The Right Way to Lose a War

America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts

By: Dominic Tierney

Narrated by: Brian Troxell

A provocative blueprint for how the United States can successfully disengage from failing wars without compromising its core values or interests.

For a century the United States steadily accumulated a string of military triumphs. But since 1945 the onslaught of failures and stalemates in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan has exposed the country's inability to change course after battlefield setbacks - with grave consequences for thousands of American soldiers and our allies.

The Right Way to Lose a War provocatively explains how America can draw failed campaigns to a close without compromising its core values through three specific steps - surge, talk, and leave. The Right Way to Lose a War is an essential guidebook for life in an era of unwinnable conflicts, an audiobook made necessary not only by Iraq and Afghanistan but the future quagmires that may yet come.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2015 Dominic Tierney (P)2015 Hachette Audio

Strong anecdotes, few solutions

The author starts with a seductive premise and catchy title, and offers some very good diagnosis of the problems with recent US military efforts (as well as some foreign ones): short-sightedness, hubris, cultural ignorance, etc. But the book falls apart when it comes to solutions: the author repeats "surge, talk, and leave" like a mantra, but fails to show how such a strategy might have actually worked in real-world scenarios, or to consider alternative approaches. There are many interesting anecdotes, and important questions are posed, but overall the writing was repetitive and intellectually over-ambitious.

The narrator did very well.