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National Security Dilemmas: Challenges and Opportunities. By Colin S. Gray. Washington: Potomac Books, 2009. 334 pages. $60.00.
Colin Gray's latest book, National Security Dilemmas, is a collection of essays dealing with a range of issues too broad to simply and succinctly recount. How, indeed, is one to adequately express the sweeping breadth of a book that has such range? It will have to be enough to merely convey a general sense of the volume.
It feels a tad unseemly to review Colin Gray's latest work within the pages of the Army War College's top-level publication. After all, the original versions of six of the book's eight chapters appeared first as independent monographs on different, though related, topics published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. From a strictly academic point of view, this approach borders on the intellectual equivalent of dating your second cousin. Exacerbating this reviewer's discomfort is the fact that this is a damned fine book, a worthy and useful addition to the bookshelf of any strategist-academic, practitioner, or theorist.
Indeed, the most difficult thing about reviewing many of Colin Gray's books is not finding things to say about them but deciding when to cut things off lest you appear sycophantic. Thankfully, here at least this reviewer is not alone....