How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything by Rosa Brooks

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

by Rosa Brooks

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems. Today's military personnel analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol the seas for pirates. Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective. She is a former top Pentagon official and the daughter of antiwar protesters; a human rights activist and the wife of an Army Special Forces officer. Her book is by turns a memoir, a work of journalism, and a scholarly exploration of history, anthropology, and law. But at its heart it is a rallying cry, for Brooks shows that when the war machine breaks out of its borders, we undermine the values and rules that keep our world from sliding toward chaos. And as we pile new tasks onto the military, we make it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America faces. Brooks sounds an alarm, forcing us to see how the collapsing barriers between war and peace threaten both America and the world. And time is running out to make things right.--From dust jacket.

Reviewed by dpfaef on

4 of 5 stars

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I found Rosa Brooks via David Rothkopf’s Deep State Podcast. As a neophyte to foreign policy, listening to the podcast has been a learning experience. I downloaded the book from Audible as I thought it might be easier to digest it by listening (and it was, at least for me it was).

Rosa Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and, a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks served as counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Michele Flournoy. She is the mother of two girls and married to an Army Special Forces officer.

Her book basically talks about how the military has taken over many of the responsibilities (by which I believe she means both government and private institutions) that deal with solving global problems. I first saw this in Afghanistan when the military started building projects and assisting tribal leaders in getting money from the local government for these projects.

Her time in the Pentagon has given her insights that are amazing, she displays a level of honesty that is very compelling making this book a very thought-provoking read.

This review was originally posted on The Pfaeffle Journal

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  • 29 March, 2017: Reviewed