WASHINGTON, June 3 (UPI) -- "Military Reform: A Reference Handbook," by Winslow Wheeler and Lawrence Korb, is an important and enjoyable guide to the U.S. military reform movement that started in the 1970s, peaked in the 1980s and died by the early 1990s.
Wheeler, who is today director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington military watchdog group the Center for Defense Information, does a good job discussing the U.S. press, which did what it always does: build something up -- which creates news -- and then tear it down again -- which creates more news.
What drew many members of Congress to the Reform Caucus was the opportunity it offered to get some good ink. When the wind started blowing the other way, those illustrious legislators blew with it. But the corruption of the press itself is a story told less often, and it needs telling. Why do defense companies buy full-page ads in major newspapers? Not because anyone buys a fighter plane based on a newspaper ad, but because the six-figure price for a full page buys the newspaper.
Larry Korb's most important chapter is on "Defense Transformation," and he makes something of a hash of it. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, is today at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning Washington think tank.
"Transformation" is the latest buzzword for what started out -- in the Soviet military -- as the "Revolution in Military Affairs," the notion that new technology would magically eliminate war's confusion, uncertainty and friction. Reform always took the opposite view, namely that to be effective in war, technology must be used in ways that conform to war's nature. Korb fails to see Reform and Transformation as opposites and enemies, although in the end he does lay out how Transformation failed in Iraq.
Wheeler's last chapter defines reform, with the hopeful purpose of renewing it and making its ideas available to a new president. The fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with federal spending that is endangering the country's financial stability, should put military reform back on the political front burner. But that "should" means nothing in Washington, where all that counts is helping the usual interests feed off the nation's decay. The only presidential candidate who might pick up the reform agenda is Libertarian nominee Bob Barr.
The book concludes with four important appendices, including a condensed version of the FMFM-1A Field Manual on Fourth Generation War, and a superb piece by Don Vandergriff on improving military education. The last alone is worth the price of the book.
It may be that the Military Reform Movement remains nothing but a historical footnote, one of many vain attempts to rescue a decaying empire from its appointment with history's dustbin. But as Win Wheeler makes clear in "Military Reform: A Reference Handbook," it was also the source of some important ideas on how to win wars and, for those of us who were involved in it, a hell of a ride.
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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)
