FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE.

• Author: Blazar, Ernest
• Position: Review

FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE by Ralph Peters Stackpole, $19.95

IT SEEMS THAT RETIRED ARMY Lt. Col. Ralph Peters could have had a great pitching career. I don t know if he's ever picked up a baseball, but the way he heaves rocks indicates a strong arm. Peters takes aim at a number of targets in Fighting for the Future, a collection of previously published essays. He unloads on the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. defense industry, and some intelligence experts who couldn't sleuth their way out of an overseas hotel lobby. In the process, he attempts to chart the likely global security landscape of the early 21st century and cattle prod the United States into being prepared for the challenges that lie ahead. He defends his tough rhetoric. "You must pound bureaucracies and not stop," Peters writes. "You have to grind them down."

Grind away he does. And like the over-the-top assaults of the First World War and the Chinese en-masse charges of the Korean war, Peters' thoughts and writing style could benefit from greater finesse and economy. Which isn't to say he is wholly ineffective. One benefit of attacking a target-rich environment--like America's sclerotic national security structures and habits--is the good fortune of being able to bayonet more than a handful of sacred cows. This Peters does with flourish and obvious delight.

"Our Department of State is a magnificent tool for dealing with symmetrically structured, like-minded entities--but what has it accomplished in Somalia ... in Bosnia ... in Africa's ruptured Gold Coast territories?" he asks. "Again and again, we find that haM-won treaties mean nothing because we negotiated them with governments that have only nominal authority while the true sources of local power are asymmetrical to our own ... We are speaking Latin in the computer age."

Peters, who served as a foreign area expert while in uniform, has written a series of fictional books about the future security environment. He is a graduate of the Army's Command and General Staff College and traveled widely throughout the former Soviet Union during its implosive shakeup. In retirement he has made something of a career of jabbing a sharp stick at the Army.

During his fearless travels--this is a man who flew Aeroflot--Peters acquired a bleak view. America's enemy will come not clad in ceramic armor and the other trappings of a modern army. Nor is it an ascendant China or recidivist Russia. Rather, it exists in the various guises of...