Living in an Age of Danger
BOOK REVIEW: Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats
By Andrew Hoehn and Thom Shanker / Hachette Books
The Reviewer: George Galdorisi is Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures for the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific. Prior to joining NIWC Pacific, he completed a thirty-year career as a naval aviator, executive officer, commanding officer, commodore, and chief of staff. He is the author of fifteen books, including four consecutive New York Times bestsellers. His most recent novel is Fire and Ice.
REVIEW – At a time when the United States faces unprecedented threats to its security and prosperity, we all are in search of a book that will help us understand how we arrived at this precarious position, what spectrum of dangers face us, and what this nation must do to most effectively deal with these threats.
Andrew Hoehn, Senior Vice President of Research at the RAND corporation, and Thom Shanker, Director of the Project for Media and National Security and former Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times’ Washington Bureau, have written a book that is truly a must read. Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons and New Threats provides a well-nuanced understanding of not only headline-grabbing threats from nations such as China and Russia, but also a plethora of below-the radar-threats like AI-enabled weapons of war, cyber-security, climate change, pandemics, food insecurity, and others almost too numerous to mention.
The book’s organization is one of its strongest points. It moves smartly through four parts describing how we got to the age of danger, great power rivalries and the new superpowers, new weapons and new threats, and finally, what needs to be done to, in the authors’ words, to dramatically revamp the entire U.S. national security structure. Importantly, this book reads like a novel in that the reader will find it hard to put down, always seeking to find out what happens next.
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This book is not a polemic that suggests that everything is broken, but rather a clear-headed and well-reasoned argument that the U.S. policy, intelligence and military structures, many of which date back to the end of World War II, are no longer adequate to deal with today’s, and especially tomorrow’s, threats. The prescriptions for change will not be easy to instantiate, but most readers will agree that this call to action is worthy of initiating a national dialogue.
Written in a style that will appeal to a wide range of readers, from the layperson to the policy expert, Age of Danger will no doubt help all who care about this nation’s security and prosperity to find a way to make that a reality.
Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons and New Threats earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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