Portland Public Library

How everything became war and the military became everything, tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-418) and index

index present

non fiction

How everything became war and the military became everything

bibliography

940795371

Rosa Brooks

tales from the Pentagon

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems. Today's military personnel analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol the seas for pirates. Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective. She is a former top Pentagon official and the daughter of antiwar protesters; a human rights activist and the wife of an Army Special Forces officer. Her book is by turns a memoir, a work of journalism, and a scholarly exploration of history, anthropology, and law. But at its heart it is a rallying cry, for Brooks shows that when the war machine breaks out of its borders, we undermine the values and rules that keep our world from sliding toward chaos. And as we pile new tasks onto the military, we make it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America faces. Brooks sounds an alarm, forcing us to see how the collapsing barriers between war and peace threaten both America and the world. And time is running out to make things right.--From dust jacket

Part I: Tremors -- Part II: The New American Way of War. Pirates! ; Wanna Go to Gitmo? ; Lawyers with Guns ; The Full Spectrum ; The Secret War ; Future Warfare ; What's an Army For? ; What We've Made It -- Part III: How We Got Here. Putting War into a Box ; Taming War ; An Optimistic Enterprise ; Making War ; Making the State ; Un-Making Sovereignty ; Making the Military ; An Age of Uncertainty -- Part IV: Counting the Costs. Car Bombs and Radioactive Sushi ; War Everywhere, Law Nowhere? ; Institutional Costs -- Part V: Managing War's Paradoxes