The author is a veteran of many tours of duty in the Middle East with extensive experience as a military advisor and lifelong training in martial arts. He wrote this brief treatise to explain the mechanics of violence, hoping to help military personnel improve their performance and civilians "grow the peace."

He lays out "Nolan's Natural Laws of Violence," which are:
1. The first participant to effectively use violence will be victorious.
2. Violence naturally tends to escalate.
3. Action is required to be victorious in violent situations.
4. The ideal position for a participant is one where the participant can effectively execute violence against others, but others cannot effectively execute violence against the participant.

When you first read these, you may think, well duh, these are obvious. But the way the author explains them makes you realize that these aren't merely tactics, but natural laws. And if they were obvious, then history wouldn't be filled with examples of armies ignoring these laws (and consequently losing wars). I've never served, but I'm a veteran of countless computer game wars, and it struck me how effectively these laws apply in Starcraft and Mass Effect.

He makes a lot of other observations I like:
- To be generous, you have to have some power over the person you're helping.
- Because violence and warfare are governed by natural laws that don't care about any human being's opinion, one must have the discipline to be absolutely rational and objective.
- Violence is the very foundation of all human law. This is something I've believed for a long time; I think I picked it up from Ayn Rand. But the author goes on to explain something I didn't realize: that "honor" may seem like an intangible value, but people who fight for honor are really fighting for wealth, success, sex, and the other tangible things that come with being considered honorable. That ties back to the earlier lesson of needing to put aside emotions in favor of objective truth.
- He expresses great admiration for the "monetization of violence" (i.e., a legal system in which people are financially penalized for their crimes and torts). Countries that don't have a strong law-and-order system that monetizes most violence are rather unpleasant places to live.
- Traditions and rituals in both martial arts and the military help hone disicipline, focus, and group cohesion. I usually scoff at rituals and traditions, but now I'm reconsidering my attitude about them.
- Military personnel who commit atrocities are themselves enemies, and should be dealt with mercilessly. This is a great point, and I feel the same about the many veterans who participated in the 1/6 terrorist attack on the Capitol. It grieves me that they haven't been adequately punished. Again, we need to monetize our violence better!

Though I enjoyed this short read, I feel it's incomplete. After laying out the four laws, the book loses structure, and you can kind of tell this from the valuable but disparate observations I note above. He promises to explore both the "masculine, straight-line and rational" and the "feminine, circular, and intuitive" aspects of violence, which he later calls Ares and Athena. I was really looking forward to this breakdown, but it's not really there. And while I think this book can help military personnel and those who are thinking of joining, I don't think civilians have as much to gain. There's potential for this book to have the same appeal in corporate boardrooms as Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Vyasa's Bhagavad Gita, if it's fleshed out into something more well-rounded. ( )

Caveat: this book was read as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. As a former military officer, I found this a good little book; given my view of the author's purpose of providing a book a theory level book with some more concrete information aimed to be understood by junior enlisted personnel, I think he did pretty well. I found some of the definitions and concepts very useful ("valid unknowns" being pretty powerful, even if slightly Rumsfeldian), along with the ideas of masculine and feminine concepts of violence. It's short and not very deep, but it's also not supposed to be and I think that works in its favor.
My only criticism is that I would have liked some illustrations, diagrams, charts, or other visual displays to lay out some of the ideas, but that's pretty minor. ( )