Customer Reviews

National Defense

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I bought this book, used, after it was recommended as a key source to a just-published book by Robert Coram, "BOYD: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War," which I recommend very strongly, together with this book for historical perspective.

Although there may be a few inaccuracies (I did not notice anything substantial) what really matters about this book are two things: the author is a very serious critic with both Public Citizen and Atlantic Monthly credits, and the taxpayer's best interests in mind; and NOTHING HAS CHANGED since this book was published in 1981. If anything, it has gotten worse. One page (43) really jumped out at me, as it contains a chart showing how many planes can be bought for the same amount of money (1000 F-5s, 500 F-4s, 250 F-15s) and then now many sorties per day they can do because of complex logistics and other constraints (2.5/day for F-5's, 1.5 per day for F-4s, 1 per day for F-15s), finally concluding on the "real force" numbers: 2,500 for the F-5, 750 for the F-4, and 250 for the F-15.

As General Wes Clark noted in his book of lessons learned as NATO Commander during the Kosovo crisis ("Waging Modern War"), he found the new USAF airplanes so unresponsive that they needed a full 24 hours notice to shift from one pre-planned task to another.

The author is equally effective in criticizing the Navy for its obsession with carriers and other big ships; and the Army for complex helicopter systems that--as General Clark documents in his book--they are loath to actually use in combat because they might not work as advertised or might be blown out of the sky.

In this book, the author gets the "constants" right, and they are still with us. First, he focuses on the rapidly changing nature of external threats, and the importance of having a military--we do not--that is agile and able to surge in varied directions. The Cold War "one size fits all" military simply will not do....yet the current Administration continues to spend in that direction, with $7 billion for a lunatic anti-missile defense (we would be better off detecting cargo containers with nuclear bombs in them), and another $72 billion for ultra-modern (code for ultra-expensive) weapons systems that a) have not been defined, b) do not provide for the intelligence support needed to make them effective and c) have no connection to the real world of sub-state violence and instability.

The second thing he gets right is the importance of both oil, and instability, as the twin threats to American prosperity--with our over-dependence on cheap oil being a form of Achilles' heel, and our ignorance and tolerance of Arab and other instability and repression being the other side of that same coin.

The third thing he gets right is the need for an independent test authority, because the US military services have proven over and over again that they are corrupt when it comes to weapon acquisition. Whether it is the Navy or the Air Force or the Army is irrelevant--they all fail to do proper requirements analysis and concept development before jumping into bigger more expensive weapons systems that are both not needed for the kinds of threats we have today (America spends as much on national security as the next *twenty* countries, including Russia and China, *combined*), and that do not work as advertised. The taxpayer needs and must demand an Independent Test Authority for all military as well as intelligence systems.

I found this book, and one other, by Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla, "WAR: Ends and Means," to be very helpful starting points in thinking about whether the taxpayer's $500 billion a year that is spent on national defense, is spent wisely. The other two, mentioned above, are the four book beginning to a 100+ book list on making America safe that I will be reviewing here on Amazon over the next 18 months.

I was first introduced to this book in College. When I went to look for it, it was out of print. James Fallows has documented events that took place in our own bumbling political recent past with the precison of a radar guided missile. It will open your eyes to a world of waste, and it will truly make you sit up when you learn the true history of the Armalite AR-15 combat rifle and how our military almost destroyed it before giving it out to our troops in Vietnam.

James Fallows is an excellent writer with one serious shortcoming- once he learns a little bit about an area, he assumes he's an expert, and starts repeating what he's been told as if it were gospel. He seems to have difficulty in reasearching alternatives once he's gotten and explainantion that appeals to him. His lack of scientific and technical education often leads him to make faulty conclusions based on incomplete or incorrect beliefs.

This book is an excellent case in point. Much of it is factual- at least as far as it goes- but much is laughingly ignorant. He repeats urban legends about Soviet weapons. His M1 Abrams story contains some real howlers, the biggest one being his criticism of the M1's smoothbore main gun, since "everyone knows" that rifled barrels are more accurate. Every except M1 gunners, that is, who made countless one-shot kills at ranges of one to two miles during the Gulf War! Having learned, no doubt, that rifles replaced unrifled muskets in the 19th Century because they were more accurate, he assumes that rifled tank guns must obviously be more accurate than smoothbore guns.

His telling of the F16 story is partially accurate, but shows he doesn't really understand the role of air superiority fighters. And so on.

So read it, should you find a copy, but do so with a critical eye. There's an awful lot of misinforation woven in among the facts.

I first read this book when I was in the seventh grade, back in 1983-84. At the time, Reagan's defense build-up was in full swing, and being interested in current events, I wanted to inform myself of the issues of the day.

Fallows' indictment of the Pentagon's weapons-procurement systems is persuasive and damning. His main theme is that money is wasted on high-tech, highly complex weapons systems like the M-1 Abrams tank and the F-15 Eagle fighter, when the same funds could buy much greater numbers of simpler, cheaper systems. His arguments seemed sound, and I was appropriately outraged at the senselessness of American defense spending. (Its wastefulness when better options were available, that is; I was quite the little hawk back then and was glad to see the nation rearming itself in the 1980's.)

But as the years rolled on, I noticed things that caused me to question whether Fallows was correct. For one thing: the Israeli Air Force, instead of spending its limited funds on large numbers of F-5's or the new F-20 Tigershark, instead spent the 1970's and 1980's buying not only the F-16, which Fallows favored, but also the large, complex F-15, which he opposed. Why? Surely, if there were ever a service which should seek the biggest bang for its buck, it was the IAF, which defended a nation facing continuous existential threats from Soviet-armed Arab nations. Why would they buy the F-15, not the F-20, if Fallows and the USAF's famed "fighter mafia" were right that smaller, simpler aircraft were better than large, complex ones? I found the answer a couple of years later, reading articles about the IAF's attempt to develop their own combat aircraft, the Lavi; they had indeed evaluated the F-20 and found that its lack of sophisticated avionics (which Fallows decries in the book) made it far less survivable than F-15's on a battlefield crowded with modern air-defense systems of the types with which the Soviets were arming their clients. Strike one against Fallows: simpler isn't always better.

The next major blow to Fallows' credibility came in 1991, when not only did all those hopelessly complicated aircraft perform brilliantly against Saddam Hussein's Soviet- and French-equipped air defenses, but the M-1 Abrams proved its worth as a main battle tank against the simpler Soviet-built T-62's and -72's of Iraq's vaunted Republican Guard. Since 1985, I'd been reading alternate accounts of the Abrams' worth, its mobility and its armor, but its performance in Desert Storm instantly made Fallows' (and his fellow critics') carping about its cost, weight, and complexity look foolish. Iraqi main-gun rounds simply bounced off the Abrams' expensive Chobham armor, saving countless American lives. It's not hard to imagine that if Fallows' preference for a force of thousands of "sturdy, simple" tanks had been followed, many American tankers would have died needlessly not only in Desert Storm but in OIF.

Still, Fallows' points about the wastefulness of the weapons procurement process are well-made, and the book is interesting as a historical source for a time when America was rebuilding her atrophied muscles.