The life of a student of policy or an academic is not so much about reading books as it is about reading so much about books that you don’t have to read the books themselves. The national security field is sufficiently broad that one cannot hope to read every important book in a year. Staying informed represents a form of triage, struggling to keep up with the avalanche of information.

But important books have a penumbra, an impact that’s obvious beyond their specific content. To be sure, the final result often proves disappointing—I remain bitter toward the people who convinced me to read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—but very often the buzz surrounding a book makes it imperative to, eventually, read and evaluate it. The following list is of the important books of 2013 that should be on your radar for 2014.

My specific interests are in the history and the nature of the organizations that make up our national security state. Broadly speaking, the books below are about our national security state, how it came to be, what it has become, and what it worries about. We talk a great deal about grand strategy, but the production of grand strategy and the delineation of the national interest depends, to large extent, on how we structure our national security institutions.

The following five books speak to how the national security institutions of the United States came to be, how they have evolved in the face of daunting problems, and how they engage with the current strategic environment.

Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945: Aviation historian Richard Overy has produced what amounts to a magnum opus, an over-seven-hundred-page evaluation of the practice of strategic bombing in World War II. This is the best single-volume treatment of the strategic bombing in the European theater, involving not only a detailed assessment of the Blitz and the Combined Bomber Offensive, but also a good account of the less well-known strategic campaigns in Russia and the Mediterranean.

What relevance does this have for modern strategic practice? This history remains important for two reasons. First, as Overy points out, the most murderous forms of strategic bombing, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were crushed, suffocated, or incinerated, were practiced by the two most democratic regimes of the Second World War: the United States and the United Kingdom. While Germany and Japan undertook what was understood at the time as “terror bombing,” they were not well prepared to do so, and their attacks generally had only tactical and operational objectives. The bombing of Rotterdam killed 900 civilians; the firestorm of Hamburg killed 42,000. Ethically, the United States and the United Kingdom have yet to fully engage with this reality. Empirically, we still need a better understanding of how and why it happened.

Second, the idea of quick, winnable wars through the practice of airpower remains close to the heart of American strategic thought. The Combined Bomber Offensive represented a massive investment of scientific and engineering resources on the part of the world’s most advanced economies. Along with the Manhattan Project, it prefigured the relationship that would develop in the Cold War between the scientific community, advanced industry, and various organs of the national security state.

Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War:For aficionados of the modern national security state, the ‘founders’ are not Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, but rather the men who reorganized the American defense bureaucracy in the wake of World War II. Indeed, Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department is perhaps the most appropriately titled autobiography in the history of national security studies.

Following up on The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Nicholas Thompson’s very interesting dual biography of George Kennan and Paul Nitze, The Brothers examines the contribution of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. In a very important sense, the debates today over the nature and expanse of the national security state are an answer to the questions posed by the Dulles brothers and their partners.

The Dulles brothers are particularly interesting in the context of their contribution to “dirty wars” in Central America and elsewhere. The shadowy, extralegal use of the national security organs of the United States prefigured the current debate over how precisely the United States ought to fight Al Qaeda and similar organizations, and of the moral and legal trade-offs associated with ‘gloves off’ combat against complex, multi-faceted international threats.

Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety: Enjoying one of the most well-developed PR campaigns of recent memory, Schlosser’s Command and Control examines the early years of U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Schlosser tells horror stories, including the tale of the near-bombing of Goldsboro, North Carolina. The story involves more than its share of inter-organizational conflict; the creation of the United States Air Force left the U.S. military establishment in a mess, as the services fought bitterly to maintain missions and turf. As Schlosser notes, the difficulties of managing nuclear weapons has never quite been adequately solved in the United States, leaving the ability of newer nuclear powers to manage similar problems in deep question. Much of the story that Schlosser tells is familiar, but what Schlosser is really recounting is the story of how bureaucracies struggled to manage new, unfamiliar strategic and technological realities.

Cathy Scott Clark and Adrian Levy, The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel:The Siege examines the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, an incident that remains understudied from political and operational perspectives. Clark and Levy detail the tactical preparations of Lashkar-e-Taiba for the attack, but also examine the geopolitical and diplomatic contexts into which the attack reverberated.

Put bluntly, Mumbai is the nightmare for police and counter-terror forces around the world, especially given the inability of India and the United States to pressure Pakistan into cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Mumbai terrorists attacked the seams of the national security state, taking advantage of numerous openings: ineffective maritime patrol, unprepared police forces, military forces uncertain of jurisdiction, and political officials with cross-cutting and ambiguous lines of authority.

More than the spectacular attacks against airliners, the Mumbai attacks represent the genuine threat that well organized, funded, and trained terrorist organizations can pose. It’s this threat that, in many ways, animates the desire of the United States to continue to disrupt Al Qaeda through air and special forces attacks into Pakistan and Yemen, regardless of how damaging those attacks may be to the local populations. Faced with the struggle of defending against an attack of the sort launched in Mumbai, policymakers naturally tend to opt for the offensive.

Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield: Several excellent books on the developing national security state emerged recently, including Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, Brian Glyn Williams’ Predators: The CIA's Drone War on al Qaeda, and Lloyd Gardner’s Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare. Like several of these, Dirty Wars presents a critical look at how the U.S. national security bureaucracy has developed since September 11, 2001. With significant on-the-ground investigative reporting, Scahill shows the impact of wars that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the CIA have waged in Pakistan and Yemen, and also discusses how the internal logics of the national security state have produced a world in which it makes legal and political sense to strike American citizens in distant locales.

Concluding Thoughts

In no small part because of the revelations of Edward Snowden, the next few years promise to be extremely fertile for evaluating and re-evaluating the national security state. As the dust settles around the NSA, we can expect longer treatments of what Snowden managed to do, and how his actions may affect the long-term prospects of the national security state. We can also expect more detailed assessments of the drone war, as well as more careful accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether these works will lead to a serious restructuring of the national security bureaucracy is a different question, but before reform must come understanding.

Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs.He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter: @drfarls.