Michael Pollak wrote:
> The textbook on strategy in the Army War college has since the early
> 1980s
> been _On Strategy: A Critical Examination of the Vietnam War_ by Col.
> Harry Summers. As you can tell by the title, it is essentially an
> homage
> to Clausewitz and an attempt to apply his precepts to our most recent
> and
> central war experience. If you want to see how somebody can get
> blinded
> to reality by Clausewitzian logic (and take others with him), this is
> the
> book. As many people have pointed it out, he and the army would both
> have
> done better to have read Basil Liddell Hart.
Isn't the RMA the basis of the strategy now being employed in Iraq?
> How The RMA Defense Plan Is Taking Congress, the Military, And Our
> Citizens Out Of The Picture
>
> Many have been having fun calling Bush's Sec. of Defense Donald
> Rumsfeld "Dr. Strangelove," both for the weird faces he makes during
> his photo ops as well as his weird policy throwbacks to the Cold War.
> Imagine our surprise last week, when we learned from Nicholas Lemann
> in his New Yorker story about Bush and his RMA defense plan, that one
> of the thinkers behind Bush's plan, Herman Kahn, was actually the
> model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove character in Kubrick's
> film prediction of world-wide nuclear destruction. The connection
> between Kahn, the original Dr. Strangelove, and Bush is that a
> colleague of Kahn's at the Rand think tank in the 50's was Andrew
> Marshall (now, age 79), Bush's speechwriter on matters of military
> defense and the head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.
> Indeed, the very conservative and very paranoid Marshall is really the
> man Bush is using to conduct a broad review of the military, not
> Rumsfeld. Indeed, Rumsfeld and his lieutenants, Paul Wolfowitz,
> Richard Armitage, and James Roche, are all protegees of Andrew
> Marshall, and it's Marshall's crackpot cold war scenario that is the
> Bush playbook for our nation's new military strategy. In short, be
> afraid, be very afraid. How in the world has this happened? To get a
> fuller story, you'll have to read Lemann's piece and an overview of
> the available documents. In the meantime, here are a few observations
> to suggest why this subject demands your further attention.
http://www.bushwatch.com/needtoknow.htm
Ted