Customer Reviews

The Army after Next: The First Postindustrial Army (Stanford Studies in Jewish History & Culture)

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The "army after next", aka the Objective Force, is where US Army honchos of 2000 wanted to go. Whether they'll ever get there is another question, what with John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and other counter-insurgency texts telling us that we need an entirely different army than the "transformational" one envisioned before 9/11. Nevertheless, this is an important read. It's also a difficult one, though leavened by Mr Adams's good humor toward the army that he clearly loves. If his book is a hard slog, the blame goes mostly to the acronym-happy bureaucrats who inhabit the Pentagon. I've been studying "war in the modern world" for two years now, and this is the first clear indication (that I've found, anyhow) as to how the 21st-century army is supposed to fight. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Written by national security consultant Thomas K. Adams, a veteran of thirty-four years of military service primarily in intelligence and special operations, The Army After Next: The First Postindustrial Army is an in-depth examination of how the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense have tried to hone the capabilities promised by the ongoing high-tech "revolution in military affairs", or RMA. Specifically, the RMA is characterized by technological innovation, operational concepts or doctrines, and organizational adaptation. Special attention is paid to the effect that the RMA has had on the American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq; Adams warns that some of the problems in both nations originate in the Department of Defense's inflexible demand to utilize RMA-driven concepts and transformational operations, whether they were appropriate for the given venue or not. Though the RMA has altered the structure of the armed forces, its vision is all too often dependent on unproven or even uncontrollable assumptions or capabilities beyond what is immediately available (such as the lack of a suitable information technology network). Above all, Adams warns that America must be willing to fight the war it has, not the war it wants to have. A sobering, critical wake-up call, accessible to readers of all backgrounds but especially recommended reading for career military officers and strategists.

This is a marvelous tour through the struggles of the US military to come to grips with the technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It contrasts the visionary attempt to create a "science fiction Army" with legions of robots and equipment so versitile that it fit all environments and all types of conflict (short of an all-out war of national survival) against the sad collision with reality that was the war(s) in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the end, after spending (by authors estimate) about $110 billion we ended up with the Stryker armored vehicle (a "better-than-average armored truck") and a force that bore no resemblance to the original intent. A sad-funny story enjoyably told with good humor.