The Portable Pat Lang: Essential Writings on History, War, Religion, and Strategy

by W. Patrick Lang

Overview

An anthology of articles, speeches, and commentaries on contemporary affairs by one of America’s leading soldiers, scholars, and spymasters, Col. W. Patrick Lang (USA-ret.). Must-read for anyone wishing to dig deeper into contemporary Middle East history, the twists and turns of the US intelligence community, the Iraq War, the state of Islam, and modern US military strategy. The anthology includes short fiction by the author focused from the epoch of the Crusades and the US Civil War aftermath. Col. Lang is the author of six books, including an historical fiction trilogy of Civil War espionage, a memoir, and a primer on human intelligence. His website turcopolier.com has had over 40 million unique visits and hosts an active committee of correspondence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781663248435
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/14/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Col. W. Patrick Lang spent 26 years in the infantry, Special Forces, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He served in Vietnam, as Military Attache in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and in special assignments in the Middle East. Lang was Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, ran DIA Global Humint, and was the first Professor of Arab Language at West Point. He graduated from Virginia Military Institute (VMI). He is the author of six books, including an historical fiction trilogy on US Civil War espionage, a memoir, a primer on human intelligence, and this anthology of essays and short fiction.

Editorial Reviews

03/06/2023

It’s a sign of humility that this illuminating collection from Lang, an Army colonel and retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s global human intelligence service, isn’t titled I Told You So. In the many clear-eyed essays and other writings within, Lang surveys the U.S.’s 21st century intelligence gathering and military strategy, often stating, in pieces from the early 2000s, hard truths about Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern countries that would be borne out over long, painful years. Today these warnings that weren’t heeded offer an urgent reminder of what went wrong.

Lang demonstrates his independence, boldness, and acute understanding from the start, with a 2002 piece declaring the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate covering Iraq’s capacity for weapons of mass destruction “the worst constructed, most illogical and indeed dishonest document of its kind that I have ever seen.” Weight of evidence justifies the heated tone, as Lang breaks down, in that essay and others, the intrusion of bureaucrats and politicians into the ways that intelligence is “collected, collated, analyzed, and disseminated.” As he considers the nation’s mistakes and misapprehensions in the face of terrorism and counterinsurgency, Lang writes with clarity and insight (“To be blunt, our foreign policy tends to be predicated on the notion that everyone wants to be an American”), drawing on a host of historical examples, lessons from his own career, and deep knowledge about the Middle East and Islam.

“The Al-Qaeda that most Americans imagine does not exist,” Lang writes in a 2006 essay worth celebrating for its prescience. Elsewhere, he sounds the alarm not only that the U.S. couldn’t succeed in Afghanistan but that even defining a “win” was impossible. In speeches, book reviews, proposals, and other forms, Lang writes with inviting prose and rare persuasive power, for an audience of intelligence and military experts and strategists but also lay readers, never simply relying on his credentials. Engaging short fictions set in other eras round out the collection, each offering insights.

Takeaway: Prescient, clear-eyed essays about what could—and often did—go wrong for the U.S. in the Middle East.

Great for fans of: Richard H. Shultz’s Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War, Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco.

Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews