{"id":83409,"date":"2024-06-28T15:03:04","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T15:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/28\/what-im-reading-tunneling-to-the-past\/"},"modified":"2024-06-28T15:03:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T15:03:04","slug":"what-im-reading-tunneling-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/28\/what-im-reading-tunneling-to-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019m Reading: Tunneling to the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s been a while since I did a \u201cwhat I\u2019m reading\u201d roundup. (After the newsletter went to once a week, it became harder to slot them in.) But today I wonder if you\u2019re feeling like I am, worried about the state of the world and eager to find answers \u2014 or at least a way to escape searching for them \u2014 in books.<\/p>\n

Some of that means reading work that\u2019s new to me, including \u201cSmall Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict<\/a>\u201d by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter and Jacob N. Shapiro.<\/p>\n

Covering the war in Gaza has inevitably brought reminders of other conflicts, including the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If, as the saying goes, history doesn\u2019t repeat itself but it rhymes, the battles for control of Mosul and Helmand feel like previous couplets in a long, grim poem that now also includes Gaza City and Rafah. I picked up this book as a way to get a more grounded perspective on those past conflicts and others.<\/p>\n

One paragraph from an early chapter of the book seems particularly relevant. (For context, \u201casymmetric\u201d wars are those fought between groups that are very different in size and capability, often involving guerrilla warfare against a more traditional state military):<\/p>\n

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In asymmetric wars, the struggle is fundamentally not over territory but over people because the people hold critical information, which is true to a greater extent than in symmetric conflicts because the ability of the stronger side to take advantage of any given piece of information is always very high, and because holding territory is not enough to secure victory. The stronger party in asymmetric conflicts can physically seize territory for a short time whenever it chooses to do so. But holding and administering that territory is another thing altogether \u2014 as so many would-be conquerors have learned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have also been drawn to reread a book that I first looked at long ago. Not, I think, because I\u2019m longing to rediscover the familiar prose, but because I feel compelled to go back and interrogate the now-unfamiliar version of myself who turned its pages a long time ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n