Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy [Paperback]

Frederick Kagan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1594032041 | ISBN-13: 978-1594032042 | Publication Date: September 2007 | Edition: 1

In Finding the Target, Frederick Kagan describes the three basic transformations within the U.S. military since Vietnam. First was the move to an all-volunteer force and a new generation of weapons systems in the 1970s. Second was the emergence of stealth technology and precision-guided munitions in the 1980s. Third was the information technology that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Golf War. This last could have insured the U.S. continuing military preeminence, but this goal was compromised by Clinton's drawing down of our armed forces in the 1990s and Bush's response to 9/11 and the global war on terror.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Kagan, currently resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is emerging as a leading voice among national security analysts. In this important work, his focus is the post-Vietnam development of America's armed forces—not merely in policy contexts, as his book title modestly states, but also in structure and mentality. With unusual clarity and understanding, Kagan describes the individual and collective dynamics of the four armed services in the two decades after Vietnam, when the military saw a series of definable threats demanding specific responses. This period also ushered in a wider concept of military "transformation," as the nation sought a post-Soviet grand strategy and a number of senior leaders argued that the world was moving to an information age. To meet the challenge, they believed, militaries must implement a "revolution in military affairs." The balance of Kagan's work analyzes the result of this transformation: the development of technologically focused "network-centric warfare" (NCW). But with Afghanistan and Iraq standing grimly in the background, Kagan warns that, in practice, NCW reinforces the concept of war as "killing people and blowing things up" at the expense of the political objectives that separate war from murder. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (September 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594032041
• ISBN-13: 978-1594032042
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #207,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important, balanced review of current American Military thinking, October 9, 2006

By 

Thomas J. Tucker (Birmingham, Al United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Hardcover)

This volume by a former instructor at West Point is well-written, lucid and stimulating. Many individual chapters could stand alone as essays on different aspects of strategic thought as well as their history post Vietnam. Of particular interest is his assertion that much American military professional thought is grounded in German concepts. He points out Russian military thought in the twenties about "deep" strategy paralleled the German beliefs developing at about the same time. He goes on to write about various strategic approaches that evolved in the years from 1975 to date. He gives John Boyd credit for the impetus for some of the new ways of looking at attack from a strategic standpoint. These theories, further developed by John Warden, may be harmful in the future to political goals achievement.
He describes American strategic thought as focused on "blowing up things" rather than using military might to impose political decisions. He explains the long history of our military refraining from domestic political involvement may have established a mindset posing difficulties for its leadership incorporating political goals in its planning. Indeed, he states proper planning should start with the ultimate political goals first and work back to attack as the last step in the process. He recognizes the tremendorous difficulty in tactical planning of major military operations, but points out some tactical decisions may be counterproductive to long term strategic goals. He used both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to illustrate his point.
Urging that any transformation of the military take second place to the vital task of bringing the war in Iraq to a successful conclusion, he states "There is no task in U.S. national security more important...and no challenge beyond preparing for the numerous grave scenarios which confront us today."
Among his conclusions and recommendations, he suggests political planning be made a permanent, important responsibility for each theater command. With significant changes in the face, if not the nature, of war
occuring every thirty to forty years for the past two hundred years, he believes we're in the first ten years or so of implementation of new technologies whose direction we cannot fortell. No matter what we do, we must give the army the manpower to fulfill the obligations our political leadership imposed on it, meaning growing it to at least one hundred brigades. These comments just touch the surface of what the author has to say.
Contrary to some other writers studying the current army, Kagan ignores the issue of the Army's flag officer training and competence. He remains focused on the major picture. I highly recommend this book as an important addition to anyone's military history library. It should appeal to the general reader interested in current events or understanding our current conflicts, academics, college military history majors, students of military affairs, and the professional military establishment. It is a major contribution to insight into our present situation, and, fortunately, transcends politics.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes sense of the current state of the US military, November 24, 2006

By 

Dianne Roberts (Los Angeles, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Hardcover)

Militaries are shaped by intellectual and technological developments over periods of decades or more, and Frederick Kagan's new book chronologs those developments that have given birth to our current force fighting the war on terror. In tracing the arc of the transformation of the US military from the ashes of the Vietnam force to the one currently on the ground in Iraq he finds a tale of both spectacular success, and cautionary failure.

Shaken to the core by the Vietnam experience and rightfully concerned over a growing Soviet threat in the 1970's, the US military reformed itself to face some stark realities. The conscription system died as something socially unacceptable, as did the concept of fighitng future Vietnam like conflicts, and with it the ability to rapidly increase force size in response to the start of conflicts. Potentially smaller than historically normal US forces would then be left to face overwhelming Warsaw Pact numerical superiority in Europe. The result of this shock was a deep and sophisticated intellectual movement to prepare the US military for just such a war, the war that looked most imminent considering the state of the World in the mid-1970's. With a strong and clearly perceived organizing purpose, and a healthy impetus of fear, the US military developed the concepts that currently define it: The ability to completely tear apart a "conventional" enemy military with lightning fast, devastating, pinpoint strikes on critical centers of gravity that defeat the enemy as a system.

The fruits of this intellectual and technological drive served our country well in preventing the cold war from going hot and in repulsing Saddam from Kuwait in the first gulf war. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, its relevance to the current world disintegrated as well. From 1989 to 9/11 the US military perceived the world to be in a "strategic pause" and thus shifted from a threat based military to a more amorphous capabilities based military, trying to take advantage of such a lull to leap ahead of potential adversaries with an information age based "revoultion in military affairs."

However 9/11 and the ensuing events in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the limits of trying to develop a military in a vacuum in a sense, as opposed to in response to the current world environment. In the course of developing a military to save Europe from the Soviets the US eschewed the consideration of political objectives and nation building from its doctrine and intellectual energies. After all, there'd be no need to transform liberal, democratic, western Europe after a war there with the Soviets. No need for occupation, just for destruction of Soviet divisions and air forces. This inertia carried forward into the strategic pause of the '90's and the military basically focused on how to dismantle enemy conventional forces more efficiently, i.e. to do so more quickly and with fewer and fewer American troops that can be put in harm's way, threatening popular support for military operations.

This explains why the US was so amazingly effective in the first part of both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, but has been unable to really pacify and achieve the political objectives of developing those countries into stable, peaceful democracies so far. American military doctrine, training, manpower, and technology are not really designed to envision the political objectives of "regime change wars" and plan the whole operation, from initial hostilities to the subsequent occupation, to achieve those objectives. Kagan makes an extremely convincing argument that this is the largest problem facing US national security, and the one that needs to be fixed quickest. He also convincingly shows that since war is a strategic (i.e. more than one actor interacting) scenario, developing a threat based military based on what potential enemies are doing is the only way to successfully transform, and the current potential of conflicts in North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan argue for a US military designed to fight and win the type of regime change wars that are still taking place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kagan offers some solutions as to how the military can better transform, including massive doctrinal changes to include political objectives explicitly in missions, back to front planning for wars as opposed to the more current front to back planning, and a fairly large increase in the number of US ground troops. However the focus of his book is to explain the current trajectory of US military thinking, show why it has recently gone awry, and show the problem that really needs solving, and less so on exactly how to solve it. In this he succeeds brilliantly.

Highly recommended

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Transformation !!!!! What is it., January 3, 2007

By 

E. Bale (Vadito, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Hardcover)

As a retired Colonel of Marines I have been bothered by the loose use of the generally undefined term "TRANSFIRMATION" as applied the military. In these writings, Frederick Kagan does more to set the definition of military transformation than any other I have read. For military professionals and those interested in national defense matters, this is close to a must read. It is not always an easy read; thus the 4 stars. Thought and content 5 stars. This book will not please some, but it may, hopefully, open their eyes. For all it will provide the understanding that military transfirmation is neither new, nor is it a magical solution for defense of a mation.