In this important work, Kagan's 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.
In his new book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality, AEI's Charles Murray focuses on four simple, hard truths that are rarely discussed or even acknowledged by educators and politicians.
In this provocative new book, Arthur C. Brooks explodes the myths about happiness in America. He examines vast amounts of evidence and empirical research to uncover the truth about who is happy in America, who is not, and why.
