Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 143

BOOK REVIEWS and, instead, used collective punishment, forced resettlement, prisoner abuse, and arbitrary execution to cow the target population into submission. Gen. George Erskine is typically cast as the hero of the Kenyan campaign. He arrived to lead East Africa Command in June of 1953 and is usually credited with giving the counterinsurgency effort a badly needed strategic vision while, at the same time, eliminating the worst excesses among the security forces. Bennett asserts that Erskine did indeed initially seek to moderate the violence but quickly realized that investigating and prosecuting those officers and men who operated outside the law would lose him support of his own chain of command and might even risk mutiny among his soldiers. Erskine, Bennett claims, thus compromised by turning a “blind eye” to the brutal methods his men used to suppress the Mau Mau while investigating only the most egregious abuses. In doing so, the general apparently acted to shield his troops from the intrusion of civil oversight. The resulting campaign saw atrocities on both sides. While Bennett believes that most British soldiers acted honorably in fighting the Mau Mau, he finds that the British Army’s experience in Kenya is hardly a ringing endorsement of the kind of progressive techniques espoused in the U.S. Army’s FM 3-24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies. In fact, Bennett concludes there is no such thing as “soft COIN.” His disturbing conclusion: “Because intelligence about who insurgents are and [because] shifting political loyalties cannot be surmounted, it may be that counter-insurgencies will always be brutal.” Fighting the Mau Mau is recommended although it is hardly a smooth read. The author chooses a thematic chapter structure rather than a chronological account, and that, along with his close adherence to the documentary record, sometimes makes for a choppy narrative. Nevertheless, his book is significant both for what it tells us about the British “small wars” experience and how it might shape the U.S. Army’s ongoing debate on counterinsurgency. Scott Stephenson, Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth, Kan. MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015 WARRIOR GEEKS: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think about War Christopher Coker, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, 384 pages I n this book, Professor Coker, head of the Department for International Relations at the London School of Economics, explores the human dimension of war and warfare and the changes that may occur in the future if technological advances separate man from the West’s morals and ethics. He examines war’s changes from possible technological and medical advances that alter the human warrior, or by using surrogate warriors such as autonomous systems (SKYNET), or some combination of both in the post-human environment. Describing his own intent, the author says— What I have tried to do in this book is to examine the likely impact of early 21st century technologies—digital, cybernetic, and bio-medical—upon our understanding of how war and our humanity will continue to co-evolve. Coker begins with a discussion of warfare as understood by the ancient Greek philosophers as the “human thing.” As contrast, he &