Military Review English Edition May-June 2014 | Page 92

BOOK REVIEWS

of U.S. troops from Vietnam. From that point on, it
was just a matter of time until Hanoi achieved ultimate
victory.
This groundbreaking book provides a unique and
compelling perspective on the war. It clears up many
misconceptions about how Vietnam fought the war.
Extremely well written and meticulously researched,
the book would be helpful for anyone trying to understand the complexities of this contentious conflict that
continues to influence the United States and its armed
forces.
Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, Ph.D., U.S. Army,
Retired, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

A MILITARY HISTORY
OF THE COLD WAR: 1944-1962

Jonathan M. House, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 2012, 546 pages, $40.50

A

LTHOUGH DR. JONATHAN House’s A
Military History of the Cold War: 1944-1962
focuses on the operational level of war, there may
be no clearer, more comprehensive evidence for
Clausewitz’s contention that “war is but the continuation of politics by other means” than this
book provides. In conflict after conflict, the reader
sees that if one side did not achieve its desired end
state, the reason was that it failed to address the
political components of the conflict sufficiently.
House shows that no military action has value
in and of itself. What matters instead are political
questions such as these: Does a military action
create more enemies than it eliminates from the
battlefield? Does it gain support from allies? Does
it drive a wedge between the enemy and its base of
popular support? Does it help address legitimate
political grievances? Does it increase the likelihood of broader war, or worse, nuclear holocaust?
These things really matter in war, especially in the
nuclear and information age.
House shows that the Cold War provides especially fertile ground for the study of counterinsurgency. This stands to reason, since the United
States and the Soviet Union—the two great nuclear
superpowers of the conflict—avoided direct
confrontation, relying largely instead on proxies
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to fight each other. House discusses 13 insurgencies in detail. After reading these case studies,
the counterinsurgent comes away with a better
understanding of which military actions could be
successfully employed again and which, due to
local peculiarities or changes in global conditions,
only could have worked when and where they did.
Additionally, the bo