Finding the Target

The Military needs to quit kicking the can around and start kicking the terrorist in the can.

That's what i learned from this book by esteemed military historian Fred Kagan. He talks about how the US Military has changed since Vietnam in terms of technology and strategic thinking. He talked about the shifting perception of the nature and method of war in order to achieve its rational aim: policy and political change. For instance, Air Force strategists, including a smart fellow named Boyd, developed a series of theories focusing on assessing information faster than your opponents and attacking critical nodes of infrastructure and centers of balance. These centers of balance were not necessarily leadership, or large troop centers, or infrastructure points, although they could be. Rather the focus was on finding the target of your mission (or the war) and targeting the specific resources utilized by the enemy that prohibit the accomplishment of that mission. For example, in structuring war games against the USSR in the event of war in Europe, instead of destroying the tens of thousands of tanks that the USSR would launch against the NATO forces, the better approach was targeting the fuel sources and lines of supply that kept those tanks going. It's a lot harder to hit ten thousand separate tanks than it is to hit one hundred fuel depots and railroad junctures. It seems kind of obvious but Clauswitz (the ultimate authority on the conduct of war) had said in the early 19th century that the center of balance in any force was the most powerful army component in it. Therefore he said that the crucible of victory was obtained in engaging and destroying that force and thereby defeating the enemy's morale.

Kagan also talks about lots of other things, which are interesting, but I think his primary point was that the military needs to consider politics in its transformation and to be more geared towards attacking the problems of the day than designing some super-force for the 22nd century.

8.5/10