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(More customer reviews)As a recent refugee from a career spent as a civilian `foot soldier' in the midst of the military's war against itself that Greider describes in this book, it is interesting and surprising that someone so singularly uninvolved with this country's long-term weapon acquisition system can catch so precisely the malady that confronts us. Greider's analysis captures the horns on which the dilemma is caught quite well, although I must admit to being disappointed to notice he downplays the way in which rampant military careerism plays into this disastrous recent history of misappropriation and wasting of billions of dollars in military funding.
Officers are so intent on practicing self-advancement that they confuse personal success with accomplishing the mission. Thus, when forced to decide between making difficult decisions regarding allowing troubled acquisition programs to proceed, they invariably choose to paper over the problems so as to substantially enhance their own chances of getting promoted and moved to their next assignment before the deck of cards fall for their successor. The sucessor must then ask the contractor to help him rebuild the deck of cards, which means the military inevitably become ethically and legally compromised fellow-travelers in the nonperformance and endless technical shortcomings the contractor incurs. In short, they lose thier effective management by unwitting or unethical collusion with contractors who deliberately underbid for contracts knowing they will never have to produce a contract meeting the stated competitive requirements because of the insidious and self-defeating corruption within the professional military acquisition corps.
Also, Greider's take on the way in which short-term tactical thinking is endangering the long-term force readiness is illuminating. The truth of the matter is that one does much better assuming the reasons we buy certain weapon systems in various numbers has more to do with Congressional prerogatives and rampant corruption than it does with any sort of objective force structure analysis. Contractors bypass the military by influencing Congressional representatives and their staffers. Thus, even if a military program manager does attempt to steer the straight and narrow course by trying to force the contractor to conform to contract requirements, he often finds himself outgunned and outmaneuvered by Contractors influencing his superiors and other federal officials.
Another way in which the current crisis manifests itself is through the militarization of civil service responsibilities, under which hundreds of thousands of Department of Defense civilians (most citizens do not realize that over ninety percent of all federal downsizing since 1990 has been accomplished within the several services comprising the DOD) have been laid off or forced out in favor of contracting the work out to contractors (read retiring military officers here) who will conform to do the bidding of their military employers without ever raising the kinds of knowing and informed ethical and legal objections a professionally-trained civilian acquisition corps does.
Since it is certainly a commonplace observation that military preparedness and internal corruption are historically found to be an endemic problem for peacetime professional military forces in all industrial deomocracies, there may in fect be no useful way to constrain the negative influence careerism has on our country's force readiness. But there is much we can do to limit the negative influence the military has on weapon system acquisition and wiser use of federal tax dollars in support of national defense policy. We must remove the exclusive program management prerogative we have given them in favor of enpowering a resurgent professional civilian acquisition corps. Yet Greider's analysis is a start in the right direction in terms of initiating a more vigorous national debate regarding how that money is allocated and subsequently obligated and spent by the several branches of the military. I recommend this book to anyone interested in how those several trillion dollars are spent over the next ten years.
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