Success in war depends on more than equipment or well-trained personnel. It also depends upon a clear and well-articulated idea of why we fight. In Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter Books, 2006), AEI resident scholar Frederick W. Kagan makes clear that many of the problems the United States has encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in part from misguided “transformation” efforts based on a misunderstanding of the nature of war. In his book, Kagan argues that the American military and political leadership must abandon a notion of warfare that attempts to remove politics from combat operations and instead focus on the most urgent task of any military planner: how to craft military operations that do not merely defeat the enemy, but also achieve the political objectives for which the war is fought. Dr. Kagan will present and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution will comment.
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