Review: Victory On The Potomac–The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies The Pentagon

5 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Congress (Failure, Reform), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics, Security (Including Immigration)

Victory PotomacSetting the Stage for the NEXT Reform of National Security, April 10, 2008

James R., III Locher

I bought this book at the Army War College after hearing its author speak to the Army Strategy Conference on “Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power.” I have posted 29 pages of notes at Earth Intelligence Network, with a page or two from Jim Locher's brilliant luncheon presentation.

Having spent the evening with this book, and with an understanding of what the Project on National Security Reform will be providing to the next President of the United States, I found the book totally inspiring, and most important for what it represents as proof that “Phase II” of national security reform is not just possible, but likely in 2009.

A few highlights:

1) The service chiefs fought this bitterly, to include lies and deceptions and fabricated studies.

2) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Jones, and later Crowe, get high praise for having the gumption to call for reform in the first case, and agree with reform in the second, but they were virtual outcasts for doing so.

3) Senator Sam Nunn will be back. As I look at the make-up of the Project, which also benefits from Newt Gingrich's brilliance and his mastery of history and House protocol, I have a very strong feeling that the follow-on to Goldwater-Nichols, a National Security Act of 2009, is not just viable, but undefeatable.

4) I've known Jim Locher as a thoughtful and courteous person for over a decade, and this book confirms my personal view that he is one of the most loyal, dedicated, intelligent, and responsible individuals we have, totally committed to public service in the purest sense of the word. The reviewer who demeans the author has no basis, in my view, for his negative judgement.

I have just one worry: everyone is beginning to realize that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama have a strong bench, and at the same time everyone I talk to seems to believe they will repeat the long-standing mistake of seeking to implement a single-party executive. This they must not be allowed to do. Please visit Reuniting America to understand the concept of Transpartisanship, in which ALL parties (including Libertarians, Reforms, Greens, and others) share leadership positions so that we might harness the COMPLETE distributed intelligence of the entire Nation.

The Project will provide a preliminary report on Phase II of national security reform in early July 2008, and a longer report in September 2008. Once a President is elected, a complete set of Presidential directives, draft legislation, and recommended amendments to Congressional jurisdictions and protocols, will be provided so that the President might be ready to implement national security reform within 100 days of taking office. We cannot wait for the Quadrennial Defense Review in the second year of the Presidency; those focusing their time on influencing that document would be well-advised to contribute shorter versions of their work sooner to the Project. By 1 May 2008.

In his comments today at the Army War College, the author told us that everyone said this would be impossible; that it was lunatic, and so on. This book is a deep historical account of how good intentions across party lines can achieve the impossible and serve the public. While I disrespect both party machines for failing to control a reckless and arrogant presidency hijacked by the vice president, I do believe that we can create a narrative on the need for reform that the public will accept and then demand of its Congress.

I will miss Barry Goldwater, the last true conservative I remember, but I am, in putting this book down, confident that John McCain and Sam Nunn and others can find common ground. This book proves the impossible can be achieved, and I believe this book is essential substantiation that the next step: civilian professionalization, inter-agency operations and authorities, multinational information sharing, a robust “white hat” capability, and a national open source agency that can influence how $2 trillion a year in other people's money is spent eradicating the ten high level threats to humanity, are all achievable in the near term.

See also my reviews of the following books that complement this one:
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC
The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command
Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy
The Pathology of Power
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

Review: Tragedy & Hope–A History of the World in Our Time

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, History, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

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First Stone in the Digital Study of Abusive Wealth,

January 4, 2007
Carroll Quigley
This is a very long book, longer than Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and it has taken me over two months, between other easier to read books, to examine. I strongly recommend that W. Cleon Skousen's book The Naked Capitalist be purchased at the same time, as it offers a very helpful “Cliff's Notes” and summary of the larger work.

I give this book 5 stars for substance, 4 stars for personal bias, and 4 stars for being both too late, and too soon–to late to have saved us from what Derek Leebaert calls The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World, too soon to be centerpiece, as I would have it be, of a massive public intelligence digital project to nail down all the relationships and follow all the money.

Carroll Quigley's book is excruciatingly dull and filled with thousands of facts in very small print. I never-the-less recommend it for purchase because it may well be one of the more fundamental references of our time. Two other books that complement this one are Mike Rupert's Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and Jim Marrs' Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. See also Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

Now to my final point: others get nervouos when I begin to engage the “conspiracy literature,” and I have to reiterate that the conspiracy literature is no more nor any less rife with bias and error than the conventional literature. See my reviews of John Perry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth' and Larry Beinhart's Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. And if your really want to worry, read John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past on how inept and ignorant most of our scholars are, or the more conventional Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman.

Quigley is the cornerstone for a public intelligence digital map that will emerge over the next few years. I anticipate that thousands of books and articles, including Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's “Gold Warriors” (which has strangely disappeared from Amazon but is being read by millions of Chinese in both Mandarin and common Chinese) will all “make sense,” and I believe they will make enough sense to warrant a massive restriction on illicit wealth such as has never before occured under non-violent circumstances. I am NOT saying repossession, but rather an end to banks lending money they do not have, governments borrowing from banks, and intermediaries charging excessively while ignoring “true cost” of their goods to the planet. This book is revolutionary, but it is also before its time.

The books below provide critical insights into how we can empower the five billion at the bottom of the pyramid to create infinite wealth. I and 23 other co-founders have created the Earth Intelligence Network to do precisely that.

They also afford me an opportunity to make clear that understanding abusive wealth does not mean we much confiscate ill-gotten gains. Doing so would serve no useful purpose and it would spread so thinly among the five billion poor. We must let sleeping dogs lie, and create infinite wealth that stabilizing localities and enables peace everywhre.

Please do at least read my review of each of the below gifts from others:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All

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Review: Making America’s Budget Policy–From the 1980s to the 1990s (Paperback)

4 Star, Budget Process & Politics

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for Presidential Advisors (Not the Has-Beens),

July 15, 2005
Joseph J. Minarik
This is not the easiest book to read, and it desperately needs a one-page executive summary that a normal person can understand. However, having said that, I have to praise this book as a dated but still valuable primer on budget policy.

The bottom line in this book is clear: America can find $500 billion more in revenue if we return corporations to paying 25% of the total revenue (down to 6% now from a high of 32% in the past), eliminate subsidies and import-export pricing fraud; if we eliminate the tax code and all of its special interest provisions, and rely instead of the marketplace to choose winners and losers; and if we shift to a flat fair tax with no deductions except the mortgage and savings not counted as income. I am over-simplifying, but this book desperate needs distillation.

The author is quite clear on the growing threat to America of the double deficit (both debt and trade),

On balance I am very impressed by the author's grasp of the nuances of budget policy, and while I do not understand all that he writes about, his book has certainly persuaded me that Bill Bradley and he have a grip on this important subject.

It would be quite exciting to see Barack Obama and Ron Paul agree to collaborate on a new coalition government that offers all Americans two things: the restoration of informed engaged democracy where every citizen has access to the information they need, and where every citizen's vote counts; and the elimination of the twin deficits as a national security and competitiveness priority.

EDIT of 20 Dec 07: Adding a few links.
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War onthe American Dream and How to Fight Back

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Review: Transformation Under Fire–Revolutionizing How America Fights

4 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Military & Pentagon Power

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4.0 out of 5 stars On target & useful–a master speaks,

February 12, 2005
Douglas A. Macgregor
I hold this author to a higher standard, for he is in the top rank of perhaps 10 people who really know what they are talking about with respect to transformation. I believe he is the single most important mind behind the Army's recent transition from 10 divisions to 40+ brigades as the basic form of organization. Where he falls short (and remember, this is a master who in falling short is still light years ahead of the others) is in not going far enough: in not carrying his ideas out to inter-agency collaboration and multi-national inter-agency planning and coalition operations.

He also fails to properly put the failings of the US Navy and the US Air Force in context. The US Navy today is a disgrace, largely incapable of moving anything or getting anywhere at flank speed, and the US Air Force is even worse off–incapable of lifting what needs to be lifted, when it needs to be lifted, in the distances and quantities that need to be lifted. Without a chapter on this joint “sucking chest wound,” the author's otherwise brilliant work loses much of its potential at the SecDef level.

This is a very serious book, not an essay. It is packed with substantive information, it is well-documented, and the footnotes are as useful as the main text.

The underlying theme in this book is that the Chief of Staff of the Army will not succeed until he breaks the back of the cultural mafia that persists–like the horse cavalry of old–in focusing on big units and expensive platforms. While the author is among the foremost and earliest proponents of small, fast, and many, it is clear to me that he does not consider the current Army to be moving in the right direction–a direction that he makes clear could lead to our achieving a sufficiency within months rather than years.

Perhaps the most revolutionary underlying theme in this book is that of how to deal with information. The author may well be the most intelligent helpful commentator I have read in this respect. On page 102 he focuses on the fact that “Command centers where information is collected and transmitted should not be information monopolies,” and he focuses throughout on the urgent need to use “commander's intent” (a concept of operations pioneered by Marine Corps Commandant Al Gray) and fluid lateral information sharing to increase situational awareness and agility at the tactical level.

Published in 2004 and not doubt polished in 2003, this book gives the US Army a failing grade for the future while noting that it could–with application and innovation, get back to the Honor Roll within months, rather than years.

I am a Marine and I discount the “hate and discontent” from disgruntled Marines writing reviews against this book. There is a big difference between Marines from the sea carrying out largely amphibious missions, and soldiers (and increasingly in today's army, contractors at a ratio of 1:1) in for the long haul. We need a 450 ship Navy, a 2 Berlin Airlift Air Force, a 45+ brigade Army, a 3 MEF USMC, a doubled Coast Guard, a tripled State Department, and a whole new focus on inter-agency and multinational armies and related peacekeeping cadres. It is not enough to fix Army–we need a grand strategy for using all of the instruments of national power over a 100 year timeframe. In this context, the book gets an A for giving Army the slap in the face it needs right now, and a C+ for missing the larger picture within which the Army, no matter how transformed, will fail because everything else in the USG is failing when it comes to coordinated sustainable inter-agency operations. Theater commanders and Army ground forces cannot win the war alone, nor can they make peace on their own.

One final word of praise: the author is an honorable man of great moral courage who speaks his mind in the public interest. Within the book he has harsh things to say about ticket-punching careerist officers, and think tank harlots who give their masters what they want, not what they need to hear. I salute and will follow any man such as this. We need more like him.

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Review: The Life and Death of NSSM 200 –How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy

6 Star Top 10%, Budget Process & Politics, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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5.0 out of 5 stars Intense, Well-Structured, Mind-Glazing, Valuable,

January 25, 2004
Stephen D. Mumford
Although I have had this book in my possession for months, it kept slipping to the bottom of the pile because it is an excruciatingly detailed look at one very specific policy area–that of population. I was mistaken in thinking that the book was so detailed as to be boring or difficult to grasp.On the contrary, the author has done a superb job, in partnership with the publisher, in presenting a great deal of important information in a readable font size and form.

For me, the book is important in two ways. First, it tells me there is a person out there who really understands all this stuff in detail, and can help me rethink our national policy when the time comes that we have a sane White House willing to be serious about this vital long-term matter.

Second, it lists up front the various areas that impact on population policy (drawing on the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future) and is worth the price of the book for this superb list (each with a paragraph about the sub-policy area): Population Education; Sex Education; Child Care; Children Born Out of Wedlock; Adoption; Equal Rights for Women; Contraception and the Law; Contraception and Minors; Voluntary Sterilization; Abortion; Methods of Fertility Control; Fertility-Related Health Services; Personnel Training and Delivery of Services; Family Planning Services; Services for Teenagers; Population Stabilization; Illegal Aliens; Immigration; National Distribution and Migration Policies; Guiding Urban Expansion; Racial Minorities and the Poor; Depressed Rural Areas; Institutional Responses; Population Statistics and Research; Vital Statistical Data; Enumeration of Special Groups; International Migration; Current Population Survey; Statistical Reporting of Family Planning Services; National Survey of Family Growth; Distribution of Government Data; Mid-Decade Census; Statistical Use of Administrative Records; Intercensal Population Estimates; Social and Behavioral Research; Research Program in Population Distribution; Federal Government Population Research; Support for Professional Training; Organizational Changes; Office of Population Affairs in the Department of Health, National Institute of Population Sciences; Department of Community Development; Office of Population Growth and Distribution; Council of Social Advisors; Joint Committee on Population; State Population Agencies and Commissions; Private Efforts and Population Policy.

The author makes a very strong case for how, as his subtitle suggests, US population policy has been doomed by a lack of political will and the inappropriate influence of the Catholic Church and Mexico, in addition to strong private sector interests seeking low-wage workers while avoiding any associated social costs that are put on to the taxpayer.

I consider this book a primary reference that will be needed soon as America becomes more thoughtful and participatory democracy is restored. Population policy is fundamental. Missing from the official documents are serious discussions about citizenship, civics, ethics, morality, the restoration of the one-income two-parent family as the foundation for a strong nation, and the role that taxation policy can play in strengthening families while holding employers accountable for not making illegal immigration sustainable by hiring undocumented aliens.

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Review: The Pathology of Power

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation

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5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Detailed Exposure of Power Killing Intelligence,

August 16, 2003
Norman Cousins
Edit of 22 dec 07 to add links.

This book richly merits republication, and it is fortunate that so many copies are still available. Consider the author's opening statement:

“Connected to the tendency of power to corrupt are yet other tendencies that emerge from the pages of the historians:

* The tendency of power to drive intelligence underground;

* The tendency of power to become a theology, admitting no other gods before it;

* The tendency of power to distort and damage the traditions and institutions it was designed to protect;

* The tendency of power to create a language of its own, making other forms of communication incoherent and irrelevant;

* The tendency of power to spawn imitators, leading to volatile competition;

* The tendency of power to set the stage for its own use.

This is simply a brilliant, reasoned, well-documented and well-structured look at the greatest threat to any Republic's national security and prosperity: absolute power with its attendant absolute corruption. All that the author has to say over his 13 chapters, from why Hiroshima to the reality of General MacArther to General and President Eisenhower's prophetic emphasis on “true” security rather than the “cooked books” false security of the military-industrial complex, every bit of this is directly applicable to the national security challenges–and the internal ethical challenges–facing the American people are their largely corrupt national political system at the dawn of the 21st Century. Of course it applies to all other nations as well, but as the Americans are the largest bull, they do the most damage to themselves as well as to others.

The author concludes with some “first principles” that are alone worth the price of the book, these are abbreviated here:

* security of the human commonwealth above security of the state

* well-being of mankind above well-being of any one nation

* needs of future generations above the needs of current generation.

* rights of man over the rights of the state

* private conscience over public edict

* ordeal of peace over easy drift of prosperity

His final sentence will not be understood by those who “do not do nuances.” He says: “The challenge, therefore, is to recognize that national security depends on a wide range of factors, some of them nonmilitary in nature.” He goes on to list the freedoms and well-being of the society itself, the focus on making human development the highest national security priority; the selection of creative transformative rather than manipulative leaders; the articulation of national goals that win foreign support on their merits; the strengthening of international institutions; and finally, the recognition that governance must be focused on the common good, not on retaining power. To lead properly is to be free of corruption. Anything else is pathological and undermines national security.

More recent books expanding on this theme, with reviews:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
The Informant: A True Story
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

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Review: A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar–The Future of Development Aid

4 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Disaster Relief, Humanitarian Assistance, Stabilization & Reconstruction

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4.0 out of 5 stars Brother, Can You Spare a Half Penny to Save the World?,

October 12, 2000
Michael E. O'Hanlon
This is a hard-hearted practical look at development aid, and so it should be. The “official development assistance” (ODA) element of Program 150, the international affairs budget commonly recognized as the “preventive diplomacy” budget that runs alongside Program 50 (the traditional military budget), is evaluated by the authors in terms of amounts (are we doing enough), allocations (are we giving to the right countries), and directions (are we doing the right things). It is a small amount of money that is being discussed–$9 billion a year in 1997 for ODA alone-said to represent a half penny of each dollar spent by the U.S. government. This works out to about $15 per year for the members of the targeted populations. Larger more populous states receive less aid per capita than smaller states. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China are especially disadvantaged. In contrast to today's $15 per person nvestment, the Marshall Plan provided in excess of $100 to $200 per person in Europe (but for only several years, working out to an equivalent amount when compared to sustained aid flows today).Several thoughtful observations jump out from the book:

1) Foreign aid is not preventing conflicts from emerging (if anything, and this is not implied by O'Hanlon but is explicit in William Shawcross' book DELIVER US FROM EVIL: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict (Simon & Schuster, 2000), foreign aid contributes to instability by giving rise to warlords and black markets);

2) Foreign aid is of limited use in reconstructing societies ravaged by conflict, especially those with limited infrastructures that cannot absorb resources as well as European nations;

3) Foreign aid's best return on investment appears to be the education of women-even a few years of education has a considerable impact on birth control, health, and other areas of interest;

4)Foreign aid shapes both our own philosophy of foreign affairs, and the perceptions others have of our foreign role-it also shapes our domestic constituencies perception of why we should have a foreign policy arm;

5) Foreign aid does not play a significant role in most countries where there is access to open markets and stability does not frighten away investors-indeed the emerging expert consensus appears to lean toward debt forgiveness combined with private capital investment as the best approach to economic reform;

6) Foreign aid is least effective in those countries that are either unstable or have a range of harmful economic policies including trade barriers, large budget deficits, oversized public sectors, and overvalued exchange rates. Roughly half the countries receiving aid today have poor economic policies in place;

7) The U.S. is the least generous of the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members, providing just over one third as much of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the other OECD countries-0.10 percent instead of 0.27 percent.

Having said all this, the author's document their views that our ODA investments need to rise from $9 billion to at least $12 billion a year, with other countries increasing their combined contributions from $51 billion to $68 billion per year. The authors favor increased foreign aid investments in poor countries with good economic policies, for the purpose of building transportation infrastructure, enhancing local health and education programs, and accelerating the expansion of utilities and communications services.

They also recommend a broader distribution of foreign aid for countries in conflict throughout Africa, and suggest that Public Law 480 food aid should be focused only on responding to disaster relief rather than indiscriminate distribution that benefits U.S. farmers but undermines foreign agricultural programs.

They conclude with the somewhat veiled suggestion that all of this could be paid for by a reduction of foreign military assistance to Egypt and Israel. One is left, at the end of the book, with two strong feelings: first, that U.S. foreign aid is on “automatic pilot” and rather mindlessly muddling along; and second, that this is a very small but very important part of the total U.S. national security budget, one that merits its own ombudsman within the National Security Council, and one that is worthy of no less than a penny on the dollar as we plan our future Federal investments.

What is left unsaid by the authors is whether the other $60-80 billion in foreign aid by various actors including the United Nations agencies, is well managed–one is left with the impression that the U.S. really faces two challenges: an internal challenge of improving its performance with respect to foreign aid, and an external challenge in demanding a more rational and coordinated approach to various forms of aid being sponsored by others.

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