America Can Win
Hart, Gary & Lind, William S.
AMERICA CAN WIN: THE CASE FOR MILITARY REFORM Gary Hart with William S. Lind/Adler & Adler/$17.95 Mary C.N. McConnell Don't judge this book by its covers: the bullish-on-America title...
...hand...
...Like Chambers, Muggeridge put his trust in the socialist promise of an earthly paradise, experienced the most horrid disillusionment imaginable, and ultimately found refuge in religious belief...
...There have only been two collections of his secular prose to date, Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes and Things Past, neither of which was ideally satisfactory and neither of which is currently in print...
...and usually out-generaled and out-thought their adversaries...
...Lind, America Can Win should have been more of a campaign book...
...military scrap most of these high-technology weapons and return to proven, simpler weapons...
...R102 Indianapolis, IN 46250 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 than he ever defines American interests, analyzes the Soviet threat, or explains under just what circumstances Americans might have to fight...
...It shows up in the proposals for a more "socialized" bureaucracy and a less complicated arsenal...
...In essence, it is the Book of Ecclesiastes with the pious interpolations left out...
...dollars...
...B. Eerdmans/$7.95 Terry Teachout THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 45...
...One must admit that there is nothing particularly essential about this volume, though it is good to have the "Firing Line" appearances readily available between hard covers...
...In Great Britain he is known as a television personality, in America as a humorist...
...Softcover Only $5.50, 0-86597-052-1 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...America Can Win seems to have been writ-ten in a sterile environment from which all foreign policy considerations have been deliberately excluded...
...and xeh Ircanun...
...The planners prefer to fight for that last increment of capability, which only drives up cost and complicates maintenance...
...NOW, every week receive a 32 page tabloid devoted to 30 * nationally-distributed newspaper columnists, with a conservative appeal...
...Like most guerrilla fighters, the military reformers are better at tearing down the defense establishment than they are at reconstructing a workable alternative...
...its security," no one, likewise, should be allowed to lead this nation who does not have a clear notion of the purposes for which, and the adversaries against which, it must ultimately be secured...
...Similarly, Vintage Muggeridge is in all actuarial probability the last book we can reasonably expect within the life-time of Malcolm Muggeridge...
...Leaving aside the individual weapons and equipment they condemn—some have merit, others do not—the authors are promoting a dangerous generalization, which is that complicated high-tech weapons cost too much and don't work anyway...
...There is a heavily romantic streak to military reform: a nostalgia for the good old days of Patton and MacArthur, the machine gun and the unambiguous war...
...Our military planners in Vietnam, after all, thought they were trying to out-think and outpace the enemy...
...Call Mil-Free *. * only $32 ****************** * Yes, I accept your Thal Subscription Special * * Offer of 1 year (52 issues) for $32...
...The reformers are often right in arguing that the advanced weapons we have acquired work less well, and cost more, than originally claimed...
...What editor Geoffrey Barlow has assembled instead is a collection of Malcolm Muggeridge's lectures and ad-dresses dealing with "religion and society," the proceeds intended to benefit the activities of Mother Teresa in Calcutta...
...A quality magazine for children...
...can be procured in greater numbers, and do the job...
...LiberryPress LibertyClassics Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres By Adam Smith The Glasgow Edition Edited by J. C. Bryce To celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1976, the University of Glasgow commissioned a new edition of Smith's extant works and correspondence to be published by Oxford University Press...
...Check Enclosed ^ Bill Me ERVATIVE ^ >f * cif, YNr Zip * *.***************** MINN I 1(111,r Box 29BB• Hampton, Iowa 50441 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR r CTOBER 1986 43 ica Can Win mostly avoids like the plague...
...Enjoy, also, a witty selection from over 24 acclaimed cartoonists...
...n L.hn GrecnI .I Whltnn, Vol...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...The object in maneuver warfare is not to kill enemy soldiers, but to shatter the ability of whole enemy units . . . to fight in an organized effective way, and to panic and paralyze enemy commanders...
...Lind has written elsewhere, maneuver warfare rejects formulas...
...The emphasis on counterinsurgency tactics, on helicopter envelopment patterns, even on winning hearts and minds, appears in each case an emphasis on maneuver warfare...
...But our defense planners are less eager to admit that these weapons are still at an early stage of development: in other words, they still have a lot of bugs...
...emphasize military history at least as much as engineering in the training of future combat leaders...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...If that has become Senator Hart's position, he never says so, any more 'William S. Lind, "The Case for Maneuver Doctrine," in The Defense Reform Debate, edited by Asa A. Clark IV, Peter W. Chiarelli, Jeffrey S. McKitrick, and James W. Reed (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984...
...We tried to outlast an enemy when time was not on our side...
...Our interests cannot be defended until they are defined...
...This, say the reformers, is how the Israelis beat the Arabs in 1967, and how the Germans beat the French in 1940...
...This manuscript was first discovered by John M. Lothian of the University of Aberdeen in 1958...
...Conserve our culture with (St...
...The invasion that ultimately led to the fall of Saigon might have best been met by an army trained in the attrition methods of World War II...
...These promise the worst in campaign literature...
...Huh...
...Add $20 * * for foreign postage...
...The arguments have become familiar: We have too many top-ranking officers and civilians who, in search of useful employment, busy themselves gold-plating weapons and stifling the initiative of their suborMary C.N...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...But most of these organizational proposals in America Can Win are relatively harmless...
...Rue, the reformers have identified some more readily defined characteristics of a maneuver-oriented military: it would delegate greater authority to junior officers...
...The reformers, on the other hand, can argue that many of these weapons, however wonderful in theory, haven't worked as advertised...
...The military promotion system encourages the "go along, get along" officer to stay in uniform, while the retirement system encourages the innovative officer to leave...
...He is a brutal critic of the medium which has made him famous...
...analysis of each planning option's strengths, weaknesses, and cost...
...They are also right in pointing out that the low-tech alternative would require more manpower and therefore perhaps (as many reformers openly recommend) a return to the draft...
...Both sides are right, and wrong...
...dinates...
...Why do conservatives buy liberal magazines for their children...
...People smell power," he remarked in 1959, "as a bull smells a cow in heat...
...So what would have been the "maneuver warfare" alternative...
...And to call him a conservative is to impose on his political views a coherence and consistency which they do not possess...
...It is hard to quarrel with applying mind over matter, especially when the Soviets have so much more matter than we do...
...We would still like to know where the Senator stands...
...Oar No-Risk Dial Subscription Special Year (52 issues) 7iy Return The Coupon...
...The Defense Department and the services, scrambling to overcome a growing imbalance in combat numbers, have put their faith in PGMs as a way to use America's comparative advantage in technology...
...It would be a snare and a delusion to think that the serious institutional problems in our defense establishment can be solved by rearranging the organizational boxes at the top of the Pentagon," they write...
...Likewise, the Pentagon's much maligned Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) for setting defense priorities and determining the defense budget is to be replaced with a "macroplanning process . . . a frame-work designed to permit rapid and easy syntheses of individual programs into rough estimates of alternative five-year programs known as macroplanning options...
...Defense Department bureaucrats could hardly have de-scribed the putative aims of PPBS bet-ter (or worse...
...But together they do not make a doctrinal revolution, or even, for that matter, a doctrine...
...Its tone is not so much political as parochial, especially in its elaborate genealogy of the military reform movement: "a loose band of intellectual and political guerrilla fighters, ambushing the defense establishment with unexpected questions, unwelcome facts, and innovative alternatives to current policy...
...They can point to the dramatic success of these weapons in the closing days of the Vietnam war, the opening days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Israeli assault on Syrian air defenses, and, more recently, the U.S...
...Reform, then, is simply a description of the situation without the problem...
...LibertyClassics is publishing softcover versions of these volumes printed so as to provide exact copies of the hardcover editions...
...This in all actuarial probability," the last-named of these authors wrote at the age of 93 in the preface to Shakes Versus Shav, "is my last play and the climax of my eminence, such as it is...
...We allowed Hanoi to defeat, in the authors' words, the American "strategic center of gravity...
...The issue for both sides is money, a subject that Amer800-558-1244 In Iowa and Alaska Call Collect: 515-456-2585 If not satisfied, just write for a full refund of your money...
...B. Eerdmans, a religious publishing house, inevitably aroused expectations of a well-chosen and long-overdue anthology, expectations which are not meant to be satisfied by the finished product...
...simpler, lower-tech weapons are cheaper...
...Just $32 a year (52 issues...
...291 pages...
...These are all sensible reforms, and many are now being or have already been adopted by the military...
...Unless, of course, the promised final volume of Chronicles of Wasted Time is nearing completion, as is devoutly to be hoped...
...and encourage "free-play" as opposed to predetermined, "set-piece" military exercises...
...Malcolm Muggeridge's "message"—for it is a message, though a negative one .. . boils down to a simple disbelief in the power of human beings to construct a perfect or even a tolerable society here on earth...
...This book is designed to pro-mote common sense...
...Muggeridge's views on Christianity and society have already been presented with the greatest possible clarity in Jesus Rediscovered...
...Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky, than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw...
...In another sense, however, the authors are surely right to claim that Vietnam was a war of attrition...
...How is this to be accomplished...
...When Evelyn Waugh died, Muggeridge called him "above all a mystic in search of a beatific vision...
...National Catholic Register . a well-conceived and much needed Christian magazine of quality...
...His novels, needless to say, are even rarer...
...Viewed in this light, Muggeridge's career takes on intriguing similarities to the life of that other right-wing journalistic bird of paradise, Whittaker Chambers...
...put greater value on troop cohesion by reducing the personnel turnover in individual units...
...Regular viewers of "Firing Line" know him as the benign Christian apologist who speaks eloquently of the road to faith every Christmas...
...The victors sought the initiative...
...Most of them have every column published in full...
...This, anyway, has been the strongly held conviction of the greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists...
...retaliatory attack on Libya...
...The services are run not by warriors but by engineers who have for-gotten what little military history they were ever forced to learn...
...This "indiscriminate walloping" quite logically took the form of satire, and indeed Muggeridge became our century's preeminent satirist of the will to power and the liberal death wish...
...The Army's now-canceled DIVAD self-propelled, radar-directed anti-aircraft gun is a case in point...
...One could argue that we eventually out-thought ourselves...
...The reformers propose that the U.S...
...Humor" is a strange euphemism to apply to the corrosive brand of savage, lacerating satire which he has been dispensing for five decades...
...The Earnest Atheist, Muggeridge's lethally funny biography of Samuel Butler, and The Thirties, his pungent social history of Great Britain between the floods, have been unavailable for years...
...Both men moved from passionate faith in the left to uneasy coexistence with the right, from sensual chaos to domestic asceticism, from brilliantly executed secular journalism to profoundly spiritual reflections on the desperation of our times cast in the supple medium of autobiography...
...We were so busy being clever that we failed to recognize the very traditional threat posed by the army of North Vietnam...
...I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Fran-cis of Assisi, with Dr...
...The Soviet "reality rests somewhere in between" ideology armed and rampant and the toothless bear...
...a journal of Christian culture for young people...
...By exhortation—at least that's how it works in the only example offered...
...America Can Win offers a plausible critique of what might be called the American defense culture, especially the bloated, over-centralized bureaucracy that controls both the Department of Defense and the individual services...
...Nothing is open to him, therefore, except an indiscriminate walloping of all human activities whatever...
...The Anglican Digest...
...If "no one should seek to lead this nation who is not totally committed to Malcolm Muggeridge is a hard man to pin down...
...3, No...
...Having relieved himself of these statesmanesque noises, Senator Hart by all appearances then turns the job over to his creative, opinionated, iconoclastic (and quite conservative) defense adviser and "co-author," William Lind...
...The same cannot be said of Hart and Lind's better known proposals for changing the composition of American arsenals...
...1 SUMMER 1986 52.75 * This children's magazine is orthodox, humorous, fun, challenging and beautifully illustrated...
...It may be hard to grasp what is at stake in the debate over PGMs, because neither side wants to tell the full truth...
...Published by Hampton Publishing, a 110 year old independent newspaper company...
...And it is altogether fitting that this great satirist of the follies of thetwentieth century should bring his extraordinary list of publications to a close with a collection of sermons and addresses on religion whose sale will go to benefit Mother Teresa's ministry...
...George Orwell, writing about Muggeridge as early as 1940, correctly observed that Mr...
...But the ferocity of Muggeridge's satire, as Orwell clearly implies, was initially based on a pessimism so complete as to be nihilistic in its import...
...Terry Teachout is an associate editor of Harper's...
...They can also point to the decreasing prices ofadvanced electronics and computers...
...The promise is not fulfilled...
...It shows up as well in the doctrinal core of the military reform agen-da: the substitution of "maneuver" for "attrition" as the American "style of warfare...
...One other resemblance, this one exasperating, should be mentioned: neither Whittaker Chambers nor Malcolm Muggeridge cared enough about his own work to supervise the publication of anything remotely resembling a decent collection of essays...
...We raar the .mMil tree hand...
...Most readers of The American Spectator surely think of him as an elder statesman of conservatism...
...It is also how the Germans did not beat the more resilient Russians in 1943...
...Paul' FamilyMagazine rt...
...He gives no more evidence of believing in God than of trusting in Man...
...But such casual reductionism cannot come anywhere near conveying the true flavor of so complex and elusive a figure as Muggeridge...
...With apologies to Mr...
...The others, which range from a lecture on Dr...
...What Lind goes on to produce is less a presidential campaign tract than a quintessential staffer's ac-count of struggles inside the Beltway...
...and systematic examination of the possible long-term effects of current uncertainties surrounding future threats, budgets, and technological possibilities...
...Surely it was to strike quickly and decisively at the North Vietnamese center of gravity—in North Vietnam...
...But they refuse to face up to the need both to move forward with successor generations of PGMs, and to acquire sufficient numbers of more mature weapons...
...It would be interesting to know, for example, how Hart and Lind would have fought the Vietnam war...
...Its goal "is not a commander with a mental checklist, but one with what the Germans call `a feeling in the tips of his fingers' . . . a thought process rooted in Gestalt...
...Paul's Familcr Magazine ** **,, # # * I lnhke the ahary'a nn I:p.pr.,and, Uphhcd b. the unbwum Jo...
...Its New *It's Weekly *It's RIGHT ON...
...To their credit, the authors do not promote the usual panacea—defense reorganization—to cure these ills...
...Finally...
...McConnell Don't judge this book by its covers: the bullish-on-America title superimposed on an American flag, or the full-page photograph of Gary Hart in a thoughtful slouch...
...The University Bookman Send $10 for a one-year subscription to: St...
...Nevertheless, many of the organizational proposals they do offer are elusive, or naive: The "bureaucratic" model of decision-making is to be replaced by the "corporative" model—made in Japan—whereby "the institution . . . makes a great effort to get its employees at every level to adopt the institution's external goals and purposes as their personal goals and values...
...Money-back guarantee in FULL...
...which was] the growing popular discontent with the Vietnam War...
...Johnson to transcripts of three of Muggeridge's "Firing Line" appearances, are uncollected...
...Paul's Family Magazine, P.O...
...Introduction, appendices, index...
...One of these pieces, the 1968 sermon "Another King," was previously published in Jesus Rediscovered...
...No one should seek to lead this nation who is not totally committed to its security...
...The greatest villains, according to the authors, are precision-guided munitions (PGMs): the so-called "smart" weapons equipped with advanced electronics, radar, and computers that are designed to locate, identify, and destroy fixed (and, increasingly, mobile) targets from a far greater distance than ever before...
...Great reading, a handy reference...
...The key to such new planning appears to be oversight by an "assistant for macroplanning" of "impeccable" morals, superb judgment, and no political convictions...
...Its advocates actively resist answering that question...
...There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe than just getting through the days of our life as best we may...
...Box 772 A Fort Scott, KS 66701 1-800-523-5562 VINTAGE MUGGERIDGE: RELIGION AND SOCIETY Edited by Geoffrey Barlow/Wm...
...But there are, as always, striking moments, such as the highly characteristic passage in "The Prospect of Death" where Muggeridge reflects on the evidences of immortality...
...Now available is, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, a transcription of the notes of an unknown student who attended Smith's lectures in 1762-63...
...McConnell is a free-lance writer living in Chicago...
...Almost everyone in the book wears a white or a black hat, and the way to tell the difference is whether or not they agree with Bill Lind and his reformer friends...
...The main means is not firepower but . . . presenting [the enemy] with surprising and dangerous situations faster than he can react to them, until he comes apart...
...It is the great vindication of Muggeridge's career that he has so clearly found his own beatific vision at last...
...The defense establishment is almost surely correct (only war will tell) in arguing that PGMs will eventually change the face of warfare, and that if we do not employ them, the Soviets will...
...Don't be put off by the preface, either...
...I have had no wish to renew acquaintance with my past writings, whether published or unpublished," Muggeridge has written, and he does not exaggerate...
...As Mr...
...took quick advantage of every opening...
...Previously published are The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, and, in two volumes, The Wealth of Nations...
...some other destiny than merely using up such physical, intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been vouchsafed us...
...In these lectures, Smith demonstrated the connection of language and the ability to communicate thoughts and inclinations to the development of sympathy and fellow-feeling, concepts central to his more famous works...
...Un frn,dum...
...So the announcement of a book called Vintage Muggeridge by Wm...
...Such pessimism cannot be sustained this side of sanity, and so it is hardly surprising that Muggeridge turned with increasing frequency to Christianity both as a subject matter and as a philosophy of life...
...There's a TOPICAL INDEX in every issue...
...A quarterly for children 7 to 97...
...WILL* BUCKLEY* KI LPATRICK* HARVEY*SOBRAN * KIRKPATRICK EVANS&NOVAK*RUSHER* HART*VODER*RIESEL*KISSINGER*CHAPMAN*LAMBRO * PODHORE11*JA(K ANDERSON* HEMPSTONE*JONES *RABINOWITZ*MOHR*BROOKES* It's an ALL-STAR conservative cast...
...I understand I can * ^ obtain a full refund if I am not fully satisfied...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...But what does maneuver war-fare mean in practice...
...The variety of Christianity which he so eloquently espouses in his extreme old age is anything but orthodox...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
