Your comments in Defense Watch.

• Author: Sapolsky, Harvey M.
• Position: Readers' Forum - Letter to the editor

* Your comments in Defense Watch (July 2011, p, 6) on the lost decade of procurement echo a tired set of complaints about the difficult business of weapons acquisition in the post Cold War era, [t is not the failure to plan and manage that gives us problems, but rather the belief in planning and in the layering of acquisition management that does.

No organization seems to have learned less from the collapse of the Soviet Union than the office of the secretary of defense. The Soviet collapse hardly demonstrated the virtues of planning. It did, however, create an extended period of international uncertainty' that offers little guidance for our own force structure or...