Customer Reviews

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy

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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.

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

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.

Frederick Kagan has written a very important book that may help guide our thinking about military transformation back onto the very successful path we pursued in the 70's and 80's. Our focus at that time on defeating the Soviet military threat with limited manpower and taking advantage of our all volunteer force gave us a military that is second to none in its ability to win against a stand-up enemy.

He points out (correctly I believe) that we have changed our focus from a specific future threat to the task of destroying abstract future improvements in such a stand-up enemy's army. The goal has become how we can improve our forces destructive capabilities rather than emphasizing the political goal to be achieved by a war. He believes we have gone adrift in our attempts to leapfrog generations of military hardware not because the equipment is not impressive or useful but because it does not efficiently address the process of imposing our will on an enemies political options.

Now that terrorist type enemies have emerged as the principal foe, we have been caught with a military still in some ways focused on how warfare might have evolved over the Fulda Gap.

He suggests we return to positing each potential enemy and planning what political outcome is needed if a war is necessary with that foe. We need to plan wars and their aftermath starting with the desired new political arrangement and work back toward the forces needed. The current hardware orientation is understandable given the budget competition among the services (and the various congressional delegations), but it is now obvious after the Afghanistan and Iraq experiences that refocusing on the political goals to be achieved is very necessary.

He includes some suggestions for augmentation of the regional combat commands with planning staffs focused on the desired post-war political arrangements.

Since Kagan's book is about the thinking necessary to generate military transformation, he makes very few suggestions about specific current problems. Among those items he offers is that because of the up close and personal nature of regime-change wars, our army and marines are undersized by about 200,000 men. Also the M-1 tank has received much criticism because its extreme weight seriously slows its deployability. Kagan defends it and shows that it's ability to work close to a potential foe without personnel loss is essential in the type of war we are now actually engaged in. While weight is a serious problem it's capabilities cannot be addressed by vehicles that must operate in a stand-off mode.

Frederick Kagan has written a valuable and clearly argued attempt to bring our military planning focus back to the actual potential enemies. I only hope everyone serious about the future of our country reads this book.

This book does two things, and does them well. It gives an overview of military thinking in the US over the last 50 years, and tells when and why that thinking has been effective (and when and why it has not been effective).

If you want to know what we did to make our military so effective after Viet Nam, and why it worked, read this book. If you want to know why we are having so much trouble in Iraq and Afganistan, read this book.

This was the best book I have read on this subject.

Frederick Kagan is an influential thinker on the American Military. This book is his history of how our military has come to realize its need to change. He recounts how it has failed, at times, in those adaptations and how it has succeeded in others. It is when the theory of what the military should become gets divorced from the reality of what the actual threat in the world currently is that the greatest failures occur. The problem with these failures is that we can't afford them strategically or financially.

Kagan has pointed out that we have been under funding our military for more than a decade. Now that we are in a hot war in Iraq that shortage of personnel, the aging equipment that has not been replaced is causing a larger net depletion and leaves us less well defended.

While Kagan is disliked in some quarters and hated in others, he is influential because there are those in power who hear his words and appreciate what he is saying. Whether or not you agree with him, his influence requires you to read this book and make your own judgment. I found the history valuable and the arguments involving. Still, I wonder how billions of dollars in new jet fighters are going to help us against IEDs and suicide bombers. I do like his insistence that the military make its transformations intelligently and in light of both history and what we are actually facing around the world. I like his point that no one can prepare for a future war with future weapons because we are always trapped in the present and the future is never what anyone expects it to be.

Interesting book.

For readers who are tired of over-intellectualizers, Fred Kagan's "Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy", will be an absolute breath of fresh air. Instructive without being academic, detailed without being tedious, Kagan sweeps the reader into the concepts, personalities, equipment, processes, and applications of "military transformation" and keeps the reader's brain focused on the topic until the very last page. His detailed review of the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs" provides a much needed body of information to help those interested in the subject master it.

Sincerely,

Bill Hayes

Major, USMC (Ret.)

Retired Samurai

Collections strong in both military history and politics and international relations - particularly at the college level - will find FINDING THE TARGET: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN MILITARY POLICY an important guide. It comes from a leading military analyst who reviews the history of U.S. national security strategies and the latest debates about military changes, offering a reasoned guide to analyze the problems facing the American military and the different paths it may take in the future. Such analysis is key to understanding the military's strengths, weaknesses and choices and makes FINDING THE TARGET an important pick.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch

Kagan needs to stick with his level of competence which is Napoleonic war. His NeoCon political beliefs have distorted this book beyond belief and he ends up just being another spokesman for American military might well beyond any kind of reality. No wonder he is an ardent proponent of the "surge" in Iraq. Read this bok and you will see just how out of touch with the modern military he is.