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Magnouloux spent 5 years cycling around the world. He crossed paths with Richard and Nicholas Crane in Lhasa, and this book has some echoes of their Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Thanks to Joe Cruz for the recommendation.
I believe that maintaining an interest in asymmetric warfare is a healthy habit. The Rhodesian Bush War and South African Border War are particularly interesting, as both sides employed direct, unconventional means.
I am currently reading Journey Without Boundaries: The Operational Life and Experiences of a SA Special Forces Small Team Operator, the memoirs of Colonel Andre Diedericks. Diedericks joined the South African Defence Force in 1974 and served in their Special Forces for two decades. Taking inspiration from Rhodesia’s Selous Scouts, he was largely responsible for developing and implementing small team tactics in the South African Recces. These “small teams” are not the 12 man ODAs we think of with our Special Forces today. Diedericks’ small teams consisted of only two men. Their missions would last a month or longer, during which time they would be completely self-sufficient and travel hundreds of kilometres on foot. Their operations were deniable, which required them to remain completely hidden from both the enemy force and local population.
Journey Without Boundaries joins The Jedburghs by Will Irwin and The Phantom Major by Virginia Cowles as being an excellent read for tracking the development of unconventional warfare.
Published in 1983, the book paints an inspiring picture of the Swiss Army and Switzerland’s strategy of defense – the Swiss “aptitude for war”. They have combined their country’s topographic barriers with careful planning to “prevent war with a price of entry that is too high.” McPhee calls it the “Porcupine Principle”.
To interrupt the unity of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiple by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage. All purposes included, concealed and stationary artillery probably number upward of twelve thousand guns… Every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides area ready to slide.
The book is an account of the author’s 3 year, 30,000 mile bike ride from Siberia to England via Australia.
The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle, a biography of Steve Earle, is a well written account of a great musician.
(The greatest, of course, is Dune.) In 1973, the BBC recorded an 8-episode radio series of Asimov‘s Foundation Trilogy. The show is now in the public domain and available for download at the Internet Archive. It’s well done. When I read Foundation I failed to continue past the original trilogy into the later work. This show has encouraged me to revisit the books.
When the book was first published I assumed it would be just another entry into the media hubbub around WikiLeaks. When I saw that John Young – cranky old man of the cypherpunk movement – gave it a positive review I decided that it would be worth a read. While the book does center on Assange, Greenberg does an admirable job of tracing the history of the cypherpunks and describing what in the future we will probably refer to as a sequel to the cryptowars. It is a recommended read.
The book is in a similar vein as Gavin de Becker’s The Gift Of Fear (a book I strongly recommend), but with more acronyms and typos. Clint Emerson focuses on external awareness more than the internal awareness discussed by de Becker. There are some good tidbits in it, but overall I would award the book a “meh” rating.