I got to Kuwait, I felt as though I had been there before.

As I learned about the war plan, a very interesting thing happened: I discovered that the Vicksburg campaign was valuable after all. Grant had to operate in a theater at a great distance from his own country. He had to worry about very long supply lines. He had to cross a very large river and not get pinned down in the process (he tried seven times and only succeeded on the seventh). He then had to sustain his forces on the other side of the river, which he did by abandoning his supply lines and ordering his men to forage -- reasoning that if they kept moving, they would not run out of food. Next he bypassed immediate strongpoints in his march toward the center of gravity of the theater. Finally, he laid seige to a heavily fortified city and starved it out. The similarities to the invasion of Iraq are not quite perfect, but near enough. The study of Vicksburg had been very valuable indeed.

As far as note-taking, I still use the system described above, though I am not quite disciplined enough to only underline the MOST important passages.

One critique of military histories in general is that they are fine if you are in a combat arms force, or a maneuver unit. But it is very difficult to find good historical data about logistics, or engineering -- at least at the level of detail I wanted. Also, it is very general to find information about tactical logistics at all -- even current military publications and doctrine. Every Marine lieutenant learns the basics of fighting with a rifle company -- and this is as it should be. But there is very little out there about the techniques of resupplying several rifle companies in different combat environments. Combat service support personnel often downgrade themselves because they have no great war stories. But these techniques of supply, engineering, logistics, and communication are crucial to success and those who have expertise in them should consider recording tips, tricks, and hints -- you may even find yourself with a book at the end of it.

Finally, having five or more books going at once works well for raising transitional thinking skills, though the tradeoff is that you don't get the pleasure of complete immersion in one. So you must decide that for yourself.

Hope this post was helpful. Several readers asked for it.

Posted by Chester on January 17, 2005 11:04 PM to The Adventures of Chester