WITHIN a few weeks of announcing that American soldiers would remain in Bosnia indefinitely, President Clinton set forth a plan to reinforce the U.S. presence overseas, increasing funding by 20 per cent and personnel by even more. The problem for Secretary of Defense William Cohen? The windfall went not to our shrunken, strained, and underfunded military, but to the Peace Corps.
Like many other institutions, the military is a trinitarian structure consisting of mind, body, and soul. Issues of the mind revolve around strategy and doctrine. The body is represented by personnel and matériel. The soul is concerned with those intangible issues of morale, esprit de corps, and culture that have proved so consequential in the history of warfare. As Patton remarked, “It is not the sharpness of the bayonet but the gleam in the attacker’s eye that will break the enemy line.”
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