Barry Turner has written a detailed and insightful history of A.H. Nasution, one of Indonesia's foremost military leaders and theorists. In many ways, the book hews to the conventions of a traditional biography. Turner paints a textured portrait of Nasution the man, the military professional, the husband, and even the son-in-law. He makes particularly good use of wife Sunarti's memoirs to enrich our understanding of Nasution's family life and to provide illuminating glimpses into the personal politics among Indonesian power brokers. For example, Turner recounts how Nasution and Sunarti's strong marriage fuelled their distaste for Sukarno's polygamous lifestyle and helped, in turn, to inspire the army's anti-polygamy policies. Yet, the book also pushes beyond the confines of a conventional biography and tackles a more ambitious project, namely tracing the evolution of Indonesian military theorising in the formative decades of the mid-twentieth century. Turner highlights the significant role that Nasution played in formulating the Indonesian military's revolutionary-era strategies to fight the Dutch, in professionalising the army after independence, and in securing the army's special political status during the Sukarno era. He draws extensively on Nasution's own military histories as well as on contemporaneous army training publications and archival research to reconstruct Nasution's enduring influence on the Indonesian military and on the country as a whole.

Turner examines Nasution's contributions to two foundational Indonesian military concepts in particular: the doctrine of a territorial ‘people's resistance’ and the army's image of itself as an autonomous political entity. During the revolutionary struggle against the Dutch, Nasution decided to abandon standard linear methods of defence and ‘to establish “guerilla pockets” throughout West Java (p. 71)’ instead. He ordered his troops to merge with the West Javanese civilian population so that they could help local leaders maintain essential government functions while also launching sporadic attacks against regional Dutch strongholds. However, in contrast to people's resistance movements in communist China and Vietnam, Nasution's model was profoundly conservative in nature. He favoured military cooperation with local aristocratic elites (priyayi) rather than revolutionary youth and political parties. As Turner summarises, ‘Nasution's ideas for “total people's resistance” became firmly associated with traditional values and authority structures. Nasution was to idealise the period as a critical time in the life of the Republic when the army had worked selflessly together with the people and organic “traditional” authority structures (p. 109).’ After the Dutch withdrawal in 1949, Nasution set to work on institutionalising his vision for a professional and political army. Turner traces how he streamlined and centralised army leadership, demobilised various political and religious militias, and ensured the army's autonomy vis-à-vis what he perceived as improper parliamentary interference. Most significantly, Nasution used his revolutionary history to argue that a ‘guerilla army’ must never become a mere tool of the state but must rather act as ‘an ideological pioneer’ (p. 143) with its own political voice and vision. This argument helped Nasution to win recognition of the army as a ‘functional group’ first under Sukarno's Guided Democracy and eventually under Suharto's New Order.

Turner takes his analysis a step further and investigates the intellectual roots of Nasution's military vision. He argues that it was his wife's Javanese aristocratic family—and especially his father-in-law Sunario Gondokusomo—that instilled in Nasution a respect for traditional authorities and an organicist belief in societal organisation. Through his in-laws, the young Nasution came to embrace many of the conservative principles that defined pro-cooperation, priyayi nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s. Turner also stresses the impact that Nasution's Dutch colonial military education had on his career. Although Nasution was a committed nationalist and more than willing to take up arms against the Dutch, his early exposure to Dutch military culture inspired a commitment to unity, discipline, and stability that often created friction with younger, Japanese-trained Indonesian officers. Taken together, these two formative experiences cast Nasution as a possible point of ideological continuity with the Dutch colonial state. To what extent did his Dutch military education and faith in traditional Javanese hierarchies help re-create Dutch governing structures in mid-twentieth century Indonesia? Should we understand Nasution as a key link between the colonial and post-colonial states in Indonesia? By raising these questions about colonial continuity, Turner opens up new avenues of research for future historians.

The book's major contributions undoubtedly lie in Turner's detailed examination of Nasution's military strategies and conservative political vision. Yet, at times, this focus on internal military history means comparably less space for Turner to reflect on Nasution's wider legacy in Indonesia. For example, the book provides only brief analysis of Nasution's role in combatting and ultimately defeating the Darul Islam rebellion in West Java. How exactly did Nasution's ideas about ‘total people's resistance’ shape the experiences of this conflict for Indonesian soldiers, Muslim insurgents, and local civilians? What were the long-term consequences of his policies for West Java? More surprisingly, the book does not explicitly address the relationship between Nasution's conservative military ideology and the 1965–66 anti-communist massacres. While Turner notes Nasution's displacement by and eventual disenchantment with Suharto, the final chapters leave readers wondering whether we should view Nasution as essentially the engineer who enabled, if not directly ordered, the army's deadly mobilisation of civilian authority structures in 1965–66. I found myself wanting to read more about Turner's insights on these important, broader issues.

Overall, Barry Turner has produced an in-depth and valuable exploration of Nasution's impact on Indonesian military history. His book complements more social and grassroots-oriented histories of the Indonesian army during the violent 1950s and 1960s.