The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Once, contemplating the infantry strength of the old Warsaw Pact, an internal slogan of the Pentagon was "fight outnumbered and win." Throughout the 1980s, the military reform movement did exactly that to the Pentagon, defeating a superior well-armed force while armed solely with facts and ideas.

Looking back, the pace of change was spectacularly rapid. In 1979 James Fallows published, in The Atlantic Monthly, the first of his many articles concerning the existence within the Pentagon of the military reform movement, a loose association of uniformed and civilian officials convinced that weapons cost too much and did too little; equally important, that U.S. defense tactics and training methods were designed more from high-tech illusions and bureaucratic self-interest than awareness of what actually worked under field conditions. Military reform seemed like the ultimate lost cause, given the determination with which defense establishments resist new ideas, the array of well-connected interest groups that benefit from excessive Pentagon spending, and the distaste felt by the liberal establishment when people such as Fallows, and publications such as the Atlantic, advocated reforms that would make the American military stronger. More, the public coming-out of the military reform movement occurred just before Ronald Reagan came to office, expounding the notion that high military spending was in itself desirable. Military reforms were outnumbered, outgunned, outfinanced, and seemed certain to be outmaneuvered.

Instead, by 1985, just as six years after defense reform went public. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had cancelled the expensive and under-performing DIVAD automated antiaircraft gun, the first cancellation of a major weapon ready for production in the postwar era; the Army had torn up its field operations manual, replacing it with one based on the theories of maneuver warfare favored by reformers; a prominent reformer, Chuck Spinney, had been on the cover of Time magazine; and the entire old-line Pentagon establishment was in retreat before, at most, a few dozen poorly organized critics.

By 1990, just 11 years later, reform thinking had taken over many aspects of Pentagon life. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney would cancel the Navy's A-12 attack jet and demote its sponsors within the admiralty, publicly telling the Pentagon procurement hierarchy he was sick of being lied to about weapons costs. This was an amazing turn of events, considering that Weinberger spent much of the 1980s denying that this problem existed and previous Defense secretaries had happily averted their eyes from it. By 1990, the U.S. military would prepare for battle in the Gulf War using what was in no small part of reformer's script, wielding reformer weapons.

Many people, including a larger contingent of active-duty officers than might be guessed, played important roles in the military reform movement. Its central figures were John Boyd, Robert Dilger, Everest Riccioni and Charles Myers Jr., retired fighter pilots; Thomas Amlie, Thomas Christie, Ernest Fitzgerald, Pierre Sprey, and Spinney, civilian Pentagon analysts or consultants; former Senator Gary Hart and his aide William Lind; former congressman and former fighter pilot Denny Smith and his aide John Heubusch; former House Armed Services Committee staffer Anthony Battista; Fallows (conflict alert: an obvious Monthly favorite); Dina Rasor, who ran a small private foundation that publicized Pentagon abuses; and James Burton, a recently retired Army colonel.

Now Burton has written a book about his role in the movement. Both a kiss-and-tell (or maybe punch-and-tell) about Burton's confrontations with various defense big cheeses during the 1980s, and a critique of the military mindset, The Pentagon Wars goes far toward explaining how vast sums of money are wasted in the name of national defense and how large bureaucracies ca engage in elaborate deceptions to avoid facing the truth...