GUNG HO

...Fallows fails to grasp that that war was the great exception of modern American military history, when the entire country was mobilized, with twenty million men and women in uniform...

...As described by Fallows, the concept is suspiciously reminiscent of the successful "hit and run" tactics employed by the Chinese and Vietnamese...

...It may be a voice of the not so distant future...

...land-based missiles from which we could not retaliate...

...There is also the problem that the XMI might not get delivered to the front because the tank is too wide to fit through the doors of the standard Air Force combat transport...

...To ensure this status quo of uncertainty, Fallows calls for a ban on ICBM tests so that accuracy in targeting is not improved...

...Fallows wistfully quotes from the writing of George S. Patton that "volumes are devoted to armament...

...Fallows is a pathfinder for the new patriotism—a nouveau philosophe American style—marking the transition from the years of defeat to the trails of future national glory...

...He advocates a stand-by conventional military capability for deployment in global trouble spots where American "interests" are believed to be under attack...

...Let the poor have the military jobs in peacetime...

...It is possible that Fallows and the far more dangerously placed Caspar Weinberger still believe that conventional and strategic war can be kept separate in a military confrontation with the Soviet Union...

...Michael Uhl (Michael Uhl is co-author, with Tod Ensign, of'GI Guinea Pigs...

...In the tradition of the Kennedy brothers, this former Carter speech-writer longs for the elusive panacea of a counterinsurgent force capable of making common-sense tactical decisions beyond the operational reach of an out-of-touch centralized command...

...However, the "careerist" mentality of the professional officer corps has corrupted the proper military spirit necessary to achieve such reforms...

...The thirty-two-year-old author, like the current generation of majors and lieutenant colonels for whom Vietnam is a vivid memory, doesn't want to lose the next ground war...

...Moreover, "attrition" emphasizes fire power and technologically complex weapons systems that, Fallows insists, don't always work on the battlefield...

...Fallows convincingly debunks the fashionable "counterforce" strategic doctrine which holds that the Soviet Union could launch a successful "first strike" against the U.S...

...Apparently the same MXI tank that demonstrates the corruption of the "culture of procurement" is less offensive to Fallows if it is being ground into the desert sand by a white suburbanite...

...Fallows is no fan of Reaganomics, with its demand that Defense increase its share of the national budget...

...One antidote Fallows proposes to military careerism and its spiritual deficits is to scrap the "all volunteer force" and to reinstate the draft...

...This trend of the "culture of procurement" to produce high-tech, low-performance weaponry led one Pentagon analyst to plot the state of our defense as a "curve of unilateral disarmament...

...If there is a war worth fighting, there won't be any difficulty in raising a more democratically representative army...

...Since the American nuclear arsenal is basically untested in wartime (as is that of the Russians), no one, Fallows concludes correctly, knows for sure what would happen if the existing strategic forces were set in motion...

...That sound you may hear while you're reading it is James Fallows sharpening his teeth for the next U.S...

...The main problem with the military budget, Fallows agrees, is its susceptibility to "threat inflation," a process through which "the public is stampeded into an embrace of expensive, complicated projects" that bear little relationship to the realities of combat...

...Are the missile guidance systems even accurate enough to deliver warheads to their intended targets...

...It is the use of that power which should be examined, not the manner in which military manpower is secured...

...This "mutual uncertainty" already provides sufficient deterrence, Fallows believes...

...In lieu of total disarmament, this isn't a bad idea...

...It is a "culture" in which the top brass and the arms manufacturers conspire to design weapons based on abstract "paper" models rather than on "human elements that have often determined the outcome of combat...

...strategic policy...

...Yet Fallows himself never seriously addresses the question of what Americans will or should fight for...

...He quotes extensively from earnest-sounding cadres who lament the lack of "quality" soldiers in, the volunteer army...

...military donnybrook...

...they need them...

...the dust would clog its delicate mechanisms...

...National Defense should be read...

...pages to inspiration...

...The idea of a peacetime draft to field a large standing army is of recent origin, and it is related to the growth of American power...

...The brute force of massive fire power or "attrition" is out...

...Here Fallows, who "came of military age during the war in Vietnam," becomes a spokesman for the Vietnam-trained, middle-level officers who are weary of the "war of attrition" model which their managerial superiors have foisted upon them...

...The new catch word is "maneuver...

...The draft is also more "democratic," Fallows assures us...

...This managerial logic" not only "contributes to the growth of ineffective weapons" but it favors procurement skills over time-honored soldierly virtues as the prime criteria for officer advancement...

...Yet with the precocious talent of a Steven Spielberg for exploiting our psychic insecurities, he turns a mundane appeal for austerity into a vision of renewed American military strength...

...Fallows wants our forces to have more bullets and fuel and more frequent realistic training exercises...

...But the generals apparently like its fancy computers and all the gadgetry on the console...

...To cite an example, the state-of-the-art XMI tank could never operate in the deserts of the Middle East...

...He seems to believe that the American malaise can be cured by policy decisions, like those he suggests are internal to the military...

...This, in turn, creates a "culture of procurement" which "draws the military toward new weapons because of their great cost, not in spite of it...

...In his chapter on U.S...

...There are not enough "middle-class" white youths, and all those "high school dropouts" lack the "technical skills required to run and maintain a computerized tank...

...Didn't it do the job for us during World War II...