To advance the conversation around critical topics in national security and the U.S. role in the world, BENS publishes our list of books representing all-time favorites and new releases. The list includes essential works on statecraft, geopolitics, and civil-military relations, as well as emerging challenges in political risk and foreign policy.
A selected book from the list is featured each month in our Executive Brief newsletter. We hope the writers and topics represented on the reading list will generate ideas for future events, providing members with opportunities to discuss issues of interest with authors and experts directly.
Foundations of Strategy
Strategic Thinking in 3D: A Guide for National Security, Foreign Policy, and Business Professionals
By Ross Harrison, 2013
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
By Richard Rumelt, 2011
American National Security Strategy, 7th edition
By Michael Meese, Suzanne Nielsen, and Rachel Sondheimer, 2018
Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity
By Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart, 2018
7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century
By Andrew Krepinevich, 2009
Orchestrating the Instruments of Power: A Critical Examination of the U.S. National Security System
By D. Robert Worley, 2015
Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World
By Robert Gates, 2020
Statecraft and Geopolitics
On Grand Strategy
By John Lewis Gaddis, 2018
Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
By Robert D. Kaplan, 2018
Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World
By Dennis Ross, 2008
The Post-American World
By Fareed Zakaria, 2008
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
By Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, 2013 edition
War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft
By Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, 2016
The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West
By David Kilcullen, 2020
War and the Art of Governance: Converting Combat Success into Political Victory
By Nadia Schadlow, 2017
The Ambassadors: Thinking About Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times
By Robert Cooper, 2020
REgional Security
The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
By Thomas Christensen, 2015
The American War in Afghanistan: A History
By Carter Malkasian, 2021
Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific
By Robert D. Kaplan, 2015
Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West
By Sam Cooper, 2021
Civil-Military Relations
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
By Rosa Brooks, 2017
The Culture of Military Organizations
Edited by Peter R. Mansoor and Murray Williamson, 2019
America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
By Robert B. Zoellick, 2020
Adversaries
The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
By Andrew J. Bacevich, 2020
The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran
By David Crist, 2013
Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949
By M. Taylor Fravel, 2019
Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
By Fred M. Kaplan, 2016
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
By Yasha Levine, 2018
The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Constraint and the Pursuit of National Interests. 3rd edition.
By James Clay Moltz, 2019
My Journey at the Nuclear Brink
By William J. Perry, 2015
The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare
By Christian Brose, 2020
Wireless Wars: China's Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We're Fighting Back
By Jonathan Pelson, 2021
AI Superpowers
By Kai-Fu Lee, 2018
China's Leaders: From Mao to Now
By David Shambaugh, 2021
Budgetary Concerns, Research, and Defense Contractors
The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency
By Annie Jacobsen, 2015
Defense Management Reform: How to Make the Pentagon Work Better and Cost Less
By Peter Levine, 2020
Business Innovation
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
By Safi Bahcall, 2019
U.S. Politics
The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
By Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter, 2020
First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
By Thomas Ricks, 2020