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The Field of Fight: How to Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies Lt. Gen. Michael T Flynn and Michael Ledeen St. Martin S Press, 2016
As director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was the United States' top military intelligence officer until he was fired in 2014 for not putting the desired gloss on his testimony before a Congressional committee. Offense was taken when he opined that "we were not as safe as we had been a few years back." Flynn is now more appreciated by presidential candidate Donald Trump, for whom he is said to be the chief military adviser. Indeed, he was prominently mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate. We can surmise that in addition to assigning value to Flynn's experience in intelligence, Trump - himself quite a renegade - has seen in Flynn characteristics he finds appealing: independence and a desire to "tell it like it is," a rejection of "political correctness" as an ideological straitjacket, and a skeptical attitude toward the elites that constitute the de facto government of the United States. In these things, Flynn and Trump are cut from the same cloth.
Readers are in for a surprise, however. What most cries out about this book is how much it reveals a sharp difference between how the two men would have the United States act toward other countries. Although their views may converge over time, Flynn and Trump voice two very different strategies. A great deal rides on which one is chosen.
In The Field of Fight, Flynn accepts the worldwide democratizing mission that has so long been central to the thinking of each side of the political spectrum in the United States. (This has been basic to both the Right's "neo-conservatism" and the Left's "foreign policy neo-liberalism.") He writes that he "fervently believes" that "advancing freedom... is in our American national interest," and goes on to say that "part of our national mission is to support democratic revolutionaries against their oppressors." In common with the neos of both schools, he advocates sponsoring "regime change" in several countries. The preferred method has been through "color" or "velvet" revolutions that bring down regimes through "popular uprisings" such as the "Orange Revolution" in...