Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 145

BOOK REVIEWS

Ganor seeks to elevate the standards by which nonstate actors are judged and change the cost-benefit
calculus of attacking civilian targets. Despite the
attacks on 9/11 and the rise of transregional terrorist
groups, international agreement on defining terrorism
is lacking. Without international consensus, there is
little to suggest that these organizations will choose to
take greater risk in attacking military targets.
His proposed legal framework to redefine combatants and civilians into four categories of involved
actors is novel but cumbersome. He expands the
definition of combatant to include nonstate actors.
He distinguishes civilians into those uninvolved with
hostilities from those used as human shields. Two
additional categories, militias/reservists and civilian
support personnel, complete his framework.
These tiers support his proportionality equation
that assigns three levels of precautionary obligation
for targeting involved actors. Uninvolved civilians
retain the highest level of protection against attacks
while combatants keep their low level of protection.
However, he develops an intermediate level that
includes militias and reservists not on active duty,
civilian support personnel, and those civilians forced
as shields. This departure seeks to close a gap exploited by terrorist organizations.
His loosening of the protections civilians enjoy
should be skeptically viewed in the context of terrorism that he writes about. It raises a difficult question
that has far-reaching implications for all forms of
warfare. Legal analysts and scholars would have a
fruitful debate based on his proposal.
In the second half of the book, he analyzes the
tension between combating terrorism and liberal
democratic values. Methods used to combat terrorism may be at odds with democratic values and may
undermine the legitimacy of the state. The degree to
which states choose to do this may or may not give
the terrorist an advantage.
Our post-9/11 experience demonstrates his point
and it remains to be seen if France and Belgium
will follow suit. As part of his eight principles for
formulating a doctrine against the modern terrorist
organization, he articulates the need to win on legal,
operational, and public opinion fronts. We see this
conflict today with the Islamic State and the search
for solutions that counter their ideological narrative.
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Global Alert is a quick read for those seeking a broad
overview of the modern Islamist terrorist organization.
While gaining a familiarity with the legal arguments
Ganor raises, the reader should place those into the
context of the Israeli experience from which the author
writes. Ganor starts a great conversation about the need
to modify international agreements in light of terrorism—a conversation that we will all participate in for the
foreseeable future.

Col. Chuck Rush, U.S. Army,
Arlington, Virginia

THE FIRES OF BABYLON: Eagle Troop
and the Battle of 73 Easting
Mike Guardia, Casemate Publishers, Havertown,
Pennsylvania, 2015, 248 pages

T

he Fires of Babylon: Eagle Troop and the Battle of 73
Easting is an engaging historical account of Eagle
Troop, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Armored Cavalry
Regiment’s push into Kuwait as part of Operation
Desert Storm in
February 1991. The
author links together
detailed accounts of
Eagle Troop’s Battle
of 73 Easting derived
from personal interviews and memoirs
of soldiers from Eagle
Troop to give a minute-by-minute account
of the battle. This book
is not an argumentative
piece, nor does it try
to persuade the reader to view events under a particular lens; it is simply a description of events as told by
the soldiers who lived through the United States’ first
major tank battle since World War II. The author, Mike
Guardia, is a veteran of the U.S. Army and served as an
armor officer from 2008 to 2014.
The book begins by re counting the Army’s transition from the Vietnam War to the all-volunteer force.
The struggles encountered during this time detail an
army attempting to define itself and its role in the
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