Not arguing with your recommendation at all PR.
I'd believe even you, more than some of the faulty intell and interp that comes from that org.

Here is another review - from the CIA Reading Room
(The review's author, T L Ahern, is a highest level CIA academic and historian - so they must be feeling pretty uncomfortable if he is running the counter-view)

A Great Place to Have a War: America and the Birth of a Military CIA
Reviewed by Thomas L. Ahern

"Joshua Kurlantzick says that over the course of a full decade he talked to numerous participants in the so-called “secret war” in Laos. The book that emerged from those interviews, A Great Place to Have a War, rather reads like the result of an attempt to find a new narrative in which to fit the interviews. Following a current fashion in popular history, Kurlantzick treats policy as mostly a byproduct of personalities or bureaucratic competition—and any untoward outcome as the result of someone’s incompetence and/or bad faith. Kurlantzick asserts that in 1961 CIA found in Laos “a unique opportunity to increase the agency’s powers.” It had “already amassed influence, in the heart of a Cold War battlefield” that the US military was ignoring and could use the little kingdom as the site of an “inexpensive—in American money and lives, at least—proxy war [that] could be a template for fights in other places around the world.” No documentation is furnished for any of these claims, which are presented as the CIA’s justification for becoming “focused increasingly on killing rather than spying.”

The result is an intellectually rickety account based on the allegation that the war represented the culmination of a calculated CIA effort to compete with the US armed forces as a military arm of the US Government."

It was the strategic lynchpin of the war, and horribly mishandled by interference from Washington.

Between mismanagement by DC politicians and the corrupt ARVN, they were bound to lose.


The book "The Ravens" makes the mistakes very plain.

They were not even allowed to attack airfields under the insane rules of engagement.

is that site a pay service Rich?

General Mackevili wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:59 am

Ravensnest wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:55 am is that site a pay service Rich?

It was a torrent site, and you don't pay anything. I deleted the link, but the site is called LibGen.

I'm too fast for you

Doc67 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:58 am

Ravensnest wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 8:02 am

General Mackevili wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:59 am

Ravensnest wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:55 am is that site a pay service Rich?

It was a torrent site, and you don't pay anything. I deleted the link, but the site is called LibGen.

I'm too fast for you

Did you find the link for LibGen to download the book? If so, PM me the link. Cheers...

Can you download Karmageddon's book for free from LibGen?.
I want to have a look but not sure i want to invest 99c.


(If it's worth it Karma, 'promise to wing you the 99c directly)