Rescuing the military

National Review, Feb 14, 1986 by Richard Brookhiser

RESCUING THE MILITARY

TIME WAS WHEN critics of the military all sounded more or less like George McGovern. You could get a dose of vintage McGovern as recently as two years ago, during the Iowa caucuses. Then, in that marlinespike Prairie whine which, but for the attractions of graduate work in history and the Henry Wallace campaign, might have graced a pulpit instead of a political platform, the former senator took his litany to every Iowa church and high school. America scarcely deserves any military at all, it puts what it has to such wicked uses. The defense budget could easily and prudently be cut by 25 per cent. We should have "the courage and the common sense' to not build "one more nuclear weapon.' The reason for the gender gap was that women saw through Ronald Reagan's "macho, John Wayne' image. And so on.

The recipe for responding to old-style anti-militarism was correspondingly simple: wave Old Glory, point out that the Soviets were goons, and vote for bigger arsenals. Of late, however, a new kind of military critic has appeared on the scene. The new critic recognizes--or, at least, does not deny--that America is good and the world dangerous. He argues, however, that America's military stands in need of drastic overhaul. It gives too little bang for too many bucks. Its problems are structural and cannot be cured by mere infusions of cash. Such arguments appeal to liberals, in whom the instinct for Pentagon-bashing is still strong; and indeed, the most prominent politician among the new critics has been McGovern's former campaign manager, Gary Hart. But they also appeal to conservatives' anti-Washington streak. "Why,' Paul Weyrich asks, "should conservatives trust a bureaucrat just because he's in uniform?'

The military-reform movement, as the new style of criticism is called, developed out of the preoccupations of a handful of military analysts and intellectuals in the mid-Seventies. Pierre Sprey, a special assistant in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and John Boyd, an Air Force colonel (now retired) and a veteran of the Korean War, helped to design what eventually became the F-16 fighter. William Lind worked as an aide to Senator Robert Taft Jr. until Taft lost his seat: he was then picked up by Senator Hart. Franklin Spinney was a civilian analyst assigned by the Pentagon to study tactical air forces. The thoughts of these men, stimulated by the push and pull of their day-to-day work, soon took broader turns, which they began expressing in papers and briefings.

The Pentagon briefing--a lecture based on a series of charts--is one of the more painful means of communication devised by man. The most interesting (and most painful) reform briefing, Colonel Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict,' ran five hours and ranged from the battle of Marathon to the blitzkrieg. Its theme could be put into one sentence: If you think faster, you live longer. Its best-known concept was the "OODA-loop,' a model of combat behavior. Boyd argued that all fighting men, from grunts to commanders-in-chief, constantly go through a four-stage cycle: "seeing' the world around them, "orienting' themselves to what they have seen, "deciding' what to do as a result, then "acting' (since SODA is an unfortunate acronym, "seeing' became "observing'); fighting men who go through the cycle faster than their enemies win. In Boyd's view, a host of implications, tactical and moral, flow therefrom.

Sprey and Spinney were concerned with hardware and cash. Sprey's briefing, "The Case for More Effective, Less Expensive Weapons Systems,' asserted that complicated weapons were often outfought by simpler ones. Spinney's "Defense Facts of Life' argued that the spending patterns of the Pentagon--skewed by, among other things, an infatuation with complexity--yielded a military that was smaller, weaker, and less well-prepared than it ought to be. Lind was omnivorous in his interests, but tended to concentrate on history and tactics, a la Boyd.

The reformers' first political break came in 1980, with the founding of the Military Reform Caucus by Hart and Representative William Whitehurst (R., Va.). Unlike most bipartisan ventures, the caucus was transideological as well: Hart we all know about; Whitehurst's ADA rating was zero. The reformers' big PR break came the next year, with the publication of National Defense by former Carter speechwriter James Fallows. Fallows was an evangelist of the reform prophets; his book was a digest, in English, of their positions on organization, training, and weapons procurement. With Fallows, reform broke out of the Beltway, into B. Dalton's. As the movement burgeoned, it became increasingly heterogeneous. Dina Rasor, an energetic young promoter, founded, with Libertarian backing, the Project on Military Procurement, a clearinghouse for spending horror stories (it was they who discovered the $7,000 coffee pot on the C-5 transport plane). Edward Luttwak, a somber intellectual at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, collected the articles he had been writing for Commentary and other periodicals and published them as The Pentagon and the Art of War.