Gordon B Greer – författare

The author compares five primitive life forms from the Burgess Shale of over 500,000,000 years ago to five new technologies invented or developed in the first decade of the twentieth century in terms of their development and importance both in the past and for the future. He speculates on some possible alternative courses of history if different events had occurred during the first decade and what effect those alternative courses might have had on our lives today.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, American citizens within the United States constantly worry about security against future terrorist attacks. But author Gordon Greer delves further into this subject by trying to understand why the general public is so intent on the ramifications of security measures, such as the Patriot Act.

The history of warfare might provide an answer. Greer examines domestic security throughout the history of the United States. During a period of war or the aftermath of war, the American government has generally found it necessary to install security measures that may limit a citizen''s basic rights or freedoms.

Greer discusses these security issues from the earliest history of the United States, beginning with the early American settlers and the Revolutionary War through World War II and the Cold War. Greer points out that ordinary American citizens may chafe under the constraints such wars produce simply because the United States has arguably never been a totalitarian government.

What Price Security? is a thought-provoking look at a subject that affects us all, offering insight into how America can protect itself against future attacks.

Mr. Greer outlines the not well-known aircraft and activities of the United States Air Force''s all-weather fighters during the first part of the Cold War. He covers the organization, development and decline of the all-weather force in response to the Soviet Union''s long-range strategic bomber force equipped with atomic weapons. The author describes not only the individual aircraft from the early night fighters of World War II through the F-106A of the seventies and beyond but also the control organization that directed them until the whole operation was made superfluous by the ballistic missile standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the Cold War.

In attempting to analyze the role of luck in war, a rather narrow definition of luck is necessary. The conventional dictionary definitions of luck are "a force that brings good fortune or adversity" and "the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual." Those definitions are so broad that they would appear to cover many, perhaps most, events in war. There is in literature an old expression, deus ex machina, a translation into Latin of the original Greek thos ek mechans. While it literally translates as "a god from a machine", its meaning is a person or thing that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty. In the book a similar but probably unique concept, felix ex machina, will be used to denote certain extreme instances of luck which was relatively sudden, completely unexpected with dramatic consequences, good or bad, in war.