THE PORTABLE PAT LANG

U.S. Army veteran and commentator Lang offers a collection of assorted writings on military affairs.

The author’s distinguished military career comprises decades of service as a colonel in the Army, as a military attaché in the Middle East, and as a co-founder of West Point’s Arab language and Arabic studies program.His career in the private sector is equally impressive, including international business consulting, regular appearances on TV and in print media, and the publication of several books, including, most recently, The Human Factor: The Phenomenon of Espionage (2022). This latest book effectively blends his expertise in foreign affairs with his passion for military fiction, offering readers an eclectic mélange of memoir, commentary, and short fiction. The book begins with several chapters related to Lang’s experiences with “human intelligence”: intelligence gathering that prioritizes interpersonal relationships and contacts. Communications monitoring and satellite imagery attract more attention in pop-culture representations of espionage, but Lang’s case studies from the war in Vietnam and 21st-century wars in the Middle East make a convincing case for the primacy of human contacts. Particularly compelling is his argument that America’s “cultural blindness” has had disastrous consequences in our foreign policy, as in the case of the George W. Bush administration’s “dream version of Iraq,” which asserted that “inside every Iraqi there was an American trying to get out.” This, he notes, led to false confidence that infected the administration’s prewar planning, which was built around the idea that Americans would be greeted as liberators by a citizenry ready to shed their “old ways.”

The book’s second part, divided into five sections, is its strongest; it similarly draws on Lang’s expertise of the Middle East, providing readers with an erudite, yet accessible, discussion of the nuances of key concepts from Twelver Shiism and Wahhabism to Jihad and Ibadhism. The author’s inclusion of several short stories, however, is less effective. Many are historical military fiction, set in time periods that range from the Crusades to 19th-century France. One story offers an alternate history of the U.S. Civil War in which the Confederacy survived and debated changes to their constitution. The book’s absurd concluding story, “Carolina in the Mornin,’ ” centers on a future 2027 war between the United States and an alien race known as “Furries” that look “like furry Great Danes with big teeth and claws.” Bizarrely, they are led by a figure who wishes to be called “Eleanor Roosevelt.” The story includes an appearance by “Doctor Spock,” who references Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. The oddness of these stories stands in stark contrast to the more serious commentary that Lang provides on intelligence operations, Middle Eastern strategy, and America’s relationship with Russia. This eclectic anthology of published and unpublished writing lacks cohesiveness, with chapters arranged in ways that lack thematic or chronological sense; the short stories, especially, would work better as a separate volume. That said, the author is skilled at distilling complex concepts into straightforward, absorbing narratives, and the inclusion of images of historical figures and occasional maps enhances the work.

An often engrossing, if disjointed, anthology by a military expert.