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.