Extremely crude and deeply sexist throughout.
Too misanthropic to be even called racist.
Proud and devout lover of death, rape, genocide, killing, etc.

And with that out of the way.

Most military books are either written for A) Historians or B) Military or Ex-Military people, this makes a vast majority of them either hopelessly outdated for the last 60 odd years of irregular conflicts that have consistently stymied the most expensive and elaborate armies that humanity could bring to bear OR just plain gobbledey-gook that you need 15 years of military experience and far too much faith in Uncle Sam to understand.

Or both.

The War Nerd is an extremely readable world tour of various wars, conflicts, terrorisms and other deadly occurrences. Brecher is consistencly acerbic and crude about just about any horrible and graphic event you can imagine; BUT assuming you can move past that Brecher offers an extremely cohesive and convincing guide to what warfare in the 21st century is.

Brecher tackles the questions of irregular warfare that America has spent trillions of dollars and countless lives trying to answer and comes up with simple and compelling analysis of what went wrong and what went right in various conflicts across the globe.

If you don't really know how America lost in Iraq or what is happening when the news mentions a conflict in Africa this book will give you a more readable and broader view than many others out there.

Just read with a handful of salt.

There are few better “American” prosaists. I've followed Dr. Dolan for more than a decade. You generally need a sense of humor, sarcasm, and an inclination to low people and places to truly appreciate him... But I GENUINELY believe he has a record, voice, and style to live eternally in the literary aether.

Almost knocked off a star because the writer overdoes the Gary Brecher persona, but they're unparalleled in presenting international military events in a straightforward, interesting way. This book and The War Nerd Dispatches were excellent starting points for me in understanding recent military history all over the world. They changed the way I read international news – after reading Brecher, I open up drier sources on some ethnic conflict going on in [country] and go, "ah, the group that did [colorful anecdote] in the 90s against [enemy group]!"

I found Brecher's edgelord irrelevance helpful – he sounds like an unreliable source, so I kept looking up fishy sounding details to check for corroborating sources, and learned more in the process. (The majority of things I looked up are true, some things are unfindable – no English source on [Satanist cult in North Africa] – and some things are 'I can only find one example of the thing he mentions', as in the case of Kim Jong Il abducting South Korean actresses.) Brecher does not come off as authoritative, and therefore the understanding of world events he gave me is not one I'll hesitate to correct when faced with other evidence.

A valuable thing I got out of this book is a sense of the sameness of military conflicts, across the world now and across time. The same general class of postcolonial ethnic tensions, religious dynamics, patterns of bribery/funding, recruitment pools, guerrilla tactics.

Another is a sense of when national borders are and are not important: "What you really see when you look hard at places like Mauritania is how unimportant these countries’ borders really are. What’s happening here is happening all across the Sahel: North vs. South, Arab vs. “black,” Islam vs. Western. And all of it is bubbling up against a background of rapid desertification plus rising birthrate."

I found it a great intro to international relations and military history.

snarky but good facts

When he’s talking about the Iran-Iraq war, he writes: “One of the shiny new toys Saddam had picked up on his shopping trips was the Exocet, an antiship missile that the French were peddling to anybody who had a coastline and a grudge." It’s not even one of the top ten funniest lines in the book, but it made me burst out laughing.