Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace by William Greider ISBN: 1-891620-45-2 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Surprisingly lnsightful Expose of Our Military Conundrum!
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: How We Got Here
Comment: In 200 startling pages, William Gireder tells America how our insatiable appetite for all things military has led us into a national dilemma, the economic and global implications of which are frightening.
Grieder's 'wake up call' details a bloated military industrial machine which has consumed much of our national wealth, and now has nowhere to direct its massive inventories.
Greider examines the political, social and economic effects from the perspectives of generals, line workers and politicians alike. The book has an excellent read, which will hold your interest through every paragraph. You will not be tempted to sigh and page ahead.
Grieder tells us how we got here, and offers a thesis to explain the current administration's obsession with finding a new boogey man to justify the continued propping up of a military industrial complex whose utlity expired along with the threat it geared up to face for decades - the Soviet Union.
Rating: 3
Summary: Useful, Not Moving
Comment: This book contains useful facts and analysis, but I doubt it's moved many people to action. (Of course the policies it advocates have not been adopted by the Bush II regime.)
People like me who would like to see our military drastically reduced and who have little faith in the good intentions of anyone involved in it are likely to be turned off by Greider's more middle of the road views and what appears to be his reluctance to express some of the anti-military views he does hold.
People who long for an ever bigger military are unlikely to be converted by this book.
I think Greider wanted to avoid preaching to a choir, but walking down the middle, or pretending to, has found him fewer readers than his information and ideas deserve. He ought to have passionately argued a case (a moral case, not a strategic or economic one) for radical change. Those inclined to agree would have been more likely to get their hands on the book, and those inclined to disagree would have ended up picking it up too in order to know their opponent. Some would have been persuaded.
On page 10, Greider predicts a decrease in military ("defense") spending because this is what the public wants. On page 172 Greider points out a yawning chasm between what the public wants and what happens. This is illustrative of a gradual shift. The book starts out sounding like an article in the Washington Post and concludes sounding like one in the Nation.
The corruption analyzed along the way is not terribly new to readers of the Nation, but it's useful to have these facts and anecdotes in one place. The fact that a single aircraft carrier costs $5 billion, the same price as a proposed National Housing Trust Fund, is the sort of thing that cannot be restated enough.
What we could have used much more than this book was a plan for tying opposition to military waste into campaigns for positive public spending. We have for too long desperately needed to transform tax-and-spend proposals into axe-the-military-and-spend proposals.
We NEED to work out the politics of proposing and fighting a grassroots campaign for specific public school or Medicaid improvements tied to specific eliminations of military pork.
And quit calling it "defense" for godsake!
 |
Title: ONE WORLD READY OR NOT : THE MANIC LOGIC OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM by William Greider ISBN: 0684835541 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 10 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
 |
Title: Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy by William Greider ISBN: 0671867407 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
 |
Title: Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider ISBN: 0671675567 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 15 January, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
 |
Title: The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy by William Greider ISBN: 0684862190 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips ISBN: 0670032646 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
