[Animats]

The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.

There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.

A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.

The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842

[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/

[dylan604]

I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...

[Animats]

The US Army War College publishes a quarterly, "Parameters", with articles about current military issues. "A New Security Framework for NATO’s Eastern Flank" (253 downloads), which is about what to do about Russia pushing against Europe, and "Key themes in Sino-American History" (165 downloads), which is about why China is pushing against Taiwan. Those are kind of important subjects.

"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.

This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.

Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.

Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/