Brilliant on Numbers, Need Same Focus on WHAT We Buy,
August 30, 2000
Daniel Goure
The authors provide compelling evidence of a forthcoming “train wreck” in U.S. defensive capabilities, and make a compelling case for increasing the defense budget by $60-100B a year for a mixture of preserving readiness; acquiring mid-term capabilities needed to replace a 20-30 year old mobility, weapons, and communications base force; and implementing the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This is a well-documented and heavily fact-laden book-the authors as individuals and the case they make in general terms-must be heeded by the next President and the next Congress.
Where the book does not go, and a companion book by the same authors would be of great value, is into the detail of
WHAT threat,
WHAT force structure.
They accept, for example, the Navy's 304-ship Navy that keeps adding gigantic carriers and does nothing for littoral warfare or putting Marines within 24 hours of any country instead of 6 days.
Similarly, they accept Air Force emphasis on fewer and fewer bigger and more sophisticated platforms of dubious utility in a 21st Century environment that requires long loiter, ranges of several hundred nautical miles without refueling, full lift in hot humid weather, and survivability in the face of electromagnetic weapons in the hands of thugs.
This book demonstrates a clear mastery of defense economics, and it is an important contribution to the bottom line: our national defense is desperately underfunded, and this must be in the “top three” issues facing the 43rd President and the 107th Congress.
What we buy, and why, has not yet been answered to my satisfaction.
Outstanding Structured Education for Adult (Policy) Readers,
August 30, 2000
Richard H. Shultz
This book is actually a guide for professors, with chapters presenting specific courses in security studies complete with fifteen-week outlines and all recommended readings. It is in my view a very fine structured reading program for the adult policy maker who is well beyond the need for going back to school, but much in need a fast means of coming to grips with the dramatic changes that have occurred in our international security environment. Early on it addresses the competing approaches to security studies-from the traditionalist national, international, and regional security approaches to the emerging transstate (non-state actors acknowledged as major sources of conflict and instability) to the global (to include human rights, environmental protection, economic prosperity, and social development as fundamental security issues). It's iteration of the weaknesses of 20th century security studies reads like a list of current biases inherent in those prescribing defense reform today: overemphasis on theory (or worst-case scenarios); insufficient attention to non-combat missions for military forces in peacetime; excessive focus on the US, Europe, and Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world; too little attention to culture and the relationship of culture to conflict deterrence and resolution; insufficient attention to history prior to World War II; and finally, a neglect of non-military instruments of power and their interaction with the military. Intelligence in particular is singled out as being a relatively recent open topic for discussion, meriting more study. The chapters on Transstate Security by Roy Godson (on non-state actors and the growing prevalence of “global ungovernability”) and on Nontraditional Uses of Military Force by George H. Quester, as well as the introduction and conclusion by Richard H. Schultz, Jr., are each, alone, worth the price of the book. Each chapter, with its course outline, discussion, and recommended references, is worthy of careful examination by any serving or aspiring policymaker. However distinguished one's pedigree, we are all students today, and Graham E. Fuller is correct when he notes on page 124 that “most policymakers do not even fully realize the dynamics of the new world we live in.”
After demolishing Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a necessary element of but insufficient substitute for corporate strategy, organizational learning, or reinvention, the author goes on to address twelve themes central to success in an economic environment characterized by networked intelligence: knowledge, digitization, virtualization, molecularization, integration/internetworking, disintermediation, convergence (a big one), innovation, prosumption, immediacy, globalization, and discordance (another big one). He stressed the need for “busting loose from the technology legacy”, the need to dramatically transform both the information management and human resource management concepts and also a turning on its head of how government works-from centralized after the fact “leveling” and gross national security to decentralized, proactive nurturing of individual opportunity before the fact, providing individual security through individual opportunity and prosperity within the network.
