Leadership and Professionalism Reading List: Psychology

Rejecting accepted theories for unexpected military disasters, the authors brilliantly analyze disasters of great magnitude. They assert that military misfortune turns not on individual or collective failure but is rooted in the nature of the complex interconnections between men, systems, and organizations.

The Face of Battle is military history from the battlefield: a look at the direct experience of individuals at the "point of maximum danger." Without the myth-making elements of rhetoric and xenophobia, and breaking away from the stylized format of battle descriptions. John Keegan has written what is probably the definitive model for military historians. And in his scrupulous reassessment of three battles representative of three different time periods, he manages to convey what the experience of combat meant for the participants, whether they were facing the arrow cloud of Agincourt, the musket balls at Waterloo, or the steel rain of the Somme. Book jacket.