http://pentagonresearch.com/categories/2/books/1.html Books Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:20:20 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-17.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-17.htm
Trillions for Military Technology explains why the weapons purchased by the U.S. Department of Defense cost so much, why it takes decades to get them into production even as innovation in the civilian economy becomes ever more frenetic, and why some of those weapons dont work very well despite expenditures of many billions of dollars. It also explains what do about these problems. The author argues that the internal politics of the armed services make weapons acquisition almost unmanageable. Solutions require empowering civilian officials and reforms that will bring choice of weapons "into the sunshine" of public debate.
Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:17:41 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/trillions.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/trillions.htm
This fascinating book exposes the movie industry as a key protagonist in the US strategy debate, through the production of films on national security across many genres, from comedy to thriller, from sci-fi to war movies. This timely volume also explores prevailing ideas of the ‘threat’ to homeland USA that are put forward by the national security network, a threat that is seen as the justification for and legitimization of America’s military operations and strategic choices. Valantin reveals how in the last 20 years there has been a consistent collaboration between the US Department of Defense and film studios and enormous contracts have been exchanged between the two industries. This book shows how Hollywood is completely penetrated by the ideological and political thinking of Washington, which in turn appears to be directly inspired by the productions of Hollywood.
Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:15:32 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/hollywood.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/hollywood.htm
Pasztors examination of Pentagon and arms-industry corruption exposes the process by which such giant defense contractors as Boeing, General Electric and United Technologies illegally obtained contracts with the cooperation of Pentagon officials throughout the Reagan years. Based on grand jury testimony, sworn depositions and interviews, the book tracks the criminal investigations and prosecution of defense suppliers and Pentagon officials during the Justice Department's Operation Illwind. Although Illwind was "a fabulous success," according to the author, he maintains that very little has changed to improve day-to-day accountability, and the Pentagon's own rules and regulations continue implicitly to encourage wrongdoing. Pasztors impressive investigative reporting renders coherent for the general reader Pentagon corruption and provides fresh insight into the arms-acquisition process. Pasztor is a defense correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:13:29 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/when-the.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/when-the.htm
The drastic health and environmental consequences of a new generation of radioactive weapons, Depleted Uranium (DU), currently being used in U.S.-waged wars are discussed in these essays. This "new kind of nuclear war" is examined alongside the effects on Vietnam and Gulf war veterans and the indigenous people on whose land these weapons are being tested. Among the issues covered are the collaborative military and media cover-up of DU, the government's denial of DU's toxic effects, uranium development on Native American land, nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands, and radioactive residue in the Middle East. Contributors include Ramsey Clark, Pat Broudy, and Helen Caldicott. Official government documents on DU and its effects and charts illustrating where DU is tested and stored in the United States are included for further examination.
Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:10:00 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/metal-of.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/metal-of.htm

Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:06:48 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-16.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-16.htm
The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. Here, author Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned themselves this role and why they sought to create "ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad."

Bogle shows that this view of Americas civil religion predated tension with the Soviet Union. She traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations formulated plans that promised to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism.

Bogles analysis suggests that cooperation among the military, evangelical right wing groups, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthys chauvinism was less an aberration than a noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, America and its armed forces embraced a narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world order. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it.
Read more]]> Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:02:43 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-15.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-15.htm
Over the course of several decades, the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) helped transform computing from a cumbersome enterprise based on batch processing to the instantly interactive, graphically rich, highly intelligent computing of today. With the purpose of improving command and control systems for the military, IPTO researchers strengthened time-sharing, laid the groundwork for graphics and parallel processing, contributed to the study of artificial intelligence, and developed the wide-area network that came to be known as the Internet. Transforming Computer Technology examines these and other developments at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency in its heyday between 1962 and 1986. The authors show how Pentagon programs affected significant developments in both computer science and engineering. They analyze the management of the office, the origins and growth of important IPTO programs, and the interaction of the staff with the R&D community. They pay special attention to IPTO's role in executing research at the leading edge of computing and networking and in working with the military to transfer that research into practical use. And they show how, by the 1990s, the research results had been assimilated into systems both for the military and for civilian society.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:32:51 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/transformi.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/transformi.htm

Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:30:53 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-14.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-14.htm
The only thing Hollywood likes more than a good movie is a good deal. For more than fifty years producers and directors of war and action movies have been getting a great deal from America's armed forces by receiving access to billions of dollars worth of military equipment and personnel for little or no cost. Although this arrangement considerably lowers a film's budget, the cost in terms of intellectual freedom can be steep. In exchange for access to sophisticated military hardware and expertise, filmmakers must agree to censorship from the Pentagon.

As veteran Hollywood journalist David L. Robb shows in this revealing insider's look into Hollywood's "dirtiest little secret," the final product that moviegoers see at the theater reflects les about what the director intends and more what the powers-that-be in the military want to project about America's armed forces. Sometimes a military liaison officer demands removal of just a few words; other times whole scenes must be scrapped or completely revised. What happens if a director refuses the requested changes? Robb quotes a Pentagon spokesperson: "Well, I'm taking my toys and I'm going home. I'm taking my tanks and my troops and my location, and I'm going home." such threats can be persuasive to filmmakers trying to keep their productions on time and within budget.

Robb takes us behind the scenes during the making of many well-known movies and television series. From THE RIGHT STUFF to TOP GUN and even LASSIE, the list of movies and shows in which the Pentagon got its way is very long. Only when a director is determined to spend more money than necessary to make his own movie without interference, as in the case of Oliver Stone in the creation of PLATOON or Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now, is a film released that presents the director's unalloyed vision.

For anyone who loves movies and cares about freedom of expression, OPERATION HOLLYWOOD is an engrossing, shocking, and very entertaining book.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:28:22 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/operation.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/operation.htm
The Pentagon's fascination with fringe science is old news, writes veteran defense reporter Weinberger in this incisive study, but the Bush administration has pushed it to new levels of wackiness. After reviewing our government's pursuit of antimatter weapons, psychics and telepathy, she focuses on a "nuclear hand grenade" that may cost billions and seems certain to fail. Before the War on Terror and the avalanche of government money for advanced new weapons, few paid attention to physicists who said they could harness the energy of unstable atomic nuclei, or "isomers," through a wildly expensive process involving atomic reactors. But in recent years, a group of fringe scientists aided by defense industry insiders has convinced the Pentagon that America's post-9/11 survival depends on developing an isomer bomb. While proponents compare it to the Manhattan Project, opponents point out that independent researchers have not been able to duplicate the results attained by isomer enthusiasts, and that many assumptions behind the bomb contradict the laws of physics. Though Congress canceled isomer bomb development in 2004, the Department of Energy found $5 million to continue the research. (July 1) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:25:49 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/imaginary.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/imaginary.htm Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:22:56 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/to-win-a.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/to-win-a.htm
Former Air Force colonel Burton spent 14 years as a Pentagon specialist in weapons acquisition and testing before his retirement in 1986. In this angry, controversial, convincing brief, he testifies that the process of selecting and purchasing weapons for our armed forces is "ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom," with few checks and balances. The most scathing and damning portions of the expose illustrate how Pentagon procurement officers routinely give more consideration to satisfying defense contractors than to the safety of the troops who will use a given weapon on the field. Burton recalls the fuss he raised over the Bradley Fighting Vehicles vulnerability to anti-armor weapons, and though (reluctantly made) design changes improved the safety of the vehicle, Burton suffered both personally and professionally for his boat-rocking, as he shows here. Ultimately, he is not optimistic: the flaws in weapons procurement are probably permanent, Burton concludes, since the reforms he and others forced were only temporary. Photos.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:17:40 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-12.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-12.htm
In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists, commentators, and others have published accounts of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. But no senior Pentagon official has offered an inside view of those years, or has challenged the prevailing narrative of that war—until now.

Douglas J. Feith, the head of the Pentagon's Policy organization, was a key member of Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle as the Administration weighed how to protect the nation from another 9/11. In War and Decision, he puts readers in the room with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, General Tommy Franks, and other key players as the Administration devised its strategy and war plans. Drawing on thousands of previously undisclosed documents, notes, and other written sources, Feith details how the Administration launched a global effort to attack and disrupt terrorist networks; how it decided to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime; how it came to impose an occupation on Iraq even though it had avoided one in Afghanistan; how some officials postponed or impeded important early steps that could have averted major problems in Iraq's post-Saddam period; and how the Administration's errors in war-related communications undermined the nation's credibility and put U.S. war efforts at risk.

Even close followers of reporting on the Iraq war will be surprised at the new information Feith provides—presented here with balance and rigorous attention to detail. Among other revelations, War and Decision demonstrates that the most far-reaching warning of danger in Iraq was produced not by State or by the CIA, but by the Pentagon. It reveals the actual story behind the allegations that the Pentagon wanted to "anoint" Ahmad Chalabi as ruler of Iraq, and what really happened when the Pentagon challenged the CIA's work on the Iraq–al Qaida relationship. It offers the first accurate account of Iraq postwar planning—a topic widely misreported to date. And it presents surprising new portraits of Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Richard Armitage, L. Paul Bremer, and others—revealing how differences among them shaped U.S. policy.

With its blend of vivid narrative, frank analysis, and elegant writing, War and Decision is like no other book on the Iraq war. It will interest those who have been troubled by conflicting accounts of the planning of the war, frustrated by the lack of firsthand insight into the decision-making process, or skeptical of conventional wisdom about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the global war on terrorism—efforts the author continues to support.


Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:15:33 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/war-and.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/war-and.htm
A newly revised and updated study of CIA and Pentagon covert operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf--a landmark book about U.S. intelligence agencies in the postwar era.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:13:22 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/presidents.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/presidents.htm
From the F-22 fighter jet and B-2 bomber to the Stryker tank and Star Wars, Grand Theft Pentagon chronicles how the Pentagon shells out billions to politically wired arms contractors for weapons that don't work for use against an enemy that no longer exists. St. Clair shows how many of the biggest arms contracts were literally inside jobs, negotiated by Pentagon generals who later went to work for the very same corporations that were awarded the contracts.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:11:31 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/grand.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/grand.htm
This book provides a brief and manageable collection of the most important documents on U.S. policymaking in the Vietnam War between 1950 and 1968. Edited by the foremost Vietnam historian, this supplementary text can be used in conjunction with any history of the Vietnam war--Herrings own Americas Longest War, for example.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:06:32 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-11.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-11.htm
Blank Spots on the Map is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year—and which, officially, it isn’t even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer’s road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. “black ops” sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the “black world.” Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire’s ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence.

Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don’t exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire—the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department’s multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots.

Paglen visits the widow of Walter Kazra, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U. S. Air Force defense to his estate’s suit? The base does not exist. The U. S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless—and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:56:19 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/blank.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/blank.htm
Shown here for the first time, these sixty patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches—which are worn by military units working on classified missions—are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known.

By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume one of the best available surveys of the military’s black world—a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:53:45 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/i-could.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/i-could.htm
Since the first edition of Assignment: Pentagon was published in 1988, great changes have occurred in the international environment, the application of U.S. national security strategy, and the manner in which the Pentagon functions. Now in its fourth printing and with a coauthor to lend a different perspective, Assignment: Pentagon remains the best book for anyone who works for the Pentagon, or for any big bureaucracy for that matter.

Eminently readable, Assignment: Pentagon is the essential guide for the newly assigned military person, fresh civilian, and interested outsider to the Pentagon's informal set of arrangements, networks, and functions that operate in the service and joint service world. From the type of wristwatch one needs to how to succeed on the Joint Staff, the book delivers a wealth of practical advice and helpful hints about surviving the pressures and problems of working in "The Building." If you've been assigned to the Pentagon or are starting work for any large company, you need Assignment: Pentagon.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:50:56 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/assignment.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/assignment.htm
Co-author J.J. Catean (a pseudonym) has worked inside the Pentagon for the past 14 years as a national security expert and will reveal many of its secrets, here in print for the very first time. -- There is virtually NO competition for this title; it will be the first and only book available on the highly secret inner workings of the Pentagon. -- The tragic events of 9/11 have sparked enormous interest in what actually goes on in the Pentagon -- and how the actions of the U.S. military effect (and will continue to effect) our everyday lives in the USA. The Pentagon is the nerve center of the American military. Its doors are closed and its secrets are reserved to a select few. What really goes on inside the Pentagon? Who has the power? Who are the key players? The Complete Idiots Guide "RM" to the Pentagon will offer an extraordinary insiders look into the inner workings of the Pentagon and pierce the tight layer of security that surrounds it. Readers will learn how plans for war are actually made and carried out; how the Pentagon fits into the national security structure; the relationship between the President of the USA and the military. The Pentagon in the 21st century-where does the American military go from here, and what changes will 9/11 create for the American armed forces?
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:48:09 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-10.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-10.htm
From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast — often hidden — impact on America.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power" — from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats — and funding — evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the house of war.

Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:45:10 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/house-of.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/house-of.htm
The Pentagon has been called many things by many people, but to those who work there, directing the defense of the United States, it is simply "the Building." Monumental in its five-pointed symmetry, the massive five-sided, five-story structure encompasses over six million square feet of floor space and covers twenty-nine acres of formerly swampy ground.

There has always been much more to the Pentagon than concrete, limestone and steel. In The Pentagon, veteran defense writer and novelist David Alexander delivers the inside story on the people who have brought the Building to life, from army chief of staff General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, charged with creating a force that could defeat Germany and Japan, to the "whiz kids" brought to the Pentagon by Kennedys Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara. Alexanders look down the corridors of power unfolds the modern history of the American defense establishment, its personalities and politics, and the evolving role that the Pentagon has played in our national security.

From its initial design to its restoration after the attack of 9/11, this book tells the story of the Pentagon as it is inextricably linked to the story of American power and strength.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:42:47 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-9.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-9.htm
The creation of the Pentagon in seventeen whirlwind months during World War II is one of the great construction feats in American history, involving a tremendous mobilization of manpower, resources, and minds. In astonishingly short order, Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell conceived and built an institution that ranks with the White House, the Vatican, and a handful of other structures as symbols recognized around the world. Now veteran military reporter Steve Vogel reveals for the first time the remarkable story of the Pentagons construction, from its dramatic birth to its rebuilding after the September 11 attack.

At the center of the story is the tempestuous but courtly Somervell dynamite in a Tiffany box, as he was once described. In July 1941, the Army construction chief sprang the idea of building a single, huge headquarters that could house the entire War Department, then scattered in seventeen buildings around Washington. Somervell ordered drawings produced in one weekend and, despite a firestorm of opposition, broke ground two months later, vowing that the building would be finished in little more than a year. Thousands of workers descended on the site, a raffish Virginia neighborhood known as Hells Bottom, while an army of draftsmen churned out designs barely one step ahead of their execution. Seven months later the first Pentagon employees skirted seas of mud to move into the building and went to work even as construction roared around them. The colossal Army headquarters helped recast Washington from a sleepy southern town into the bustling center of a reluctant empire.

Vivid portraits are drawn of other key figures in the drama, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who fancied himself an architect; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, both desperate for a home for the War Department as the country prepared for battle; Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the ruthless force of nature who oversaw the Pentagons construction (as well as the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb); and John McShain, the charming and dapper builder who used his relationship with FDR to help land himself the contract for the biggest office building in the world.

The Pentagons post-World War II history is told through its critical moments, including the troubled birth of the Department of Defense during the Cold War, the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the tumultuous 1967 protest against the Vietnam War. The pivotal attack on September 11 is related with chilling new detail, as is the race to rebuild the damaged Pentagon, a restoration that echoed the spirit of its creation.

This study of a single enigmatic building tells a broader story of modern American history, from the eve of World War II to the new wars of the twenty-first century. Steve Vogel has crafted a dazzling work of military social history that merits comparison with the best works of David Halberstam or David McCullough. Like its namesake, The Pentagon is a true landmark.
Read more]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:39:49 -0600 http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-8.htm http://pentagonresearch.com/products/books/the-8.htm