Nathan Hodge’s recent book provides important insights into the close relationship between development practice and modern warfare. After September 11, 2001, U.S. foreign policymakers and defense planners came to envision international development as a crucial objective in the pursuit of counterinsurgency and national security. Their efforts in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan also fell victim to false assumptions and serious fallacies. Hodge’s analysis exposes major flaws in U.S. policy, but the pattern he refers to has a much older history, rooted in longstanding visions of modernization and rapid social change.