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It wouldn’t be the holidays without our annual War on the Rocks book roundup. Check off your gift list or pick a book to enjoy by the fire. Happy reading.

Kerry Anderson

The Warrior Queens: The Legends and the Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War, Antonia Fraser (1990). I’ll happily read any history book by Antonia Fraser, but this might be my favorite. The book offers multiple mini biographies of warrior queens throughout history, such as Boadicea, Zenobia, the Rani of Jhansi, and several more. Fraser weaves fascinating themes about women, power, and warfare throughout the various women’s stories.

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, Colin Woodward (2008). This wonderfully engaging history book tells the story of the peak period of Caribbean piracy. While I wouldn’t want to be a pirate back then (or now), the story left me much more sympathetic to those who chose or were forced into the pirate life. Woodard wrote another one of my favorite nonfiction books (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America) and is skilled at highlighting crucial themes in history that have relevance to today.

Benjamin Armstrong

Annapolis Goes to War: The Naval Academy Class of 1940 and its Trial by Fire in World War II, Craig Symonds (2025). This book is a micro-history, examining World War II through the experiences of one class from the U.S. Naval Academy. The book includes their time in Annapolis, in addition to their service during the war. It offers not only great stories told by a masterful historian, but also great insights about military education and the preparation of officers who may face the ultimate challenge.

The Pacific’s New Navies: An Ocean, Its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power, Thomas Jamison (2024). This book examines the rise of the U.S. Navy at the end of the 19th century in an entirely new way: from the vantage point of the Pacific. Using original research in the archives of multiple Pacific nations, in multiple languages, Jamison demonstrates how the Navy was shaped by the wars and maritime developments of the Pacific. Not only does this book offer a deep understanding of the Pacific world that is vital to today, it also demonstrates the complex history of the U.S. security interests west of the California coast.

David Barno

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I, Douglas Brunt (2023). The disappearance of the Diesel engine’s famed inventor in late 1913 sparked enduring speculation about his apparent demise for more than a century. Brunt unravels this mystery in a fast-paced narrative that ends in a shocking speculative conclusion. A compelling account that provided me with fascinating new insights upon the dangerous final years leading to the First World War.

From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, Arthur C. Brooks (2023). In recent months, I have recommended this book to over a dozen friends and family members facing the painful transition from high-flying careers to “the second half” of life. Brooks, an academic, best-selling author, and former think tank president, lays out the inevitable decline and surprising opportunities to be seized in later life as we find new meaning in our skills, experiences, and evolving types of intelligence. An absolute must-read for all those facing the transition from the all-consuming careers that so many of us have loved.

Mike Benitez

The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. (2023). A compelling study of how disruptive innovations reshape warfare, this book demonstrates that technology alone is insufficient — it’s the ability to integrate it through new doctrine, organization, and mindset that ultimately wins. Krepinevich highlights recurring barriers of institutional inertia, service rivalry, and cultural pride that have slowed technical adoption in every era, offering critical lessons that are especially relevant today.

Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat, Robin Higham and Stephen Harris (2006). This book analyzes 13 different failures of various air forces spanning World War I to the Falklands War. The historical insights are well-researched, even for obscure failures that most airpower disciples have never heard of, and the lessons are applicable now more than ever.

Ian Brown

The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians, Brian Garfield (1982). This sat on my bookshelf for years until I finally cracked it open this summer. I quickly regretted waiting so long to read it — it’s a deeply immersive narrative of American and Japanese forces grappling with each other in the High North under astonishingly brutal weather conditions. Just as impressive as the stories of human endurance was the incredible effort of a handful of U.S. commanders to create, out of nothing, the operating bases and supply chains that supported hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the most austere environment imaginable. Garfield’s book is worth a reread today as global competition in the High North warms up.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, Stephen Platt (2013). I’d never heard of the Taiping Rebellion until a colleague recommended this book to me to better understand the events that shaped Chinese history over the last two centuries. Reading it filled in a vital gap in my knowledge — a conflict both bloody and surreal, the rebellion was led by a man who believed himself to be the son of God and a brother of Jesus Christ, had a death toll that equaled the World War I, and offered a tantalizing alternative path for China’s development until Western intervention snuffed that path out. The tribulations that wracked China in the 20th century cannot be understood without understanding the Taiping Rebellion.

Brad Carson

The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter (2025). Potter is the author of the great Substack Construction Physics, from which I’ve learned more about the world than from any other recent source. This book continues his inquiry into the secret origins of the modern world. If you like writers such as Vaclav Smil, you’ll love Potter.

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI, John Cassidy (2025). Cassidy is a long-time economics writer for The New Yorker. In this book, he profiles the major schools of recent economic thought through a close look at the thinkers themselves. The biographical information is always interesting, there are many interesting juxtapositions, and it is nice to see heterodox views get consideration.

Ryan Evans

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, Richard Beck (2024). Beck is good at showing how a formally overseas war reshaped life at home. He traces how the Global War on Terror helped normalize a permanent emergency, eroded citizenship, and hollowed out democratic accountability. And as he points out, this all unfolded as the conflict “militarized America’s relationship with the rest of the world.” Beck moves from law and politics to culture and daily life, showing how security thinking and crisis logic seeped into everything. Truly everything. Even where I part ways with him, especially in his tendency toward totalizing explanations, our different political beliefs, and his reluctance to consider any ideology but America’s, the book forces a reckoning, or at least it should.

The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949, Sarah C. M. Paine (2012). This is one of the clearest guides to overlapping wars that are usually treated as a tangle of only loosely related conflicts. Paine shows how Chinese, Japanese, Soviet, and Western aims collided, how domestic politics shaped strategy, and how a series of regional contests bled into one another. I am so impressed by her ability to pull disciplined narratives from a chaotic era. 

Madeline Field

On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist, Clarissa Ward (2021). CNN’s chief international correspondent reflects on her life and career as a female reporter assigned to some of the most brutal conflicts in the last two decades. It’s a short, and oftentimes funny, memoir full of fascinating stories from Russia to Bangladesh and Syria. Yet, it’s also a sharp examination of what conflict reporting should be, and the toll violence takes on all involved. It’s one of my favorite reads this year.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, Steve Coll (2025). I picked up this excellent book after reading a War on the Rocks book review and follow-up article from last year. This book offers a detailed look at Saddam Hussein’s psyche throughout his reign, and the nearly unbelievable series of intelligence failures and miscommunications that occurred in the leadup to the Iraq War. Coll weaves a highly convincing narrative that has quite a lot to offer to international relations students, intelligence officials, and practitioners alike. 

Richard Fontaine

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Christina Thompson (2019). This is the fascinating account of how the Polynesians settled remote islands across thousands of miles of ocean, all without maps, metal tools, or navigational instruments. Beautifully written, it tells the history of these remarkable people, their incredible feats of navigation, and the culture they built in the process.

Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara, Judith Scheele (2024). The Sahara is often thought of as empty desert, with more sand dunes than people. Yet two million make their home there, and this anthropological tale tells their stories. Totally fascinating.

Amos Fox

Ground Combat: Puncturing Myths of Modern War, Ben Connable (2025).  This book addresses many of the recurring lines of contemporary defense and security studies, to include the revolution in military affairs, that technological means can (and should) replace manpower, and that complete (or near-complete) battlefield awareness is just around the corner. Connable’s refreshing analysis takes a holistic and historical approach to the subject, and finds that in most cases these recurring ideas perpetually fail to come remotely close to achieving a fraction of what their advocates suggest is possible. In the end, Connable finds that fighting and winning in war still requires rugged military forces that are capable of iteratively persevering against seemingly insurmountable odds until the other side of a conflict is exhausted. Well worth your time.

AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military Tech Complex, Anthony King (2025). King examines the intersection of AI, human involvement, and the future of war to examine if autonomous warfare is practical. King uses case studies from recent wars in Ukraine and Gaza, among others, to find that although AI can help manage increased loads of data and make simple recommendations, it currently lacks the judgment that humans possess to make policy and command decisions in war. Thus, King argues that despite the move towards a more technocratic approach to war and warfare, humanity — for the sake of humanity — ought to cautiously approach the handover of decision-making in war to AI and autonomous systems and only do so when it doesn’t jeopardize international law and the law of armed conflict. King’s AI, Automation, and War is a truly thought-provoking tour de force.

Ulrike Franke

The Magic Bullet? Understanding the Revolution in Military Affairs, Tim Benbow (2004). It may seem odd to recommend — in 2025 — a “topical” book published over twenty years ago. But I recommend making it a habit to reread old analyses from time to time. It can help to put current debates into perspective. This is the case here. Tim Benbow takes on the “revolution in military affairs,” a concept which remains influential today, despite Benbow already noting 20 years ago that it had “transcended the status of buzzword and entered the ‘done to death’ category.” His historical analysis of past revolutions in military affairs stays as topical today as it was then. Rereading what experts thought about the then-current revolution in military affairs can help remind us how difficult it is to predict things, how important it is not to believe in the hype — but also how quickly things can indeed change.

Nicholas Hanson

Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China, Desmond Shum (2021). This memoir pulls back the curtain on the world of China’s politically connected elite, showing how wealth, power, and access rise and fall at the whim of the Chinese Communist Party. Shum traces his own climb through Beijing’s business circles, the deals that made it possible, and the sudden disappearance of his ex-wife, Whitney Duan, after she fell out of political favor. It is an unvarnished look at how influence really works in China and how quickly it can all be taken away.

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster, Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro (1997). This book gives a gripping, on-the-ground account of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and how a mix of corporate shortcuts, poor oversight, and bad luck led to one of the worst industrial accidents in history. Lapierre and Moro bring you into the lives of the families and workers who lived next to the Union Carbide plant and show how larger political and economic pressures shaped what happened. It is a sobering look at how easily systems can fail and how ordinary people often pay the highest price when they do.

Frank Hoffman

How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, Carl Benedikt Frey (2025). The author explores economic history and the optimal path to managing innovation. Frey studies the role of the state in free markets and how industrial policy impacts economic growth. His biggest conclusion is that the binary distinction between centralized versus decentralized approaches is limited. Frey contends that nations need decentralized exploration of new technologies to stimulate invention as well as competent managers to efficiently produce innovative products at scale. The fate of nations hangs in finding the right balance. The alternative is the prospect of stagnation.

War and Power: Who Wins Wars―and Why, Phillipps Payson O’Brien (2025). The central theme in War and Power is that God and fortune are not necessarily on the side of the biggest battalions. The war against Ukraine is just the latest example that there is more to success in war than having the most troops or ships. Wars are clashes of complex systems and institutions, as well as trials of both social and industrial mobilization.  Forecasting the interaction of these interactions is difficult and humbling. An excellent blend of history that illuminates the enduring continuities of war.

Rick Landgraf

Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Daniela Richterova (2025). In the middle of the Cold War, Prague was a hotbed of espionage. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Richterova takes us behind the curtain to see how states liaison with non-state actors through clandestine networks to advance their interests.

The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America’s Cold War, Robert F. Williams (2025). This book traces the origins and the eventual reach of a powerful subculture in the U.S. Army: the airborne. Williams demonstrates how a small group of World War II paratroopers made a lasting impression on how the Army trained and fought in the Cold War.

David Maxwell

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, Robert D. Kaplan (2025). One of my favorite Kaplan books yet. He argues that the post-Cold War global order is unraveling much like the Weimar Republic because liberal institutions, hierarchies, and norms are collapsing. Kaplan traces how interconnected crises (war, climate change, technology, migration) threaten systemic stability and contends that order must come before freedom. He warns that without renewed emphasis on governance and tradition, the world risks sliding into autocracy or chaos.

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, Thomas Ricks (2017). Ricks shows how Winston Churchill and George Orwell, from opposite backgrounds, became twin defenders of liberty. Churchill fought fascism through action. Orwell battled totalitarianism through truth and words. Both upheld individual freedom and moral courage against authoritarianism, shaping democracy’s survival in the 20th century.

Mike Mazarr

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr (2016). Mokyr won the Nobel Prize in economics this year, and for good reason. At a time when great powers will be contending for power amid growing headwinds and multiple crises, understanding the true domestic foundations of dynamism is essential to choose public policies that feed national competitiveness rather than sap it. Mokyr’s brilliant analysis describes the sort of intellectual and institutional environment we need.

The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture At Its Limits, Jed Esty (2022). One doesn’t have to agree that the United States is destined to become a “second-place nation” to get striking value from Esty’s long essay. He challenges Americans to think about the kind of nation they want to be in the post-primacy era, when the dominant impulse is still to hit the reset button.

Walker Mills

How the United States Would Fight China, Franz-Stefan Gady (2025). Backed by years of research and conversations from inside the U.S. national security establishment, Gady succinctly outlines how the United States would fight a war against the People’s Republic of China (as the title suggests) as well as why current approaches may fail, and could trigger nuclear escalation. His work is a sobering assessment that should trigger self-reflection among practitioners and policymakers in the U.S. national security establishment.

Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy, Toshi Yoshihara (2022). Dr. Yoshihara explains an understudied and often overlooked, but critical chapter in the military history of the People’s Republic of China — the early amphibious campaigns against Nationalist forces. Using fresh primary sources, he explains how the People’s Liberation Army rapidly built a coastal navy and amphibious force and began a campaign that only stalled with the outbreak of the Korean War, and in the process gained critical experience and a founding narrative that the People’s Liberation Army Navy hold onto through the present day.

Grace Parcover

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History, Casey Michel (2024). The book brilliantly traces how the United States built a financial and legal system that attracts and protects hidden wealth, ultimately becoming what Michel calls “the greatest kleptocratic haven in the world.” Through the case studies of “Teodorin” Obiang and Ihor Kolomoisky, Michel illustrates how individual kleptocrats have exploited longstanding loopholes to launder billions of illicit funds. It’s a revealing and highly readable exploration of a system whose consequences touch far beyond America’s borders.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, Michael Lewis (2017). This book brings to life the brilliant, complicated partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose groundbreaking research reshaped our understanding of how humans think and make decisions. Lewis turns their scientific partnership, and its eventual unraveling, into a compelling narrative, showing how their insights into heuristics, bias, and risk gave rise to behavioral economics and changed the way we see the world.

Iskander Rehman

Strategy and Grand Strategy, Joshua Rovner (2025). How should one distinguish between strategy (a theory of victory) and grand strategy (a theory of security)? And perhaps even more importantly, in what instances might they fail to coincide? In this elegantly argued Adelphi book, Rovner employs this deceptively simple framework to engage in a lively and sophisticated examination of the oft-hidden long-term costs, or ramifications, of certain courses of action in foreign policy. Deeply grounded in history, this is destined to become a classic in the field of strategic studies. The chapter on the effects and costs of France’s game changing involvement in the American Revolution — a case of catastrophic success if ever there was one — is particularly worthwhile, and almost worth the price of admission alone.

The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, Ecyk Freymann and Harry Halem (2025). An excellent, historically informed and readily accessible primer to some of the major challenges currently facing the U.S. military and defense industrial base. The authors offer a brisk, bracing diagnosis, and the chapter on logistics — a crucial but often neglected topic — is especially useful. The book is also freely available for download.

Joseph Wehmeyer

Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime, David Barno and Nora Bensahel (2020). Recommended to me by someone on this list, this book illustrates that not all things — conflicts included — unfold as we might expect (or after years of planning and investment, hope) they will. Through their case studies, Barno and Bensahel make a decisive argument that in the face of unpredictability that the battlefield presents, militaries must adapt rapidly, and that the costs of not doing so could very well be the difference between victory and defeat. Many of the same lessons apply off the battlefield as well.

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel, Tom Wainwright (2016). Chock-full of firsthand anecdotes from around the world, Wainwright’s investigative journalism offers key insights into how cartels — and the methods used to combat them — are often misunderstood. This is a thought-provoking book, and the business principles it outlines are as relevant today as they were almost a decade ago.

Nicole Wiley

Hiroshima, John Hersey (1946). In the business we’re in, it can be easy to talk about weapons as numbers, capabilities, or dollar signs — but Hersey’s journalistic account of the human beings affected by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima reminds us that weapons (and how they’re used) mean more than numbers. This remarkable book is a much needed “go touch some grass” reminder for those of us in the national security space.

The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, Liza Mundy (2023). Women’s contributions in the intelligence community are more recognized now than ever before, thanks to films like “Zero Dark Thirty” that highlighted the role of women in discovering Osama bin Laden’s compound hideout. If you’re looking for the lesser known stories of women in intelligence (and the history of how they got into the field in the first place), this book will do the trick.

John Allen Williams

Grant, Ron Chernow (2017) and Robert E. Lee: A Life, Allen C. Guelzo (2005). Most readers of War on the Rocks are familiar with these books and already know a lot about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, but they are still a fascinating and informative read. Grant’s reputation for his generalship and his presidency was greatly enhanced by Chernow’s book. Lee remains a divisive figure, and rightly so. Guelzo doesn’t try to whitewash the fact that Lee betrayed his oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and led the military battle to preserve slavery, and I’m happy the statues are going down. Nevertheless, Lee remains an important historical figure and perhaps a cautionary tale. Those interested in Lee’s postwar life should consult Charles Bracelen Flood’s Lee: The Last Years.

Image: Midjourney