National Defense Hardcover – May 12, 1981

Retiring from work at one of the AEC/ERDA/DOE nuclear weapons labs, over the years I saw the fallacies of the Pentagon over and again. It was an easy conclusion that the minimum in the IQ curve occurs at the rank of Major, and the performance minimum at the ranks of General. A good read and all the more current in today's world of F-35s and Sig-Saurs.

I am not the right reader for this book, somehow I was expecting a readers digest (but insightuf) overview.

This is a crystal ball written back in the early 80's and all the predictions came true. Contractors making Billion dollar weapon systems that spend more time in maintenance than they do in use all while the taxpayer foots the bill.

Even though the book is several years old it explains exactly what is going on politically today. Could be used for academic studies.

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.

James Fallows is an excellent writer, andI would add, a excellent reporter- though not unqualifiedly so. In this boo he set out to reveal what he though were a number of failings in the US Defense establishment, concentrating on policy, strategy, and weapons procurement. In many areas he does an excellent job. In others, he does less well. Some of this is because of facts that weren't available to Fallows at the time he wrote this book. Some is because of the evolution of technologies, like RPVs, that weren't part of the equation when Fallows did his research. But in other cases, it's because he only told one side of the story. And in some cases, he simply got the facts of the matter wrong. There's a body of experimental evidence from studies done in the last decade that suggests people give highest credence to the first source of information they encounter. We're all prone to do this, and in many cases I think Falows found a source that seemed to do a good job of explaining the facts to him (like Paul Nitze) and he stopped there.

Let's start with the matter of the M-16. This is a story that's been told many times, and Fallows gets it mostly correct. But there's a lot missing from his telling. He credits Rep. Ichord with being the one man who set in motion the hearings that led to the revision of the M-16, but in point of fact, there are a number of men who were much more important. The first is then-Lt. Michael Chervenak, who bucked the chain of command, and sent the letters to several Congressmen and newspapers that really set everything in motion. Anoteher was Chervenak's CO, Richard Culver, a career officer who backed Chervenak up when the brass came gunning for him. (This is well documented in Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War, a book largely about the AK-47, but which also comers the complete M-16 history and much of the history of 20th Century small arms.) Fallows also misses the single biggest flaw of the M-16- the chamber and barrel were not chromed, and that led to severe corrosion in the humid climate of Vietnam. It was this flaw, which was due to the Pentagon's refusal to spend a few extra dollars for the plating that Colt recommended, that was responsible for most of the jams and failures experienced by soldiers in the field.

Fallows also seems, in his dissertation on the M16, to have fallen under the spell of those who at the time were arguing for massed fire over aimed fire as being the role of the infantryman. This was a fashionable view for a time, but as wiser men observed, why put sights on rifles if you're not supposed to aim them. Today, aimed fire is the standard, and marksmanship is heavily emphasized in both the Marine Corps and the Army. Today's M-16 derivatives have advanced reflex sights that are designed to make the most out of the rifleman's skill. Fallows closes this section with a shot at those who, in the 70s, were arguing again for a higher-power cartridge. But today, while the 5.56 NATO remains the standard cartridge for the infantry rifleman, more higher power rifles have entered the basic armory of the soldier, particularly for sniping use. The 7.62 NATO cartridge is in common use, along with the 300 WIn. Magnum and the .338 Lapua.

There are also several specific technical errors in the M-16 section. For instance, in describing why the change from IMR powder to Ball powder caused problems, he says that because the Ball powder was a slower burning powder, it was still burning "when the gas port opened". Fine, except the gas port does not open and close. It is not a valve, as Fallows thinks, but merely the hole at the muzzle end of the barrel where gas is vented off to drive the bolt rearward.

In the section on armor, he ridicules the TOW missile, stating that the need to keep a sight on the target while the missile is en route is a fatal flaw, and that "the TOW has never really been tested in combat"- but the TOW has been extremely successful in combat from Vietnam- a decade before Fallows wrote his book- through Desert Storm. He similarly ridicules the JTIDS Command Network and the "wild expansion of C3I", complaining that such complex, integrated networks "are useless when they don't work and may be harmful when they do." But as anyone who has followed the development of integrated battlefield C3I systems can tell you, such systems, which integrate data from soldiers, radar, aerial surveillance and intel, are the backbone of the modern battlefield, and an area where the US military has a tremendous advantage over its dies. Fallows quotes a number of stories whose point is that in the end, war is attrition, and a surplus of material can overcome the best weapons. That is true, to a point, and it was Stalin's philosophy; he is supposed to have said, during WWII, that "quantity has a quality all its own." But countless engagements and campaigns have proven the effectiveness of superior weapons over numbers, including the aforementioned Gulf War. Fallows' 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 than smoothbores. Everyone except M1 gunners, that is, who made countless one-shot kills at ranges of one to two miles during the Gulf War. The M256A1 120 mm smoothbore gun found on the M1 Abrams, firing the M829A3 APFSDS round, has demonstrated itself capable of one-shot kills of tanks at 4,000 meters (2.4 miles) in actual battle conditions.

Despite the numerous errors, omissions and faulty inferences, there is still a surprising amount of good information in this book. Fallows' description of the genesis of the F-16 is particularly good, as is his writing on procurement, the evolution of the modern fighter jet and his chapter on careerism in the military. It's still useful for that material, and more. But there are other books on those topics. If you do happen on a copy of this book, I still recommend reading it, and there's a lot of historical information that can be gleaned from it. But read it with a critical eye, and don't take anything Fallows claims as gospel.

I will always be on a book binge whether I do it or we do it. In recent years I really liked "National Defense" by James Fallows. It's a fun read through the saga of protecting our nation against microgravity aggressors with military brass turning perfectly lethal killing machines into dead weight. How many generals does it take to screw up a light bulb?