The Week

■ The bad news is that the environmentalists have won the Tellico Dam battle. The good news is that the Supreme Court managed to save the snail darter without recourse to the Fourteenth Amendment.

■ Senator Gary Hart, George McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager, has metamorphosed into a tough, sophisticated defense analyst. He sits on the Armed Services Committee, assisted by a young aide named Bill Lind. Speaking privately with NR editor and syndicated columnist Jeffrey Hart, Lind recently said he thinks America is ripe for military defeat—much like France in, say, 1938. Part of the problem is organizational: our officers belong not so much to the total defense system as to their own branches of service, whose interests they tend narrowly to promote. Weapons systems, too, tend to be hidebound, often merely updated versions of old ones. Military thinkers here are paradoxically less free than their Soviet counterparts to publish fresh ideas. Worst of all, perhaps, we are afflicted with an atrophy of military imagination: military professionals tend to think in terms of the obsolete principle of “fire-power attrition,” useful only against a quantitatively weaker foe—which the Soviets are not. The U.S., says Lind, needs a “conceptual revolution,” in the direction of a “shock and maneuver” strategy designed to discover and exploit enemy weaknesses. Unless our strategists can learn to accommodate new realities and necessities, Senator Hart thinks, we can spend away, and still arrive at France, 1940.

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■ The bad news is that the environmentalists have won the Tellico Dam battle. The good news is that the Supreme Court managed to save the snail darter without recourse to the Fourteenth Amendment.

■ Senator Gary Hart, George McGovern’s 1972 campaign manager, has metamorphosed into a tough, sophisticated defense analyst. He sits on the Armed Services Committee, assisted by a young aide named Bill Lind. Speaking privately with NR editor and syndicated columnist Jeffrey Hart, Lind recently said he thinks America is ripe for military defeat—much like France in, say, 1938. Part of the problem is organizational: our officers belong not so much to the total defense system as to their own branches of service, whose interests they tend narrowly to promote. Weapons systems, too, tend to be hidebound, often merely updated versions of old ones. Military thinkers here are paradoxically less free than their Soviet counterparts to publish fresh ideas. Worst of all, perhaps, we are afflicted with an atrophy of military imagination: military professionals tend to think in terms of the obsolete principle of “fire-power attrition,” useful only against a quantitatively weaker foe—which the Soviets are not. The U.S., says Lind, needs a “conceptual revolution,” in the direction of a “shock and maneuver” strategy designed to discover and exploit enemy weaknesses. Unless our strategists can learn to accommodate new realities and necessities, Senator Hart thinks, we can spend away, and still arrive at France, 1940.