Professional Reading List

Collins and his research team studied 1,435 companies over forty years to identify the eleven that made sustained transitions from good to great performance, then reverse-engineered what those companies had in common. The findings — Level 5 Leadership (leaders who combine personal humility with professional will), the Hedgehog Concept (doing one thing better than anyone else in the world), a culture of discipline, and technology as an accelerator of existing momentum rather than a substitute for it — have been applied widely across military organizations. On the Air Force enlisted professional military education track because the question it answers — what turns a competent institution into an exceptional one — is the question every unit commander asks. The contrast between good-enough and great performance is especially pointed in an organization where the gap between the two is measured in aircraft and aircrew.

Grant's argument that the ability to reconsider — to update beliefs in response to new evidence rather than defend prior positions — is the most underrated cognitive skill in professional and organizational life. His framework distinguishes between thinking like a scientist (forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence) versus thinking like a preacher (defending your beliefs), a prosecutor (attacking others'), or a politician (pursuing approval). The military application is direct: the organizations that failed most catastrophically in the post-9/11 wars were the ones that couldn't update doctrine and strategy in response to evidence that their initial assessments were wrong. On the CMSAF reading list.

Lencioni's framework for team failure — presented as a fable about a CEO taking over a dysfunctional Silicon Valley company — identifies five nested dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The model is sequential: each dysfunction enables the next, and fixing it requires starting at the bottom. The military application is direct: every team that underperforms in garrison or in combat is usually traceable to one of these five failure modes. On the CMSAF enlisted PME reading list because the problems Lencioni describes — teams that avoid productive conflict, leaders who cannot hold peers accountable, units that mistake unanimity for commitment — are exactly the problems that erode effectiveness before they erode performance.

Singer and Brooking's analysis of how social media has become a weapon of war — how state and non-state actors weaponize information networks to shape narratives, recruit fighters, coordinate action, and manipulate adversary populations. The case studies span ISIS's social media strategy, Russian information operations in Ukraine and the 2016 U.S. election, Chinese influence campaigns, and the ways that the viral dynamics of social platforms amplify extremist content. On the CMSAF reading list because information operations are now conducted by every level of the military, and understanding the environment those operations occur in is prerequisite to conducting them effectively or defending against them.

Greenberg traced the Russian military hacking unit GRU Sandworm from their first intrusions into Ukrainian power grids in 2015 through their deployment of the NotPetya malware in 2017 — the most destructive cyberattack in history, which caused ten billion dollars in damage and shut down shipping, logistics, and financial systems across the globe. The book is the most complete available account of what large-scale offensive cyber operations look like in practice: the target selection, the tools, the operational security failures that revealed the unit, and the absence of any effective response from the countries attacked. On the CMSAF reading list because cyber is the Air Force's fourth domain and most Airmen don't understand what operations in it actually look like.

Ackerman is a Marine veteran and novelist; Stavridis is a retired four-star admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander. Their near-future novel about a U.S.-China naval war that begins with a confrontation in the South China Sea and escalates to nuclear use is written with the operational specificity that only actual commanders can bring to the scenario — the chain of decisions, the command breakdown, the escalation that becomes uncontrollable not from intent but from the institutional logic of conflict. Unlike Ghost Fleet, which focuses on tactical innovation, 2034 focuses on strategic failure: how a war that neither side wants begins and cannot be stopped once it starts. On the CMSAF reading list as the fiction that policy analysis cannot fully replace.