The book is timely. For years, Chuck Spinney and I have said there will be no reform until the money simply isn't there anymore. If that day has not yet arrived, it is on the calendar. The combination of a severe recession or depression and vast New Deal-type public works programs in the U.S. national economy means something has to give.

As the largest element in the discretionary U.S. annual federal budget, defense spending is an obvious target. More, it is a worthy target, in that much of what we spend buys little or no capability. The problem is not only mismanagement but also outdated and fundamentally wrongheaded approaches to war.

The latter are the focus of "America's Defense Meltdown," although the book addresses financial and managerial issues. Here I want to focus on three chapters, the three most innovative -- I leave my own two chapters, on the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy, for others to weigh. The first is Chet Richards' "Shattering Illusions: A National Security Strategy for 2009-2017."

In its first incarnation in the 1970s and 1980s, the military reform movement deliberately avoided the subject of strategy. It did so because the Cold War locked the United States into worshiping the great clay god of the Brussels-based North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is to say into a continental strategy. Then, as now, a maritime strategy made better sense, but anyone who questioned the holiness of NATO was cast into outer darkness. So we bit our tongues and bided our time.

Now, with the Cold War over and the challenge of Fourth Generation war upon the United States, a debate over strategy is urgent. Richards launches it con brio, arguing that the U.S. government must determine what state militaries can and cannot do in a Fourth Generation world.

Then, the American people and their political leaders must stop asking our armed services to do things that are impossible for them, like turning fly-blown, flea-bitten Third World hellholes into Switzerland. More, the U.S. government should stop buying forces that are useless or worse for the types of conflicts the United States is likely to face.

Richards may disagree, but I think that in his chapter he moves closer to what I have advocated for years, namely a defensive rather than an offensive grand strategy. In any event, he puts the subject of strategy on the table, which is vitally important. Because a higher level of war dominates a lower, if you don't get your strategy right, no matter what you do at the tactical and operational levels, you lose.

How to restructure the U.S. Armed Forces Reserves and National Guard
The book "America's Defense Meltdown," edited by Winslow Wheeler, updates the work of the U.S. military reformers of the 1970s and 1980s.

The brilliant second chapter of the book by Pierre Sprey and Bob Dilger is entitled "Reversing the Decay of American Air Power." In it, the authors chop up the idea of "winning through air power," aka strategic bombing, and they flush that concept down war's sewage system.

More, Sprey and Dilger explain in detail how the United States can build an air force that can really make a difference in wars' outcomes and how the U.S. government can do so for less money than it is spending now. The key idea is simple and well supported by military history: build an air force that works in close union with ground forces.

A personal anecdote: Years ago I was asked by a thoughtful U.S. Air Forces Strategic Air Command commander (yes, there was one), "What am I supposed to do with 18 B-2 bombers?" I replied, "Tow them around to county fairs and charge admission."

My favorite chapter in "America's Defense Meltdown" is Bruce Gudmundsson's, "The Army National Guard, the Army Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve." Gudmundsson is the highly talented author of "Stormtroop Tactics," the history of the development of Third Generation war in the German army in World War I. Here, he shows how to take the classic European military reserve system and adapt it to American conditions.

Few transplants work "straight," as direct imports. Adapting them requires great insight and imagination, and Gudmundsson demonstrates both in proposals that would improve the usefulness of the U.S. National Guard and armed forces Reserve forces by orders of magnitude. His chapter alone is easily worth the price of the whole book.

Is anyone listening? Maybe. Interest is growing on Capitol Hill in reviving the Military Reform Caucus. Both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress see that further cuts in the national defense budget are coming, and they know that left to its own devices the U.S. Department of Defense will cut its own combat forces while preserving the Pentagon's bureaucracy and the money flow to its major industrial and high-tech contractors.

I suggested to a Capitol Hill staffer earlier this month that the motto of a revived Reform Caucus should be, "Preserve the combat units, cut the bureaucracy." That slogan could quickly gain bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress.

"America's Defense Meltdown" is available in print from the Center for Defense Information and is also available on the CDI's Web site. Interestingly, the site is blocked on U.S. Department of Defense computers. Why? To quote the late William S. Buckley, the founder and publisher of National Review magazine, why does baloney reject the grinder?

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)

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