Frederick W. Kagan

I write this with the "hindsight" of the present, 2014.

Professor Kagan began as a liberal immigrant, and in early 2000s became a voice of neo-conservative concerns which saw a need for a strong military to defend against some as yet un-perceived "enemy". He compares the history of England's post-WWI policies summed up in the Unitarian widely-held delusion voiced by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin -- "peace in our time" -- to America's post-WWII policies.

However, the professor's great expertise with the eternal wars of the Peloponnese (of Achea and Attica, in four volumes, and a 5th which summarizes them), fails him in finding false parallels between the post-war periods and the policies of the British and the Americans.

Professor Kagan fails to research, much less interview, the players -- Gorbachev, the USSR military, Ho Chi Minh, etc. -- and fails to identify the fact that the USSR collapsed from within, while Saudi-funded Wahhabi extremism began its ascendency. He fails to identify the role of the plutocracy, so critical in the Greek model. America was not "sleeping" -- it was deliberately kept distracted by domestic terrorists operating IRS 501c3 front organizations who attacked Our Government and weakened the democracy from within.

Worse, while calling for an even more robust military, he fails to identify what weapons-systems are needed. He fails to analyze the military situation under President Reagan -- the withdrawal from the middle east with the Beirut Bombing killing 300 Marines in barracks and resulting in the take-over and ascendancy of Islamic troops using terrorist tactics. The invasion of Granada -- in which our finest amphibious assault troops were pinned down on the beach by three Cuban machine gun nests. Reagan dramatically increased our military spending and the National Debt, with nothing to show for it. No facts show that the USSR collapsed as a result of any weapon the US produced. The USSR knew that the Bradley Fighting Vehicle could not fight, and the million-dollar-a-copy anti-missile missiles rarely knocked down even the most primitive Iraqi missiles in the first Bush War.

Far from identifying appropriate weapon-procurement systems, or suggesting how to defend against an actual "enemy", the author fails to assess the MIE (Military Industrial Establishment of which Eisenhower presciently-warned), fails to warn that it has bled us with an enormous, and practically worthless, war machine, and fails to assess or identify the "enemy". He fuels the industrial weaponized mind-set, leaving us with the fear which the plutocracy is trying to ignite.… (meer)

Kagan traces how US military theory and planning came to be dangerously misaligned with the rebuilding and counterinsurgency missions of the Global War on Terror. He argues that mainstream thinking in the American defense community has become dominated by a set of unexamined assumptions that have increasingly diverged from the actual challenges posed by the geopolitical environment.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v028/28.1heim.html… (meer)