Below is a list of some of the books, blogs, and other media which I’ve found insightful. Let me know if you have any suggested reads in the comments below. This is still a work in progress!

I’ve included more detail on some of the books below in this article about what life in the military is really like.

Military culture and norms

• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
• Sword of Honour series, Evelyn Waugh
• On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon
• August 1914, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy
• 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, Elliot Ackerman, Admiral James Stavridis

Military technology

• Pigeon Guided Missiles: And 49 Other Ideas that Never Took Off, James Moore and Paul Nero
• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser
• Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, Paul Kennedy
• The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

Military history

• Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose
• Overlord, Max Hastings
• Anything by Anthony Beevor
• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Brett Devereaux
• The War Between the Generals, David Irving (a good book by a man with pretty reprehensible views on the Holocaust)
• Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks
• The Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser
• The Shortest History of War, Gwynne Dyer

Popular science and engineering

• What If, What If 2, How To, and Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe
• A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith