The Art of Military Innovation

Lessons From The Israel Defense Forces

Edward N. Luttwak • Eitan Shamir

A world-leading military strategist and an IDF insider explain the improbable success of the Israeli armed forces.

When the Israel Defense Forces was established in May 1948, it was small, poorly equipped, and already at war. Lacking sufficient weaponry or the domestic industrial base to produce it, the newborn military was forced to make do with whatever it could get its hands on. That spirit of improvisation carried the IDF to a decisive victory in theFirst Arab-IsraeliWar.

Today the same spirit has made the IDF the most powerful military in the Middle East and among the most capable in the world. In The Art of Military Innovation, Edward N. Luttwak and Eitan Shamir trace the roots of this astounding success. What sets the IDF apart, they argue, is its singular organizational structure. From its incep-tion, it has been the world’s only one-service military, encompassing air, naval, and land forces in a single institutional body. This unique structure, coupled with a young officer corps, allows for initiative from below. The result is a nimble organization inclined toward change rather than beholden to tradition.

The IDF has fostered some of the most significant advances in mil-itary technology of the past seventy years, from the first wartime use of drones to the famed Iron Dome missile defense system, and now the first laser weapon, Iron Beam. Less-heralded innovations in training, logistics, and human resources have been equally import-ant. Sharing rich insights and compelling stories, Luttwak and Shamir reveal just what makes the IDF so agile and effective.

Edward N. Luttwak is the author of several books, including Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook; Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace; and The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, which have been published in twenty-five languages. His articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement,ForeignAffairs, and Tablet.

Eitan Shamir is Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan University. He formerly served as Head of National Security Doctrine at the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy. He is the author of Transforming Command: The Pursuit of Mission Command in the U.S., British, and Israeli Armies.

Yesterday

A New History Of Nostalgia

Tobias Becker

A sweeping reassessment of our longing for the past, from the rise of “retro” to the rhetoric of Brexit and Trump.

Nostalgia has a bad reputation. Its critics dismiss it as mere sentimentality or, worse, a dangerous yearning for an imagined age of purity. And nostalgia is routinely blamed for trivializing the past and obscuring its ugly sides. In Yesterday, Tobias Becker offers a more nuanced and sympathetic view. Surveying the successive waves of nostalgia that swept the United States and Europe after the Second World War, he shows that longing for the past is more complex and sometimes more beneficial than it seems.

The current meaning of “nostalgia” is surprisingly recent: until the 1960s, it usually just meant homesickness, in keeping with the original Greek word. Linking popular culture to postwar politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, Becker explains the shift in meaning. He also responds to arguments against nostalgia, showing its critics as often shortsighted in their own ways as they defend an idea of progress no less naïve than the wistfulness they denounce. All too often, nostalgia itself is criticized, as if its merit did not depend on which specific past one longs for.

Taking its title from one of the most popular songs of all time, and grounded in extensive research, Yesterday offers a rigorous and entertaining perspective on divisive issues in culture and politics. Whether we are revisiting, reviving, reliving, reenacting, or regressing, and whether these activities find expression in politics, music, fashion, or family history, nostalgia is inevitable. It is also powerful, not only serving to define the past but also orienting us toward the future we will create.

Tobias Becker is an independent scholar based in Berlin who has published widely on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture and theater, as well as urban history. He was previously a lecturer and researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and the German Historical Institute London.

Periphery

how your nervous system predicts and protects against disease

Moses V. Chang

A leading neuroscientist argues that the peripheral nervous system, long understood to play a key role in regulating basic bodily functions, also signals the onset of illness.

Millions of years ago, one of the first organisms—a deep-ocean worm—functioned without a brain. It detected the light around itself through a mesh of cells that enabled sensation, performing all manner of bodily functions through its peripheral nervous system. In humans, these sensory nerves and fibers regulate digestion, heart rate, perspiration, and other involuntary systems. And beyond these critical roles in our bodies, Moses Chao argues, the peripheral nervous system can also warn us about neurodegenerative disorders that may be in our futures.

Periphery describes how the peripheral nervous system evolved to detect sensations—smells, sounds, and touch. The organs of the PNS prove to be an integral part of how we make sense of the world, packaging and transmitting information throughout the body to inform our cognition, attention, perception, and memory. But Chao contends that the peripheral nerves may do more than regulate and detect—they may also allow us to predict the onset of disease. Thorough investigation of historical findings, clinical cases, and contemporary research suggests that peripheral activities create markers of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, autism, and dementia. These are bold claims, some of them speculative, but Chao marshals compelling evidence. With optimal clinical management and even potential treatment increasingly dependent on the earliest possible detection, his insights may prove invaluable to patients and clinicians.

Full of new ideas and provocative interpretations of the latest data, Periphery opens exciting avenues for medical research while deepening our understanding of a crucial and little appreciated biological system, foundational to all animal life.

Moses V. Chao is Professor of Cell Biology, Physiology and Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. A fellow of the AAAS and past president of the Society for Neuroscience, he is a recipient of the Zenith Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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