Spirit, Blood, and Treasure

Donald E. Vandergriff, Ed.
Presidio Press
June 2001

Review by Defense and the National Interest
March 2001

Although the Cold War has been over for 10 years, the basic doctrines, organization, and even weapons of America’s military establishment remain unchanged from those that stood ready to confront the Soviet Union on the plains of Europe. We still maintain the large percentage of middle and senior ranking officers that would have been needed to accept and train the draftees filling out our armor and infantry divisions. Our manuals still envision conventional conflict against a large foe with weapons and tactics similar to our own. And even our new weapons were conceived to defeat their hypothetical counterparts that might have rolled out of Soviet factories. To foot the bill, we are now spending as much (in inflation adjusted dollars) as we did during most years of the Cold War, and roughly three times as much as the combined total of all of the conceivable "threats."

Such waste would be regrettable in view of our other domestic priorities, but it is also locking us into outmoded patterns of thought, perhaps our own Maginot Line syndrome. Unfortunately the nature of war around the world is changing. Aside from the occasional Saddam, no one wages war by lining up his forces like he was preparing for a second Battle of the Bulge. Instead, we face enemies that blend into the jungles or teeming urban sprawl, that present few targets for our wonder weapons, and that prosecute a dirty and vicious form of war that one might describe as "military terrorism." These tactics have been remarkably successful, driving us from Vietnam, Beirut, and Somalia. We can certainly expect that those who wish us harm are learning from these experiences and so will become even better at applying them, rendering our Cold War weapons and doctrines even less effective in the future.

While not the first to examine why America’s military is so resistant to change, this book presents the first coherent explanation in terms of the evolving generations of war and the social dynamics of large, stable systems. It insists that change must start with our people and our systems for selecting, retaining, and promoting them, then with our doctrines, and then finally with our weapons and hardware programs. Without fundamental change of this magnitude, we will certainly confront more and more enemies employing the agile but brutal "fourth generation" strategies that have rendered our conventional might impotent or irrelevant whenever the two have clashed around the world.