Customer Reviews

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

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This well researched book will have an impact on civilian-military relations as long-lasting as Samuel Huntington's "Soldier and the State," published fifty years ago but still a landmark. The author examines four examples of excellent democratic leadership of the military during wartime: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion. These four break the current "normal theory of civil-military relations," which holds that civilian leaders should set political goals and leave the details of implementation to the neutral competence of military professionals. The "normal theory" is currently the predominant orthodoxy: Lyndon Johnson meddled in Vietnam military matters, irretrievably messing up that effort; George H.W. Bush set the goals in the Persian Gulf and left the military unimpeded to execute policy. The four supreme commanders Cohen expounds upon break the current orthodoxy: they were deeply involved in military matters, Churchill to the point of driving his generals nuts with questions about the details of operations. If anything, the author argues, Lyndon Johnson was not involved enough, failing to question Westmoreland's attrition strategy. Cohen's books will have significant impact and will be debated in U.S. war colleges for years to come. He significantly contributes to the quality of the debate on civil-military relations. He also brings new life to the question: what exactly is the military profession? Huntington and the traditional definition describe it as the management of violence for political ends. Yet many military work their entire careers in support fields which aren't directly related to combat, and even military who spend their entire careers in combat forces often are only in combat a small percentage of their service time. Cohen's discussion on this topic of the essence of the military profession will start a new and much-needed debate on this topic. There are a dozen or so typesetting errors in this edition which confuse the reader. But the big picture is that it's a stellar performance which will impact discussion on the role of the soldier and the statesman for years to come, and is a must read for anyone interested in military affairs, the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the future of the civilian-military relationship. As one person commented, if he could recommend one book for President George W. Bush to read in the current terrorist war crisis, this would be it. Trying to save on my book-buying, I read my public library's copy of this book. Then I bought my own copy because it will be a classic referred to again and again in future debates.

This is Eliot Cohen's most intriguing and accomplished work to date. As one who has disagreed with Professor Cohen almost as often as I have agreed with him in the past, I must acknowledge the immediate (and likely enduring) value of this very well-done study of the relationships between heads of state and the military men working for them. While this book will not end the debate over "Who's on first?", it certainly deepens it. And it's simply good reading. I'm still not convinced that civilian leaders always know best--especially given their often-willful ignorance of the military experience--but I certainly believe that the civilians must always be firmly in charge, and Cohen makes that case indisputably along the way. It would have been interesting to bookend these studies with a look at the relationship between Bismarck and the elder Moltke, who enjoyed perhaps the most suspicion-laden symbiotic relationship in history--and whose grand successes illustrate Cohen's thesis with something near perfection--and the relationship, so very different, between President Clinton and his generals, all of whom were hobbled by fear, though of very different things. But this is Professor Cohen's book, not mine. I recommend this book highly--especially to military officers, not all of whom will be pleased by it. Intellectually engaging in the best sense.

If you want the best ever book to assess the command and leadership of a single FIGHTING leader, buy Joel Hayward's highly praised "For God and Glory: Lord Nelson and His Way of War". Its assessment is original, thorough and relevant to today's leadership studies.

But if you want a book that deals with that highest level of leadership, the political employment and direction of fighting forces, then this is your book. As you would expect from author Cohen, you get rigorous and insightful analysis of the difficulties and responsibilities involved in wielding massive force. You get lucid explanation, fluent writing and clear and compelling argument. In short, this book is better even than Martin van Creveld's book on military leadership.

Eliot Cohen shows that the Pentagon's preferred model of civil-military relations--namely that the civilian leadership should leave war to the generals--does not make for a successful policy. By profiling four supremely successful war leaders--Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben Gurion--he demonstrates that they all took a very active hand in the conduct of war, and that they were often right, and the generals were often wrong. Whereas when political leaders have deferred to the generals--for instance in the original Bush administration's determination, made at the urging of Gen. Powell, to end the ground war in the Gulf after 100 hours--the results have often been far from satisfying. Not only is this an important argument, highly relevant to today's policy debates, but Cohen also offers interesting profiles of four very different leaders. I was particularly interested in the discussion of Clemenceau and Ben Gurion, since I know less about them than about Churchill and Lincoln. This is a book that all our leaders should read.

Cohen's thesis is that wars cannot be left to generals. Using four case studies involving successful heads of state who took an active role in their nations' wars (Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion), he debunks the "normal theory of civil-military relations." That theory holds that once war is upon us, politicians must step out of the way and let the military take over and, unfettered, win it. This view goes back at least to the American Civil War (for example, read the same admonition in Sheman's memoirs). It became most fashionable in this country after the Vietnam War, when comparing it and Korea to civil-military relations during the two World Wars.
I was skeptical. Having fought in Vietnam and still a bit upset at our not having achieved victory (albeit still today I'm not sure what our goals were...ahh, but I get ahead of myself), and having ascribed that failure to this nation's civilian leadership, I, too, espoused this theory. Cohen has turned me around.
Cohen keeps a narrow focus: civil-military relations at the highest levels. Each case study deals with a head of state's involvement with the conduct of a war for national survival (in Lincoln's case, national unity). He makes the point, "The odds in each of these cases were so finely balanced that leadership could and did make the difference. Take away each leader, and one can easily imagine a very different outcome to 'his' conflict." In the process, he describes the leadership style that made these statesmen great:
· None dictated to subordinates.
· Each tolerated, even advanced, men who strongly disagreed with them.
· Intuition and judgment, based on an ability to observe, make sense of, and use a huge amount of information.
· An ability to understand the larger picture, yet master military details.
· Skilled communicators, deeply read.
· Moderation - the ability to discipline passions, and an understanding of when and how to counteract trends.
· Ruthlessness, with their nation's enemies as well as with "wavering allies or internal opposition."
· Courage to see things as they are.
In his closing chapters he compares these case studies (which are as interesting purely as readings in history as they are to build and support his thesis) with civil-military relations during the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War. He shows that the Johnson Administration did, in fact, manage the Vietnam War, but in the wrong areas; moreover, the Johnson Administration abrogated its role by not defining the goal(s) of the conflict, not defining victory, and not providing adequate strategic guidance. He faults the first Bush Administration for not becoming more involved with war planning and not providing sound strategic guidance.
Cohen's is the quintessential Clausewitzian argument. Clausewitz's most famous dictum is, "War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means." It's often read out of context and thus often misinterpreted as meaning that once war starts, politics ought to stop. Actually, he explains, "If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character...Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa." He goes on, "He who maintains, as is so often the case, that politics should not interfere with the conduct of a war has not grasped the ABCs of grand strategy."
There are other dimensions of civil-military relations not discussed by Cohen that have substantive impact on the battlefield and on victory or defeat. There is the allocation of resources, human and materiel, between military and domestic uses (e.g., the manufacturing and agricultural bases), between the military departments, between naval forces and the merchant marine, availability of training land, force structure, recruiting and retention resources and limitations, etc. Each is steeped in politics with profound consequences on the battlefield. (For more insight, explore Joel R. Davidson's The Unsinkable Fleet and Peter R. Mansoor's The GI Offensive in Europe.)
Lack of discussion of these and others is not a failure on Cohen's part. He deliberately limited himself to one manageable dimension of civil-military relations.
It would have been instructive to see some contra-examples such as Ludendorff and Hindenburg in Imperial Germany in the latter stages of World War I or Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II. They weren't Western democracies, but they are at the other end of the spectrum where the military is the government and thus has no civilian counterbalance at all. It would also have been instructive to include a case study on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, contrasting the styles of Eisenhower and Kennedy, as would have been a case study on Clinton's response to Somalia, Yugoslavia, and Islamist terrorism. Still, Cohen makes his case.
In the end, this is also a book about Vietnam. Cohen argues, "...the American politicians failed as war leaders in Vietnam...because they looked at the wrong details and drew the wrong conclusions...They did not test a strategy - a theory of victory as some have called it - against the realities of the field; they did not ask whether the organization at work had the right structures, the right tasks, and above all the right leaders. They did not cross-examine, test, and probe their subordinates, and they did not force them into debates with other professionals who took a different view."
I used to believe that if one were to read only two books to understand the outcome of the Vietnam War, then read COL Harry G. Summers' On Strategy twice. Now I would say, read Summers and Cohen. There is tension between their theses, but close examination will reveal that they mesh and work well together.
The implications for the coming conflict in Iraq are obvious. Cohen's thesis and support for that thesis help explain the debate inside the Bush Administration. Our civilian leadership must drive what and how we do there and elsewhere in our War on Terror. I hope the likes of COL David Hackworth pay attention.

The true genius of leadership is found in the proper management of subordinates. In this excellent book, Eliot Cohen examines the actions of four democratic leaders and how they led their nations through four different kinds of total war. The four leaders are Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion. Each had differing styles and different concerns but each had one thing in particular in common, a determination that the strategic conduct of the war should be managed by civilian, not military leadership. Cohen agrees with the four that such civilian control is absolutely essential not only to the winning of a war but to the preservation of a democracy. In his chapter on Lincoln, Cohen describes how Lincoln formulated a political strategy for winning the Civil War which included complicated and sometimes contradictory goals: To name two of them, Lincoln needed to retain the loyalty of the slave holding border states that stayed in the Union while also refusing to compromise on the issue which led to the secession in the first place, the refusal to allow the expansion of slavery. He also had to ensure that the Confederacy received no diplomatic legitimacy. The political impacted on the military strategy. Much of this was beyond the grasp of the military generals and Lincoln had to lead aggressively. By contrast, Jefferson Davis, graduate of West Point, seemed completely oblivious to the need to formulate a larger political strategy.

In discussing Clemenceau's leadership in the waning years of WWI when the French faced catastrophe, Cohen shows how Clemenceau played two military commanders Foch, with his offensive tendency and Petain, promoter of the doctrine of "defense in depth", off against each other. He reconciled the differences in tactics and doctrines and ultimately helped ensure the success of the French army. He educated himself with frequent trips to the front to see the situation first hand. Churchill, was known for his intense micro-management, not of individual battle tactics but of military strategy. Churchill, having seen the debacles of the first world war was determined that no decisions would be made on the basis of faulty assumptions. As such he questioned his officers and generals intensively and constantly. The officers resented this but such a management style enabled Churchill to base decisions on facts not on conjecture. Churchill's supple mind, much like Lincoln's enabled him at all times to reconcile distant and sometimes competing goals, including the political management of a difficult alliance. WWII was an intensely political war and considerations of state pervaded almost every strategic decision taken. Churchill's genius as a war leader was his ability to bring each disparate element together into a cohesive whole.

Ben-Gurion had to fight a very different kind of war. As head of a fledgling state with no genuine army, in 1948 he was not only required to formulate military and political strategy, to enable Israel to survive an onslaught of Arab armies, Ben-Gurion was forced to create a modern disciplined army from scratch. In this he succeeded brilliantly. From Ben-Gurion's standpoint, the key was the imposition of discipline, from subordinate to superior officer and from military to civilian command.

In the last part of the book, Cohen examines and contrasts the military/civilian relationship in the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Contrary to popular wisdom, civilian leadership did not interfere excessively with the military in Vietnam. As Cohen argues, contrary to the leadership of Churchill, Lincoln et al., the Johnson administration failed to question the assumptions on which the military based its recommendations and strategies. It failed to challenge the military to find a way to comport military tactics with political realties. With the more recent Gulf War, Cohen is critical of the extent to which political generals like Colin Powell were able to substitute their own views for those of the elected civilian leadership. He cites the well-known "Powell Doctrine" on the use of military force as a completely inappropriate usurpation of civilian prerogative by the military.

This is a thought provoking and extremely interesting book which I recommend to all interested in military and political history.

Cohen's book on the nature of civil military relations provides timely analysis and debunks traditional perceptions of how civilian leaders should relate to the generals that work beneath them. One can look to the headlines and see some of the author's opinions underlying many of the current Defense Secretary's decisions. Rumsfeld's choices of successors to the leadership in the Army reflect Cohen's argument that the strong wartime civilian leaders have chosen the right generals, as with Lincoln, and they have also micromanaged much of the wartime effort that senior military leaders attempt to carry out. Cohen uses four case studies of wartime leaders to support his arguments: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben Gurion.

Lincoln - Cohen challenges traditional views that Lincoln allowed Grant complete freedom of maneuver without undue meddling. The president also fired numerous generals before finding in Grant someone that could win the war. The author argues that Lincoln became very involved in military issues, and he provides examples to support his conclusion.

Clemenceau - the leader of France during World War I, this strong civilian head visited the front lines on average, once per week. Cohen argues that Clemenceau developed a close understanding of the nature of war and used that to manage two general officers with monumental personalities. Clemenceau achieved fame for his quote, "War is too important to be left to the generals." His quote underscores many of the opinions outlined in Cohen's book.

Churchill - subjected his military leaders to continuous probing about methodology, assumptions and planning. Cohen argues that he skillfully managed his own field marshals, as well as some of the U.S. generals.

Ben Gurion - this chapter provides a tremendous example of one leader building a military against all odds that could preserve a fledgling nation in the midst of many enemies, to include the British, who initially leaned toward the Palestinian cause. Ben Gurion combined several organizations within Israel to create a military force that has withstood numerous threats to the nation's security.

Chapter six adds an analysis of the Vietnam conflict and attempts to debunk the popular perception that undue civilian meddling kept the military from achieving victory. Cohen presents information that the military leadership provided no viable alternatives to the strategies proposed by McNamara and LBJ's other civilian advisors. Thus, the president had no true choices to choose from, and he hadn't chosen the right generals that could develop alternate strategies that encompassed an understanding of the enemy and the international situation. This provides an interesting twist to many popular conceptions of the war within our society.

The prologue outlines the "normal" theory of civil military relations, providing much background on Huntington's model developed in his landmark book, the Soldier and the State.

Given the author's position on the Defense Policy Board as an advisor to Secretary Rumsfeld, this book helps to understand much of the philosophy behind the Defense Secretary's interaction with military leaders. Military leaders of all uniforms, as well as civilian policy makers, will benefit from reading Supreme Command. The book lends an alternate perspective to the traditional view of civil-military relations.

Highly recommended!

Eliot Cohen argues that it is not possible to sustain a dichotomy between civilian and military decision-making in war. The view that such a dichotomy is possible and desirable is what Cohen calls the "normal theory."

According the "normal theory," wars are conducted best when civilians set broad objectives and leave it to the military to achieve those objectives, free from meddling. Cohen instead argues that the greatest civilian war leaders are "meddlers," not in the sense that they interfere with military decisions, but in the sense that they avidly study and question the thought process of the generals and admirals.

A business analogy would be with information technology. A "normal theory" would be that CEOs should set business strategy, and leave IT strategy to specialists. However, this dichotomy in fact is unworkable, because a CEO who does not understand how technology affects the business will be ineffective.

I came away from the book persuaded of Cohen's main thesis. That is, I can see that the line between political and military strategy is necessarily blurred, and that military commanders should not be above challenge and questioning. Above all, I see the need for civilian war leaders to immerse themselves in the problems of war, so that they can communicate effectively with generals and make decisions that are realistic.

I think that if all I had to go on were Cohen's profiles of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion, I would not have been so persuaded. I found those chapters to be sketchy, with too many digressions for my taste.

On the other hand, the discussion of the Viet Nam war and its aftermath was very thought-provoking. I think that a lot of people would like to comfort themselves with a simplistic view that "we could have won if we'd let the military do it's job." Cohen argues otherwise, and I think that he is right, but I am sure that this one chapter will not be enough to end the debate.

There are those who say that this is the book that President Bush should be reading in the aftermath of 9-11. Actually, I would want him to read David Brin's "The Transparent Society" and also Churchill's World War II memoirs. As Cohen points out, Churchill's ability to identify key theaters, such as the Battle of the Atlantic, was very powerful.

Eliot Cohen's book is remarkable and worth reading, destined to be read in command colleges for decades and also destined to hold a special place in US military history; because it is so wrong and its consequences have been so destructive. This book has already led to a lot of death and suffering, and it will likely lead to even more. When historians and strategists try to make sense of what went wrong in Operation Iraqi Freedom they will find it necessary to refer to the confused thinking that finds an unfortunately elegant and persuasive voice in this book.

Ostensibly this book is a profile of several civilian leaders (Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion) who ignored the warnings of the generals under their command and managed to push forward to victory. Consider it a book of case studies. To his credit, the author does demonstrate that bold civilian leaders possessed with good instincts and strong leadership capabilities can press forward to victory. But one gets the sense that the real purpose of this book is giving politicians and appointed civilians the justification to dismiss the warnings of the generals beneath them. The author's main point is that the popular idea that war should be left to the generals is wrong. The book's unmistakable message stated in vulgar terms would read, "War as far too important to be left to generals, who tend to be a bunch of wimps. If general balks at some civilian leader's demands, the civilian leader should feel perfectly justified in overriding them to overcome the general's cowardice. In fact, he should feel bold and heroic, destined for historical greatness. Just like Lincoln, Churchill, . . ."

Unfortunately, in providing such a limited number of case studies the book necessarily leaves out the situations in which bold civilian leaders have ignored their generals and pressed their armies into meat-grinders and defeat. For example, Adolf Hitler famously overrode his generals and ordered them into defeat. Admiral Yamamoto was opposed to attacking Pearl Harbor, and those above him ordered him right into it. Cohen makes his case, but he does so with an extreme paucity of evidence combined with an amazing avoidance of the record of military history that does not fit his thesis. Select a few key incidents and ignore all the rest and you can come to all sorts of wild and dubious conclusions.

As I write this review, the US is experiencing extreme complications in Iraq. It's possible that the situation may be salvaged, but virtually every problem currently experienced was clearly seen by the US military leadership yet dismissed by the civilian leaders in the Office of Secretary of Defense. In the build-up to war and after the fall of the Hussein regime, the generals in the Pentagon consistently stated that more troops would be needed and raised a number of concerns about establishing stability in post-war Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a man closely associated with the author of this book, has consistently rejected the very real concerns raised by his generals. [See James Fallows' article in the January '04 issue of the Atlantic Magazine or my website.] He boldly pushed forward, disregarding all of their concerns which are now appearing to be absolutely prescient. Was part of Rumsfeld's problem that he was inebriated by the message of this book? William Kristol, a prominent republican advisor and advocate of the war in Iraq, has claimed that this was the one book he most wanted President Bush to read. Perhaps in reading this book Bush was left unconcerned about all of the very real concerns that members of his administration so blithely dismissed.

The fundamental theme that this book deals with is extremely important. There have been, and will continue to be, situations where civilian leaders need to take command and override their generals and order them to accomplish objectives, develop new doctrines, or procure new technology that those generals may be opposed to. But Supreme Command does not adequately address this essential and very complicated issue, instead it seems to bludgeon the reader with a certain message derived from the selective interpretation of the actions and results of just four leaders. While the author's historical research is great and his writing entertaining it's been the experience of this reviewer that far too many of the book's readers come away with a frighteningly simplified understanding of a complex and serious issue. The book is good, it's worth reading, it's well-researched and well-written. Read it, just don't get carried away by the author's message.

If you want to know learn more about military history and strategy, there are far better books to read. Victor Davis Hanson, Martin Van Creveld, and Ralph Peters are all much better places to start. A strong understanding of the work of John Boyd will give you a clearer understanding of strategy than this book. (In fact, understanding Boyd is all it takes to collapse much of the neo-conservative message.) If you want to have a clear understanding of how Operation Iraqi Freedom went wrong, if you want to know how a bunch of civilians in the Pentagon could so cavalierly dismiss the warnings of the generals of the US military, you need to read this book. The mess in Iraq may very well be the legacy of this book and its author.

Edit of 18 May to add links, images, and comment for the war college students.

This is a first-class book and everything that it offers is laudable. Unfortunately, it completely isolates the civilian political to military professional relationship from ethics, intelligence, or the public.

This is not to suggest that leadership cannot take place in the absence of intelligence--indeed, Churchill was at his greatest when he formed his private informal intelligence network to replace the static and myopic official intelligence channels that muddled along in the pre-war years.

However, to discuss Viet-Nam, for example, and not acknowledge what George Allen has documented so well in None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam, or Michael Hiam in Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, to wit, the consistent manner in which policy-makers in Washington refused to listen to accurate intelligence estimates, while their Generals and Ambassadors in Saigon steadfastly "cooked the books," leaves the reader with a distorted understanding of how the policy-military-intelligence triad actually fails, more often than not, on the policy side rather than on the intelligence side. The manipulation of truth from the Saigon end, and the refusal to listen to truth on the Washington end, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and American, as well as allied nationalities.

Ethics--and intelligence--matter, and no treatment of Supreme Command should fail to address how these two should be but often are not the foundation for the civilian-military relationship. Let me be blunt: until complete transparency is achieved in how we plan, program, and budget for national security, the military officer corps, not the elected politicians or the secret bureaucrats, are going to be the truth-tellers.

Eight other books (all with my Cliff Note reviews) that I recommend as context:

Modern Strategy: Time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced.

Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale Neither is ideological fantasy and flag officers that forget their Oath and confuse loyalty with integrity.

Security Studies for the 21st Century Policy makers are seriously stupid about reality, and all too prone to believe classified crap or make up their own (see next two books)

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers See my review on Ellsberg lecturing Kissinger how he would become like a moron in shutting out ground truth in favor of codeword.

The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People Reality 101, not taught in most war colleges

The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World General and President Ike Eisenhower warned us--we let it happen anyway.

Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. Strategic Communications is seriously stupid and ineffective if we continue to support 42 of the 44 dictators, and allow Guantanamo and Abu Grahib to dominate how others see us

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change Reality 102. LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft was the US member of this panel on high level threats, challenges and change. Here they are, in priority order:

01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime

See my many lists on emerging threats, intelligence support to acquisition, etcetera. See comment for the free weekly report on Global Challenges: The Week in Review, and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Analysis Model.

TAKE-AWAYS:

01) $60 billion a year for secret intelligence that can be ignored and only touches 4% of the relevant information in 183 languages we do not speak is institutionalized lunacy.

02) Spending $1.3 trillion a year on war when peace and prosperity for all can be bought for under $250 billion a year is institutionalized lunacy.

03) You are responsible for keeping policy makers honest--that is a core Constitutional, moral, and command responsibility...you owe your troops, and the average American, this discipline of mind and heart.

04) The collective intelligence of the public is vastly more aware, more conscious, more moral, and more relevant to national security that the idiot ideas that come from loosely-educated policy makers who got their jobs by blowing smoke up someone's butt (or academics who lie to Congress when Service leaders are not willing to kick them down the steps of Capitol Hill and put their stars on the table).

05) The Chinese brought Dick Cheney's plane over Singapore. Why have you not been told this? Search for the Memorandum <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>. Waging Peace (Irregular Warfare) is the ONLY win-win.

06) DoD, for all its faults including an inability to pass an audit and $2.3 trillion "missing and unaccounted for," works better than the rest of the government. DoD needs to become the inter-agency and coalition hub for global action.

07) Foundations, corporations, other governments, and international organizations spend close to $1 trillion a year in charitable giving and planned assistance. Wrap your heads around this: a Multinational Decision Support Center in Tampa, taking over the CCC building that is being vacated, could create and promulgate an annual Global Range of Gifts Table to guide, on an opt-in basis, how they spent that money, while using Civil Affairs Brigade as the hub for regional multinational Civil Affairs Brigades who help connect the one billion rich with the five billion poor at a household level of granularity, with needs from $1 to $10,000 being covered by individuals that will not give to foundations.

The world has changed. Most of what is in this book is history, and completely out of touch with how the Services must motivate and lead Digital Natives, the Web 2.0 generation, and how the Services must become brain-housing groups--thinkers as well as shooters--able to deliver Peace from the Sea, Peace from Above, and Peace one cell call at a time.

I welcome invitations to speak informally after hours on a not to interfere basis. You folks at the next generation of leaders--you will need to learn most of what you will use outside the normal curriculum. Amazon is a great place to start.