John P. Carlin

This review is actually a review of two books: this one, and "An Army at Dawn" https://www.librarything.com/work/13178/book/81996115

Both are, in my view, about the logistics of information.

Be it WWII at beginning of the combat-readiness of the US Army and its logistics (the subject of "An Army at Dawn", about the WWII campaigns within the Northern Africa theatre), or the more recent Cyberwar readiness from the USA federal government, up to the 2016 elections (published in 2018, but with obvious confidentiality constraints on more recent material, cybersecurity investigations and policy are the subject of "Dawn of the Code War"), both books contain plenty of information about organizational readiness.

In both cases, it is not just a matter of materiel or financial resources, or even of one-off interventions, but of blending both the routine "lessons learned", spreading them, and keeping reinforcing the awareness of the new scenarios.

Both books let what happened to deliver the lessons, with the author underlining what readers can derive from reading through the storytelling.

Also, both books have interesting material- that could be used to derive "cameos", i.e. examples useful to carry the messages home.

As shown by the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021, we still have to learn lessons about logistics that had been learned in 1942-1943, and also in cybersecurity, we are still letting the "technicality" of the subject trump (no pun intended) over the conceptual element.

Logistics of both physical and virtual resources is still logistics, and carries some characteristics: degrees of freedoms, identification of strengths and weaknesses, as well as identification of costs and benefits.

Doing a proper detailed review of both books would require few thousand words, but, in reality, the purpose of this review is to share few pointers, and share the impact of both books.

Actually, I first read "An Army at Dawn" over a decade ago, but decided to re-read it along with "Dawn of the Code War", as the parallels where interesting.… (mehr)