We're sitting ducks
KAPLAN, LAWRENCE F.
We're Sitting Ducks! Literary War Games and Their Discontents By Lawrence F. Kaplan After tanks, subversion, and vodka, perhaps the greatest export of the Soviet Union was the "socialist realism"...
...At the same time, due to more frequent overseas deployments, operational demands on the military have increased dramatically...
...As you already know, we don't have the same armed forces that won Desert Storm...
...According to Weinberger and Schweizer, "The U.S...
...invasion of Mexico ("Conclusion: The United States must work aggressively to construct a deep, effective HUMINT network in Latin America and elsewhere...
...This is a shame, for beneath the overheated pedantry lies a convincing argument for rebuilding the nation's neglected defenses...
...Rather than present five scenarios that end in what is essentially a single catastrophic outcome, Weinberger and Schweizer might have considered making the scenarios more plausible by designing a single case with three variations, only one of which would have been a worst-case scenario...
...Later, an immigrant invasion of the United States is followed by a U.S...
...It probably would also have meant writing an op-ed rather than a book...
...Mark Chain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1999, explains, "During the past five years we have made cuts in HUMINT, trying to rely instead on national technical means...
...Despite the sensationalist format, with the military bracing for a new round of force reductions and budget cuts, the thesis of The Next War merits serious consideration...
...force that defeated Saddam Hussein no longer exists...
...Now, with the publication of Caspar Weinberger's The Next War (co-authored by Peter Schweizer), the socialist-realism canon has received a contribution from an unlikely fig-ure—a former secretary of defense who helped consign to the dustbin of history the regime that popularized this tedious genre...
...The body of the book—400 pages of apocalyptic war stories—merely dramatizes the claims presented in the 13-page introduction...
...members of Congress have cited it in hearings, and Bob Dole even plugged an advance copy on the campaign trail...
...If only the authors had made their case minus the theatrics, they might have changed the minds of a few legislators—the audience for which this book should have been intended...
...Literary War Games and Their Discontents By Lawrence F. Kaplan After tanks, subversion, and vodka, perhaps the greatest export of the Soviet Union was the "socialist realism" novel...
...The size of the armed forces has been cut by a third since the end of the Cold War, and projects to modernize weaponry have suffered as defense funds are diverted to social programs...
...The Next War is a collection of "literary war games" intended to dramatize the point that "what we have today is a military that is a shadow of its former self...
...Procurement spending is at a 40-year low, while the defense budget consumes a smaller share of GDP than it has at any time since 1940...
...In novels titled Steel, Wheat, or Cement, the story always proceeds along the same lines—girl meets boy, boy falls in love with some revolutionary harvesting technique...
...In the first scenario, American troops battle North Korean and Chinese forces, only to be attacked with nuclear and biological weapons...
...To ensure that even the most imperceptive reader will understand where the blame rests for these battlefield fiascos, the authors have constructed the scenarios using a wooden prose style that barely conceals the nuts and bolts of their thesis...
...These candy-coated political tracts, which enjoyed a vogue on college campuses for half a century, were concerned less with plot elaboration than with hitting the reader repeatedly over the head with a blunt message...
...We have thousands of chicken inspectors working for the USDA, but hardly anyone is inspecting the nuclear missile sites of our enemies...
...Similarly, in a plug for the intelligence community, Gen...
...Conclusion: Failure to expand American military capabilities and support the procurement of advanced weapons systems by Taiwan will doom the United States to further defeat in Asia...
...This, of course, would have meant attempting to persuade, rather than frighten, the reader into supporting an otherwise sensible position...
...Then Russia conquers Western Europe and rains nuclear warheads down on NATO forces...
...demobilization as the source of future battlefield catastrophes and warn that we must spend more on defense if our soldiers are to avoid the fates of those described in the book...
...Or the authors could have expanded their sober and well-argued introduction and dispensed with the nightmarish fables altogether...
...If indeed war is hell, passages such as these suggest that the "literary war game" is something like purgatory...
...In the final chapter, a trade war with Japan quickly spins out of control when the Japanese sabotage the New York Stock Exchange and resume their World War II conquests in the South Pacific...
...In five fictional war scenarios, the authors cite our current Lawrence F. Kaplan is a Merrill fellow of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...Thus, to emphasize the future impact of present force reductions, the secretary of defense lectures the president, "Victory is going to be very difficult indeed...
...The Next War has already made ripples in the debate over future defense spending...
...They have incorporated detailed tables, weapons diagrams, and orders of battle—most of them authentic— into a Tom Clancy-esque narrative, replete with fictional characters to "demonstrate the human and psychological dimensions of conflict...
...But the book's car-toonish presentation makes it unlikely to have an enduring impact...
...Next comes a war with Iran that features an Iranian nuclear strike on Italy...
Vol. 2 • March 1997 • No. 24
