Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 135

BOOK REVIEWS

War Dogs drives home a key lesson U.S. military leadership repeatedly fails to heed. Like the
rest of the armed services, the size and capability of
working-dog programs is cyclic. Summarized, the
Pentagon does not maintain sufficiently robust working-dog programs during peacetime and must rapidly
expand those same programs in time of war. A
properly trained K9 team requires months of specialized selection and training. Similarly, successful and
capable war dog programs require years to develop.
Despite a proven record of success in World War II
and Vietnam, the Pentagon virtually eliminated wardog programs at the end of those conflicts.
Those dog programs extant on 9/11 were too few
in number and scope of training for the operations
that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially
given our enemies increasing use of IEDs. While the
Pentagon wisely, if belatedly, ordered a “dog surge” to
support the Global War on Terrorism, it has already
begun to downsize working-dog programs. This is
a tremendous mistake. Any Iraq or Afghanistan
veteran will tell you war dogs routinely save lives and
there are never enough of them. While the future of
warfare is forever changing, one aspect is constant:
our soldiers will be more effective and safer with a
well-trained war dog at their side.
Lt. Col. Chris Heatherly, U.S. Army, Pullman,
Washington

THE ACCIDENTAL ADMIRAL:
A Sailor Takes Command at NATO
Adm. James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Retired, Naval
Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 2014, 288
pages, $32.95

A

dm. James Stavridis has written a very
readable book that is part history and part
leadership theory with a sprinkling of recommendations for the future dropped in at the end.
The first part of the book is historical in that it begins
just before his appointment to the position of supreme allied commander for operations (SACEUR)
at North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
and commander of the U.S. European Command
(USEUCOM).
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

Stavridis’ perspective on how he arrived as the first
admiral to ever hold the senior position at NATO
proves interesting. After taking command in 2009, he
recounts in six chapters his most pressing challenges.
He does this primarily through a geographic lens with
chapters focused on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the
Balkans, Israel, and Russia. In each chapter he paints
a candid picture from a strategic leader’s viewpoint on
how he approached the problems he encountered in
each region.
After the historical tour of challenges, he shifts to a
discussion of leadership in a broader sense. There are
five chapters on various aspects of leadership. Most of
these leadership tenets are valid, not just at the fourstar military level, but to all leaders.
He admits that a lot of the leadership principals
he applied are not mysterious at all, but asserts that
the real mystery is why so few leaders actually implement them. A common thread through the chapters
is the emphasis on the need for leaders to know and
encourage their people, and strongly promote innovation for solving the complex problems of our times.
Finishing out the book are some insights regarding the future of NATO and the threats that keep
Stavridis up at night. He coins a new term, “deviant
globalization,” to describe the convergence of aspects
of globalization in ways that create mayhem and not
stability. Ironically, the greatest threats will come
from creative innovators and leaders during these
occurrences. This demands that our own leaders
must embrace and promote innovation to solve the
problems posed by deviant globalization.
Stavridis is an excellent writer, as one would
expect since he has written articles on doing just that
(N.B.: his 2008 article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s
Proceedings, “Read, Think, Write, and Publish”). His
personal anecdotes make for a very upbeat and easily
read book. Oddly, he does not document interactions
with the more fractious leaders he must certainly
have encountered in his tour at a command position
of global influence. It would have been informative
to hear how he dealt with the more difficult strategic
leaders bent on obstructing the forward progress of
the SACEUR. The closest he comes to a substantive criticism of anyone is his characterization of
Vladimir Putin saying, “He will be a difficult ‘partner’
indeed.”
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