MILITARY INCOMPETENCE
Why the American Military Doesn't Win
Richard A. Gabriel
Hill and Wang, 1985
208 pp., $16.95 Cloth
THE PENTAGON AND THE ART OF WAR
Edward N. Luttwak
Simon and Schuster, 1984
333 pp., $17.95 Cloth
THE DEFENSE REFORM DEBATE
Issues and Analysis
Asa a. Clark IV et al, eds.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984
370 pp., $12.95 Paper
Modern public discourse has an unusual trait: The whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts. And perhaps nowhere is this "reverse synergy" more apparent, and less affordable, than in the current furor over the condition of America's national defense.
The formula for public stupefaction is simple enough. Start with an issue, in this case a matter at once fundamental and volatile, exceedingly complex and exceedingly expensive, and equally inseparable from the imperatives of survival and the demands of individual and international morality. Add the print and electronic media, with their incessant sniping, their ninety-second "in depth" presentations and page one "exposes," their editorial writers with raised eyebrows and TV corresponds with ominously lowered voices, their deft counter pointing of pugnacious outside experts and joyous savaging of governmental officials, and their constant invocation of the "public's right to know" whatever they choose, for whatever reasons, to tell them. Then add the ideologues, left, right, and libertarian. Now factor in those with money to make, lives to lose, offices to be elected (or re-elected) to, or Hobbesian self-righteousness to tout, and the result is less the victory of truth than a chaos of conflicting, ill-formed opinions supported less by accurate data and coherent ethical premises than by an array of weary bromides and a truly awesome tonnage of partial data, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain ignorance.
Happily, however, within the past year or so, a number of first-rate studies of the defense conundrum have appeared. Rightly ignoring the over-publicized but essentially tangential issues such as occasional criminality among contractors and garden variety malfeasance in uniform, these analysts have concentrated instead on systemic and structural deficiencies in the American way of preparing for and waging war. Some of these writers are members of the so-called military reform movement--that invertebrate, perpetually disorganized collection of Congressional types, think-tank denizens, defense consultants, and occasional military officers. Other are professional journalists and academics with an interest in the subject. A few, no doubt, are motivated as much by ego as by concern, and many have rightly been criticized for advancing their pet theories as all purpose solutions to America's defense dilemmas. But, taken together, their works (including many now just entering the public domain after years of restricted circulation) constitute both an implacable indictment of the
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