Picking up on the earlier comment thread re T.P.M.B (always forget that ‘M’)’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” banalities, tonight we offer instead a concise, substantive rumination by Douglas Macgregor in AFJ.
MacGregor’s a retired Army colonel, thorn in the side of the Army’s status quo and a decorated Persian Gulf War combat veteran. Many of you probably know he’s put out several books on modern warfare and military reform. That he is at the Straus[sic] Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. is purely coincidental.
Washington’s war
. . .
The U.S. needs a new national military strategy, a strategy designed to enhance America’s role as the world’s engine of prosperity, making the American way of life attractive, not threatening, to others. However, for a new, more effective national military strategy to emerge that can rationalize the structure and content of the armed forces for operations in the aftermath of Iraq, both policymakers and the flag officers who command our forces must reorient their thinking to a strategy that exalts economy of force in expeditionary operations and rejects plans to optimize the Army and Marine Corps for any more misguided occupations.
This is a strategy that deliberately limits the commitment of U.S. military resources to attainable goals and objectives consistent with U.S. strategic interests and avoids the kind of open-ended ideological warfare that nearly destroyed Western civilization in the 20th century. . .
In time of peace or war, civilians who command America’s defense establishment must not allow the nation’s military leaders the freedom to develop military strategy in isolation, to define their own programs and priorities, control their own funding lines, and then rate their own effectiveness. Clemenceau’s dictum, “War is too important to be left to the generals,” applies with equal force to the conduct of military operations and, in particular, spending for military modernization.
We suspect that if you read to the close it’ll be clear why we selected this item as of possible interest to you. Pass it along, as they say.