Customer Reviews

Command, Control, and the Common Defense

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Ken Allard provides an insightful analysis of the warfighting philosophies underlying each of the military services and the different priorities which result. A former U.S. Army Colonel and a professor at Georgetown University, Allard provides a superlative look at the influence of Mahan, Clausewitz and Mitchell and their impact on the priorites, strategies and budgets of the navy, army and air force. Oftentimes, these diferences are the root of interservice rivalries and divergent decsionmaking. Allard's framework provides great explanatory power in understanding military missteps and decisionmaking in many instances such as the Iran hostage rescue attempt, the invasion of Grenada and the first attempt to build a joint services fighter. He argues that one effective way to mitigate the ill effects of interservice differences is mandatory joint duty for officers and giving operational and weapons procurement decisionmaking to joint commands instead of individual services. A must read for those in the defense community.