The Pentagon Battle

Are conservatives willing to face the fact that the Department of Defense today is where the Chrysler Corporation was before Lee Iacocca? That’s what’s being asked in Washington by the military “reformers,” those conservatives who favor high defense spending but are demanding a total reexamination of how the Pentagon spends its soon-to-be $1 billion per day.

At the center of the discussion is a controversial study done by George W. S. Kuhn, “Ending Defense Stagnation,” commissioned by the Heritage Foundation and published in Heritage’s Agenda ’83. Kuhn believes that the defense establishment has far too little to show for the sizable funding increments it soaks up, and that our military has failed to adapt to the single greatest strategic challenge of our era, viz., the threat that conventional forces might be used against vital American interests in Europe and Southwest Asia (oilfields). “We are forced to rely on the nuclear threat,” says Kuhn, “in an era when we no longer possess, and are not promised, nuclear superiority.” DOD overemphasis on “long-shot technology,” says Kuhn, has drawn attention away from the most vital needs of all: leadership, tactics, unit structure, training.

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John McLaughlin

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Are conservatives willing to face the fact that the Department of Defense today is where the Chrysler Corporation was before Lee Iacocca? That’s what’s being asked in Washington by the military “reformers,” those conservatives who favor high defense spending but are demanding a total reexamination of how the Pentagon spends its soon-to-be $1 billion per day.

At the center of the discussion is a controversial study done by George W. S. Kuhn, “Ending Defense Stagnation,” commissioned by the Heritage Foundation and published in Heritage’s Agenda ’83. Kuhn believes that the defense establishment has far too little to show for the sizable funding increments it soaks up, and that our military has failed to adapt to the single greatest strategic challenge of our era, viz., the threat that conventional forces might be used against vital American interests in Europe and Southwest Asia (oilfields). “We are forced to rely on the nuclear threat,” says Kuhn, “in an era when we no longer possess, and are not promised, nuclear superiority.” DOD overemphasis on “long-shot technology,” says Kuhn, has drawn attention away from the most vital needs of all: leadership, tactics, unit structure, training.