Commander Canadian Army's Reading List Supplement No. 6

Welcome to the Commander Canadian Army’s Reading List Supplement No. 6. The Commander Canadian Army’s Reading List was first published in January 2016 and since then supplements have been published twice a year. The aim of the supplements is to ensure that the Canadian Army (CA) remains well read in the profession of arms and current security challenges. Each supplement has four main sections, an overall theme supported by three sub-themes, a special focus section, new books received by the Fort Frontenac Library, and a forthcoming book of interest. Chief Warrant Officer Stephen G. McNabb of the PME section has written a piece for the Special Focus Section on the state of PME for non-commissioned members.

The overall theme for this issue is the perception of threats, problems, concepts and narratives by armies. The sub-themes are Cognitive Dominance, The Future of Counterinsurgency and Measuring Success in War. The goal of cognitively dominating an adversary, the gaining of “intellectual advantage” over a situation or adversary—proactive agility over reactive adaptation—is as old as war itself, but difficult to attain. It would be of inestimable value if the CA could achieve T. E. Lawrence’s model of “perfect ‘intelligence’” so that we could, in his words, “plan in certainty.”1 However, the relentless parade of theories, models, concepts, paradigms and narratives with which the CA must continually wrestle makes the quest for cognitive dominance at any one point in time in the present, let alone in the future, extraordinarily difficult. Despite the challenges, the goal of CognitiveDominance should be pursued because the quest, if undertaken with the willingness to test and discard biases, assumptions, visions and narratives, should ultimately make the CA stronger intellectually. In other words, read often, think critically and use this supplement as the genesis of your own personal reading list.