The Bomber Mafia

4.5Gladwell is upfront that this isn't like his other books in the subject matter. At the very end he mentions that unlike traditional book this was created as an audiobook first before being published in print. This is a rich audiobook in that it is more than just Gladwell's voice, he uses audio clips of interviews, segments of news reports (pretty cool to hear Ronald Regan voicing some of them), music, and the sound of planes.The first half of the book is more about Britain's engagement with Germany and the latter half is of the US in the Pacific. I really appreciate Gladwell also giving some of Japan's perspective. He visits a Japanese museum, plays an account of a Japanese woman who had survived the fire bombing of her city, and some Japanese war propaganda. Gladwell also goes into the origin of napalm, oof napalm is some horrific stuff.I listened to this as I was also reading [b:Verax: A Graphic History of Electronic Surveillance 33911351 Verax The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance A Graphic Novel Pratap Chatterjee https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499741786l/33911351.SX50.jpg 54876816] and wonder what he would have thought of drone strikes as I consider them to be the epitome of precision bombing. Near the end Gladwell mentions that ‘it has its own set of drawbacks. If your target is a single man inside a room then you have to have intelligence good enough to tell you that man is the man you want. And when you have a way of hitting that man inside a room then it becomes awfully easy to decide to strike, doesn't it. They all worried about that fact. The cleaner and the more precise a bomber gets the more tempting it is to use that bomber even when you shouldn't.'