Finding The Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick Kagan

From the Publisher

In Finding the Target, Frederick Kagan describes the three basic transformations within the U.S. military since Vietnam. First was the move to an all-volunteer force and a new generation of weapons systems in the 1970s. Second was the emergence of stealth technology and precision-guided munitions in the 1980s. Third was the information technology that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Golf War. This last could have insured the U.S. continuing military preeminence, but this goal was compromised by Clinton's drawing down of our armed forces in the 1990s and Bush's response to 9/11 and the global war on terror.

The New York Times - Barry Gewen

Kagan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a stalwart of neoconservatism…Yet his criticism of the Bush administration's conduct of the Iraq war is blistering…Kagan contends that the American military successfully transformed itself after the humiliation of Vietnam with the all-volunteer Army and upgradings of personnel and weapons, but then fell captive to dreams of dominance through technology alone, losing sight of the human component of warfare. Not every reader will happily follow Kagan as he hacks his way through the thickets of AirLand Battle doctrine, the "center of gravity" and "five ring" theories, or Base Force strategy. But his message is one anybody can grasp: people ultimately win wars, not machines. By concentrating on raw power, especially air power, to the exclusion of politics and culture, the Bush administration has courted disaster and defeat in a region it never took the trouble to understand.

Publishers Weekly

Kagan, currently resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is emerging as a leading voice among national security analysts. In this important work, his focus is the post-Vietnam development of America's armed forces-not merely in policy contexts, as his book title modestly states, but also in structure and mentality. With unusual clarity and understanding, Kagan describes the individual and collective dynamics of the four armed services in the two decades after Vietnam, when the military saw a series of definable threats demanding specific responses. This period also ushered in a wider concept of military "transformation," as the nation sought a post-Soviet grand strategy and a number of senior leaders argued that the world was moving to an information age. To meet the challenge, they believed, militaries must implement a "revolution in military affairs." The balance of Kagan's work analyzes the result of this transformation: the development of technologically focused "network-centric warfare" (NCW). But with Afghanistan and Iraq standing grimly in the background, Kagan warns that, in practice, NCW reinforces the concept of war as "killing people and blowing things up" at the expense of the political objectives that separate war from murder. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information

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Table of Contents