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Ted Serong    Written by: Anne Blair, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, ISBN: 9780195515923, 238pp.   Reviewed by: Major General Adrian Clunies-Ross (Retd) Brigadier Ted Serong was a unique Australian soldier, and the essence of any biography of him would be to capture this uniqueness. This Anne Blair does to a considerable degree. Serong is most widely identified with the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV); this is not surprising since he led the first team to South Vietnam in 1962 and …

Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for Bin Laden    Written by: Robin Moore, Random House, New York, 2003, ISBN: 9780375508615, 372pp.   Reviewed by: Captain Brett Chaloner, Royal Military College, Duntroon Robin Moore will never be renowned as one of the world’s great military historians; however, as the author of Task Force Dagger , he does what only an American author can do. He tells a story with great passion and fervour, sprinkled with good old ‘Uncle Sam’ ideology. This is a story of which the World War II …

Sir James Whiteside McCay: A Turbulent Life     Written by: Christopher Wray, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, ISBN: 9780195515732, 280pp.   Reviewed by: Brigadier John Essex-Clark (Retd) ‘One of the greatest soldiers ever to have served Australia ... greater even than Monash’ So wrote General Brudenell White. This is an honest book that should be read by those who aspire to understand leadership and the pitfalls of egocentricity. It highlights the weaknesses of a strict, dogmatic, non-empathetic …

Spirit of the Digger    Written by: Patrick Lindsay, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2003, ISBN: 9780732292751, 293pp.   Reviewed by: Brigadier John Essex-Clark (Retd) Patrick Lindsay, who also wrote The Spirit of Kokoda , now gives us this 293-page exposition of the quality and character of Australian servicemen by a carefully selected use of lucid anecdotal cameos from the Boer War to Iraq in order to illustrate the qualities of the Digger which, as he describes, are no more than the essence of Australianism. …

The Third Force: ANGAU’s New Guinea War 1942–46    Written by: Alan Powell, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2003, ISBN: 9780195516395, 292pp.   Reviewed by: Michael O’Connor Arguably, the most ubiquitous and perhaps the most neglected unit of the Australian Army in World War II’s New Guinea campaigns was the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU). The Army History Unit deserves commendation for sponsoring this excellent history of ANGAU just at a time when the need for a civil affairs …

Living by the Sword? The Ethics of Armed Intervention   Written by: Tom Frame, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2004,  ISBN: 9780868405193, 278pp. Reviewed by: Christian Enemark, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus admonished his disciple Peter: ‘All who live by the sword will die by the sword’. For centuries, theologians have debated what Jesus really meant by this statement in order to determine the moral status of those who engage in armed …

Globalisation and the New Terror: The Asia Pacific Dimension   Written by: David Martin Jones (ed.),  Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK,2004,  ISBN: 9781845427771, xv + 316pp. Reviewed by: Michael Evans, Head of the Land Warfare Studies Centre and coeditor of the AAJ. The study of terrorism is a field that often lends itself to sensationalism and instant books based on breathless narrative and journalistic impression. None of these features characterises Globalisation and the New Terror . On the contrary, the …

Future Armies, Future Challenges: Land Warfare in the Information Age   Written by: Michael Evans, Russell Parkin and Alan Ryan (eds), Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004, paperback, ISBN: 9781865086262, 370pp. Reviewed by: Professor Jeffrey Grey, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. There is an art to editing conference proceedings, which too often when published are less than the sum of their parts. They often date quickly, and it seems strange that, in the era of the Internet, …

Surprise, Security and the American Experience   Written by: John Lewis Gaddis, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, ISBN: 9780674011748, 150pp. Reviewed by: Russell Parkin, Senior Research Fellow at the Land Warfare Studies Centre and coeditor of the AAJ. At the end of the Cold War, the American scholar, Walter Russell Meade, wrote a book entitled Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World . A key thesis of Meade’s book was based on the identification of four …

Stray Voltage: War in the Information Age   Written by: Wayne Michael Hall, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2003, ISBN: 9781591143505, 219pp. Reviewed by: Michael Evans, Head of the Land Warfare Studies Centre and coeditor of the AAJ. In this interesting and stimulating study, author Wayne Michael Hall—a retired American brigadier general who directed the US Army’s Intelligence XXI study—argues that, because of the ascent of the digital age, the face of battle is rapidly changing. Increasingly, the …