Product Description

In Finding the Target, Frederick Kagan describes the three basic transformations within the U.S. military since Vietnam. The issue of transformation leads Kagan to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's vision of a new military; the conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; and the disconnect between grand strategic visions such as the Bush Doctrine's idea of preemption and the under funding of military force structures that are supposed to achieve such goals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260003 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Kagan, currently resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is emerging as a leading voice among national security analysts. In this important work, his focus is the post-Vietnam development of America's armed forces—not merely in policy contexts, as his book title modestly states, but also in structure and mentality. With unusual clarity and understanding, Kagan describes the individual and collective dynamics of the four armed services in the two decades after Vietnam, when the military saw a series of definable threats demanding specific responses. This period also ushered in a wider concept of military "transformation," as the nation sought a post-Soviet grand strategy and a number of senior leaders argued that the world was moving to an information age. To meet the challenge, they believed, militaries must implement a "revolution in military affairs." The balance of Kagan's work analyzes the result of this transformation: the development of technologically focused "network-centric warfare" (NCW). But with Afghanistan and Iraq standing grimly in the background, Kagan warns that, in practice, NCW reinforces the concept of war as "killing people and blowing things up" at the expense of the political objectives that separate war from murder. (Sept.)
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Customer Reviews

Logical and informative
This book does two things, and does them well. It gives an overview of military thinking in the US over the last 50 years, and tells when and why that thinking has been effective (and when and why it has not been effective).

If you want to know what we did to make our military so effective after Viet Nam, and why it worked, read this book. If you want to know why we are having so much trouble in Iraq and Afganistan, read this book.

This was the best book I have read on this subject.

Candor and Insight
For readers who are tired of over-intellectualizers, Fred Kagan's "Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy", will be an absolute breath of fresh air. Instructive without being academic, detailed without being tedious, Kagan sweeps the reader into the concepts, personalities, equipment, processes, and applications of "military transformation" and keeps the reader's brain focused on the topic until the very last page. His detailed review of the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs" provides a much needed body of information to help those interested in the subject master it.

Sincerely,

Bill Hayes
Major, USMC (Ret.)
Retired Samurai

A focused lesson on the spotty history of transforming the military and how it needs to be tied tightly to reality, not theory
Frederick Kagan is an influential thinker on the American Military. This book is his history of how our military has come to realize its need to change. He recounts how it has failed, at times, in those adaptations and how it has succeeded in others. It is when the theory of what the military should become gets divorced from the reality of what the actual threat in the world currently is that the greatest failures occur. The problem with these failures is that we can't afford them strategically or financially.

Kagan has pointed out that we have been under funding our military for more than a decade. Now that we are in a hot war in Iraq that shortage of personnel, the aging equipment that has not been replaced is causing a larger net depletion and leaves us less well defended.

While Kagan is disliked in some quarters and hated in others, he is influential because there are those in power who hear his words and appreciate what he is saying. Whether or not you agree with him, his influence requires you to read this book and make your own judgment. I found the history valuable and the arguments involving. Still, I wonder how billions of dollars in new jet fighters are going to help us against IEDs and suicide bombers. I do like his insistence that the military make its transformations intelligently and in light of both history and what we are actually facing around the world. I like his point that no one can prepare for a future war with future weapons because we are always trapped in the present and the future is never what anyone expects it to be.

Interesting book.