Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 101
BOOK REVIEWS
CARTELS AT WAR: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence
and the Threat to U.S. National Security
Paul Rexton Kan, Potomac Books, Dulles, VA, 2012,
192 pages, $29.95
C
artels at War is must-read for professionals
needing to understand the crisis emerging on the
U.S. southern border. Paul Rexton Kan, an associate professor of national security studies at the U.S.
Army War College, offers a concise, but comprehensive
analysis of the cartel violence in Mexico, and illustrates
why this phenomena may become the primary threat
to U.S. national security in the future.
Kan demonstrates how two major structural changes, the implementation of the North American Free
Trade Agreement and the shift in domestic political
power from the Partido Revolucionario to the Partido
Accion Nacional, established the conditions for cartel
expansion and conflict. The former removed barriers
for both licit and illicit trade between the United States
and Mexico, and the latter ended the cozy “live and let
live” agreements between the Partido Revolucionario
and the drug lords. The result was increased shipments
of narcotics to the north and amplified violence in
Mexico.
A valuable aspect of the book is its explanation of
what is actually transpiring in Mexico. Many academics, military officers, and journalists conflate cartel
violence and activities with insurgencies and terrorism.
While they use similar means, Kan demonstrates that
the cartels are not striving for a strategic political objective such as the overthrow of a government or the implementation of an ideology. Instead, their activities are
considered high-intensity crime, which is “a war waged
by violent entrepreneurs who seek to prevail over one
another and the state in a hypercompetitive illegal
market in order to control it or a particular portion of
it.” The war is waged for control over the business supply lines and distribution nodes of the illegal narcotics
trade. This difference strongly implies that the solutions to the problem are often not military in nature,
but require other elements of national power.
In fact, among the policy recommendations he
offers at the end of the book, several stand out for their
clarity of thought and strategic purpose: avoid further
MILITARY REVIEW July-August 2014
militarization of the situation, strengthen the Mexican
state and civil society, concentrate on cartel finances,
and tackle U.S. drug usage. Given the constant level
of U.S. drug demand over the past years, cartel spillover violence into American cities and towns beyond
the border region, and millions of dollars invested in
counter narcotics measures; this book deserves a place
in the professional library for critical thinking on the
subject. Like recent publications in the same genre
such as National Defense University’s Convergence:
Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of
Globalization, Cartels at War provides relevant insights
into what is developing as the key threat to U.S. national security in the next decade.
Lt. Col. Kevin D. Stringer, Ph.D., U.S. Army
Reserve, Zurich, Switzerland
KIEV 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East
David Stahel, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2012, 468 pages, $35.00
udged by its scale, the Battle of Kiev was the
Wehrmacht’s greatest victory. By encircling
Stalin’s forces in the bend of the Dnepr River, the
German First and Second Panzer Groups ripped
a vast hole in the enemy line, destroyed an entire Soviet
Front along with its four component armies, and
captured—according to the German propaganda
machine—665,000 men. By any standard, the German
triumph in the Ukraine in September 1941 was mind
boggling.
David Stahel’s new book, Kiev 1941, gives us a new
and insightful account of this titanic battle, yet it is
hardly a celebration of Nazi military expertise. Instead,
the author builds on the analysis of his earlier work,
Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the
East, which argued that Germany’s plan to subjugate
Soviet Russia in a single campaign was doomed from
the start by poor planning, insufficient resources, and
dysfunction at the highest levels of command. In his
previous book, Stahel focused attention on the difficulties encountered by the campaign’s main effort, the
two panzer groups of Army Group Center. In his new
book, the author continues that theme by showing how
the panzer groups that linked up east of Kiev in late
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