Christine Wormuth, the U.S. Army secretary, recently finished reading “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.” She decided to pick up the book after hearing retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli mention it. The book, by Isabel Wilkerson, is about “how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.” She also plans to read “The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan,” a book by Elliot Ackerman that “brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended.”
Doug Bush, the assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, recently finished reading “Battlegroup!: The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War.” He told Defense News that the book, written by Jim Storr, is told through the lens of a British officer and discusses how unfought battles of the Cold War might have gone, given what American and British technologies existed at the time. During an October flight to the headquarters of Army Futures Command, Bush was reading “Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.” The author, Roger Lowenstein, writes about President Abraham Lincoln’s financial revolution amid the Civil War.
Gen. Edward Daly, the head of U.S. Army Materiel Command, told Defense News he is reading “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.” The book, by Geoff Colvin, shows what makes world-class performers so remarkable.
Gen. Charles Flynn, the head of U.S. Army Pacific, is reading the papers of the late Brig. Gen. Robert Charlwood Richardson III, which relate to the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and military operations in the Pacific during World War II.
