Prospects for Military Reform
Abstract
Throughout history, military catastrophe has prodded defeated armies to reform themselves. An apparent irony of the decade following the catastrophic US failure in Vietnam is that the most vocal advocates of overhauling American military institutions have been not soldiers but civilians. Epitomizing this interest has been the so-called military reform movement, a loose coalition of Washington-based writers and consultants Edward Luttwak, Jeffrey Record, William Lind, and Steven Canby, to name a few-along with political allies such as former Senator Gary Hart. Diligently nonpartisan in the best tradition, of politics stopping at the water's edge, these self-styled reformers claim-wrongly, as we shall see-that the military is incapable of reforming itself and that they alone can fix what's wrong with our military policies. They have seized the high ground in the contemporary debate over defense issues, calling for changes in the very framework of that debate. The reformers consider old questions such as how much to spend or how to reduce waste to be irrelevant. The real issue is effectiveness-getting a dollar's worth of capability for each dollar spent.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA515075
Entities
People
- A.j. Bacevich
Organizations
- United States Army War College