The recent passing of retired senior military official and former Yale professor William Odom has given many the chance to reflect on his life of service and scholarship. In his work with the Carter and Reagan administrations, Odom maintained a hard-line stance on the Soviet Union, a nation that had fascinated him since his days as a student at West Point. More recently, Odom had been a staunch critic of the war in Iraq, never sacrificing his independence from political parties to oppose the conflict.

We at the Yale Press are proud that part of Lt. Gen. Odom’s legacy lives on in print. The Collapse of the Soviet Military (8/2000), his first book with YUP, presents his exper
t’s argument for the scaling back of the Soviet armed forces after the fall of the Union, drawing upon both field experience and original research. In America’s Inadvertent Empire (2/2004), Odom joins former Council on
Foreign Relations fellow Robert Dujarric to argue against American
unilateralism and question the conventional wisdom that the spread of
democracy serves as a panacea for global conflict. Finally, Odom’s study of American security, Fixing Intelligence (4/2004), offers his post-9/11 suggestions for tightening protocols to encourage more effective cooperation between security and intelligence officials.