The author sets out to show how certain mistakes were made and how intelligent people made them. Shore starts slowly but makes some interesting observations throughout as he compares the (correct) decisions made by people like Eisenhower and Kennedy and the (poor) decisions made by Rumsfield and other neocons. I like to keep well away from commenting on American politics but it wouldn't surprise me if there were many people who disagreed with some of Shore's findings.

This book never reached any great heights in me, until almost the last page when he makes a casual remark that left me needing to reread the sentence a few times. It also provided the answer to my question "What's with the odd author photo and what is he carrying?"

In the end, "Blunder" didn't quite live up to what I expected of it, but I will be interested to see how he further develops the theories he posits here. ( )

The author is a historian who seems to specialize in military history from the point of view of strategic studies. He begins by defining a blunder as a cognitive act, that is, one that involves conscious decision making, and which has made matters worse. This would be in contrast to an error, which may or may not have involved any conscious thought and could just as well have made matters better as making them worse.

He then goes on to analyze seven major causes of blunders-

Exposure Anxiety: The fear of being seen as weak,

Flatview: Seeing the world in one dimension,

Cure-allism: Believing that one size really fits all,

Infomania: The obsessive relationship to information,

Mirror Imaging: Thinking the other side thinks like us

Static Cling: Refusal to accept a changing world, and

Cognition

These are illustrated by various examples. Usually one would expect a lot of military examples from such an author, and there are some, but on the whole these are fairly balanced with examples outside of the strict military domain. Many American authors also tend to spend a great deal of time analyzing 9/11 from the point of view of their thesis, and once again, although 9/11 is mentioned, it is used in a balanced way. The author is also refreshingly frank about criticizing American decisions and policies in various international involvements such as Viet Nam and Iraq.

I found the examples of King Mongkut of Siam and Ho Chi Min of Viet Nam to be the most interesting because the analysis was new
to me and these examples will certainly lead to some additional reading on my part. The King of Siam used his skills as a statesmen to keep his country from falling to imperialist pressures that swallowed up most of the southeast asian empires of his day. Ho Chi Min lead the Vietnamese people in resistance and ultimate victory over two countries with vastly superior technologies and armies, namely those of the French and Americans, surely there are lessons to be learned in that feat.

Overall, a thoughtful and brisk read. ( )