The Pentagonists: An Insider’s View of Waste, Mismanagement, and Fraud in Defense Spending
A. Ernest Fitzgerald. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. 344 pp. Photos. Illus. Tables. Figs. Append. Ind. $19.95 ($17.95).
The Defense Management Challenge: Weapons Acquisition
J. Ronald Fox with James L. Field. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1988. 348 pp. Tables. Figs. Append. Notes. Ind. $24.95.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Two recent books purport to give insider’s information about the process of arming U. S. defense forces and how to improve it. The similarity ends there. At first glance it is difficult to envision how two books by authors who shared a common genesis—Fitzgerald identifies “my predecessor as Air Force management deputy, Ronald Fox [who at that time] was an Assistant Secretary of the Army in charge of procurement”—could have ended up so far apart. The reason for the difference in tone is that from that post, the authors took different paths. Fox went in and out the door between government and industry, while Fitzgerald found that the door did not work for a whistleblower. As a result, perhaps, there is a faint aroma of sour grapes in some of his comments.
The Pentagonists chronicles the “waste, mismanagement, and fraud in defense spending,” and is liberally illustrated with Fitzgerald’s wearing collection of anecdotes about his 17-year fight to regain and keep his job as an Air Force cost analyst. In his 20-year career as a whistle-blower, Fitzgerald has learned a great deal about the defense community. A pity. From this knowledge he has concluded that no good whatsoever exists in the community, and he has written his book around this theme. While he continually stresses his own honesty, integrity, high principles, selflessness, fearlessness, and superior judgment, officials in the military-industrial system do not fare well. Some of his descriptors include: “larcenous officers,” “dedicated boondoggle corporations,” “Daddy War-bucks types,” “DoD flacks,” “Pentagon Praetorians,” “pampered giants,” and “gross and mighty bureaucracy.” One might infer from his description that all the corruption in the United States (or “banana republic”) is centered in the Pentagon.
With the author’s bias so evident. The Pentagonists has no credibility. Alas, Fitzgerald never mentions any contribution on his part to get new systems in the hands of the soldiers, sailors. Marines, and airmen who need them. Nor does he offer an outline, agenda, or even a suggestion on how to better the existing system. All we are left with is his hunch that ordinary Americans will somehow manage to save us all from ourselves.
This symptomatic approach is a shortcoming so glaring that it cannot be overlooked. Also disturbing is the lack of consideration given to performance goals. He cites the Sidewinder air-intercept missile as having been developed by about 125 people at the Navy’s China Lake lab, while Hughes Aircraft Company was developing the Air Force Falcon missile with 4,000 people. He then concludes, “The only difference in results was that the Falcon failed and the Sidewinder worked.” Of course, they were not being designed for the same type of missions, and the successful short-range Sidewinder would be totally useless in stand-off attacks, which was the intended Falcon role. In his discussion of weapons procurement stretchouts, many of the cost increases resulted from decisions to buy more capable missile variants rather than the cheaper, simpler versions. He fails to understand that a potential enemy is never static and capability must be able to meet the constantly changing challenge.
This failure to examine all sides of a highly complex issue is obvious throughout the book.
On the other hand, J. Ronald Fox, former Deputy Secretary of the Air Force and Assistant Secretary of the Army, has written a thorough, though sometimes tiring, appraisal of a complex subject. His is a veritable textbook on the process, the organization, and the people in them. (This book is one volume of a two- volume set, and it should be noted that it is for practitioners, not the general public, as Fitzgerald’s book is meant to be. Fox’s second volume is planned to examine additional aspects of weapon systems acquisitions.)
Fox is realistic about the enormous challenges facing both government and industry leaders, is alert to the intermix of policy with technical and management issues, and offers many mostly constructive suggestions for changes. His insight into micromanagement by various organizations and committees and their staffs and their rationale for it also reveals why defense procurement is such a difficult process to change.
In his textbook style, Fox outlines problems and offers solutions for both Congress and the Department of Defense. He claims that some of the reasons for problems are frequent changes of decision makers, micromanagement by Congress, little incentive for industry to reduce cost, and program managers who sometimes have short tours of duty and lack experience in using the necessary authority to match their responsibilities. He makes a number of recommendations—none have been tested—which he believes will straighten things out.
For one, he suggests that in Congress a single authority for defense programs should be established and incentives should be authorized and appropriated for acquisition officers to serve five or ten years longer. Second, in DoD, a single, well-defined procurement chain should be established and incentives adjusted so that profits relate more to performance than to costs.
In discussing these problems and changes, Dr. Fox omits two important relationships: The first is between the officers setting the military requirements and those charged with designing, engineering, and building the systems to satisfy those requirements. Without continuing dialogue between these officers there is always the distinct possibility that the system will either be unaffordable or impractical. The other critical relationship is between the project manager and the entire level of independent test organizers—at the service level, the DoD level, and the congressional level. The vast hordes of people who interpret their charter as not to field the best system possible, but rather to prevent imperfect systems from entering the fleet, are enough to overwhelm the best manager. There must be some balance between the “doers” and the “critics”; today the critics outweigh the doers.
The Fitzgerald book, more overpriced than any spare part alleged to have been so found, offers no help whatsoever. The Fox book, while dry as dust in many places, offers many powerful suggestions for at least a partial cure.
At the same time, after 20 years in project management, I am mighty suspicious of untested textbook and menu-like cures. The present acquisition frenzy and mania repeatedly shunt aside the reasons we need weapon systems. In our rush to civilianize the engineering and building processes we better twice ask ourselves whether such approach can stand test and evaluation. After all, the weapon systems are a direct product of the organizations that engineer and build them, no matter how many after-the-fact testers and auditors there are. Why not apply the same exhaustive “standards” to organizations?
Admiral Meyer was project manager of Aegis shipbuilding from 1970 to 1983.
U. S. Navy Aircraft 1921-1941 U. S. Marine Corps Aircraft 1941-1959
William T. Larkins. New York: Orion Books, 1988. 594 pp. Photos. Tables. Ind. Append. $27.50 ($24.75).
Reviewed by Norman Polmar
This book is a combined reprint of two classic directories of U. S. naval aircraft originally published in 1961 and 1959, respectively. If you are interested in U. S. naval aircraft and do not have the original volumes in hand, this book is a “must” for your shelves.
Bill Larkins compiled photographs— most of them outstanding views—of each naval aircraft flown in the period covered by the titles. Many of the best shots he took himself. Equally valuable, he provided explanatory captions, lists of naval air organizations and their component aircraft at various times, data tables, lists of aircraft “bureau” numbers, and a special list with the location of every U. S. naval aircraft on 7 December 1941. (For example, the Navy’s lone XF4F-4 was with Fighter Squadron Three on board the USS Saratoga [CV-3].)
From the first entry of the combined book, a Navy Aeromarine 39-B (Bureau A-643), to the last, the F8U-1 (Bureau 145432) of the squadron leader of Marine Fighter 235, the expert and the novice alike will find this book both invaluable and interesting. The only flaw—a minor one—is that the current publisher did not provide a combined index.
Mr. Polmar, a frequent Proceedings contributor, is the author of several books related to naval aircraft.
Four Stars: The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders
Mark Perry. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1989. 412 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Robert P. Hilton, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Mark Perry’s book Four Stars is billed on the dust jacket as one that reveals “the inner workings” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and takes us “deep inside the Pentagon.” While the author appears to have written an insider’s account of the JCS, his sources and hence his credibility are seriously flawed by an excessive reliance on unidentified sources. Fully 23% of the endnotes cites “a retired Army colonel,” “a House Armed Services Committee aide,” “a U. S. intelligence official,” “a retired Air Force general,’ or “a retired JCS admiral”—without further identification. This may be suitable for an investigative news reporter, but not for the author of a serious book on the chiefs and their relations with their civilian leaders. Perry includes an impressive bibliography of books, articles, documents, and oral histories. The text relies heavily on interviews, but the interviewees are not listed in the bibliography. Many of them are identified by name and rank with no indication of where and under what circumstances they acquired their knowledge.
Perry does not appear to understand the distinction between the roles of the chiefs as members of the corporate JCS and their roles as chiefs of their respective services. Most actions of the chiefs dealing with weapons acquisition, personnel, discipline, training, support, and morale are performed by the chief’s service staff Perry should have distinguished between the service staffs devoted to joint matters and the Joint Staff and its J-directorates and the much larger JCS support staff, known as the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (OJCS). Only members of the Joint Staff and OJCS are entitled to be called “JCS officers.” The service chiefs, their three-star operations deputies, and their two-star deputy operations deputies are also classified as JCS officers. It is clear from the context of the author’s comments and his sources that he erroneously attributes many actions of the service staffs to the Joint Staff.
In the chapter “Flimsy, Buff, Green,” Perry refers to the Pentagon’s E-Ring– the building’s outermost hallway that houses the JCS offices—as filled on any given day “with an assortment of new weapons and a cohort of salesmen. ” This is inaccurate. The JCS area is closed, and anyone entering it must wear a picture badge or a large blue or red badge that clearly identifies the wearer as coming from outside the JCS. Furthermore, blue badges are given only to security-cleared personnel working with the Joint Staff, and red badge wearers require constant escort. Salesmen with building passes can and do enter the building and go freely into the service spaces; displays are often set up on the Pentagon Concourse and in corridors throughout the building–' but not in restricted-entry spaces such as the JCS offices. The author refers, without citing a source, to “an unwritten code of conduct” that requires calling JCS officers only by their rank, forbidding criticism of one’s own service, and prohibiting the questioning of another officer’s patriotism. No such “code” exists in the joint arena. While it is wise neither to criticize one’s own service nor to question another officer’s patriotism, military courtesy, discipline, and common sense are the guiding rules in the Joint Staff as in other military organizations.
In the early part of Four Stars, Perry focuses on the Korean War and the dismissal of U. S. Army General Douglas MacArthur. General Omar Bradley’s statement that “Korea is the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place” was not made on 30 June 1950, as the author implies, but in the spring of 1951 in conjunction with hearings on the dismissal of General MacArthur. General Bradley opposed expansion of the war against China; he was not opposing United Nations intervention against North Korea, as the author asserts. Perry describes the episode of General MacArthur’s dismissal as largely a confrontation between the chiefs and the general, whereas the conflict was between President Harry S Truman and General MacArthur over the prerogatives of the commander-in-chief. The chiefs never recommended General MacArthur’s dismissal, but when the President asked specifically for an opinion on 6 April 1951, the JCS expressed a “view” that a “change of command” might be in order. Perry gives no sources for his interpretation of this episode, although he implies that it comes from an official JCS history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Perry correctly notes that “today, the role of the JCS in the dismissal of MacArthur is often overlooked.” In my opinion, it is overlooked because the JCS role was not pivotal.
Perry isolates a second major incident. “The most significant incident in the JCS’s existence occurred in August 1967,” he writes, “when the entire U. S. high command threatened to resign over the civilian handling of the Vietnam conflict.” If one looks at the documentary evidence, this was a non-event. There is not a shred of proof that the chiefs, including the chairman. Army General Earle G. Wheeler, threatened to resign or that General Wheeler subsequently convinced them not to do so. The author quotes Army General Bruce Palmer, Jr., as saying that General Wheeler alluded to resignation during a dinner conversation. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who was then Chief of Naval Operations and would have been an eyewitness to such discussions if they had taken place, denied the episode occurred. An unnamed “former JCS flag rank [sic] Army officer,” who could not possibly have been present according to Perry’s account, provides several sentences and phrases that the author puts in quotation marks. This technique serves to personalize and sensationalize the alleged event, but it proves nothing. Perhaps the chiefs did threaten to resign, but until real evidence is presented, the account in Four Stars rests only on gossip and hearsay.
A third major series of episodes in Perry’s history is the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1983 Grenada invasion, and the prelude to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. These three events are covered in one chapter entitled “Semper Fidelis.” The description of the events contains numerous errors of fact and relies even more heavily on unidentified sources than earlier portions of the book—40% by my count. The author’s discussion of a “bitter debate over [Army General John W.] Vessey’s leadership” by JCS officers is undocumented except for an endnote referring to an “interview with a retired Army major.” Surely such a statement about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff calls for an authoritative and attributable source.
Perry gets numerous details wrong in his description of the “Urgent Fury” Grenada operation. While it was far from a perfect military operation, all military and political objectives were accomplished quickly with minimum casualties and collateral damage. Decisions on assigning portions of the island to different forces and the delegation of specific tasks to the Rangers, 82nd Airborne, and Marines were made by the commander-in chief in Norfolk or by the on-scene commander, Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf III, not by the JCS.
The book’s section on defense reorganization contains an interesting phrase: “the JCS’s near silence during this part of the debate was a direct result of pressure from the JCS staff.” Staff officers often feel that they have a lot of power, but muzzling the JCS exceeds their reach! The role of Admiral William J Crowe. Jr., in the internal and external debates over the Goldwater-Nichols Act from his appointment as chairman on 11 October 1985 to the passage of the bill in late September 1986 is based entirely on hearsay evidence and gossip from yet-again unattributed sources. While the chairman’s role may be true as portrayed, that truth is impossible to judge. Another error concerns the position of the chairman with respect to the National Security Council (NSC). The chairman is the principal military adviser to the President, the NSC, and the Secretary of Defense— replacing the corporate JCS in this role. However, he is not “an official member of the NSC,” as Perry states. There are only four members of the NSC—the President, the Vice President, and the Secretaries of State and Defense. Other advisers such as the chairman, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the President’s Adviser for National Security Affairs attend by invitation of the President. Admiral Crowe did not “appoint a JCS vice chairman.” While Crowe undoubtedly made recommendations, the President appoints four-star officers upon the recommendation of the Secretary of Defense. A minor but typical error concerns the vice chairman, General Robert T. Herres, U. S. Air Force. General Herres has never been Air Force chief of staff as Perry reports.
Despite its many errors and poor scholarship, Four Stars is a readable but cursory treatment of the 42-year history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Perry’s point of view. But this is not the book that explains the “inner workings of this tremendously powerful institution ' That book remains to be written.
Admiral Hilton retired in 1983 from his last Joint Staff assignment, as Vice Director for Operations Previously he served in the Office of the Director. Joint Staff, on the Chairman's Staff Group, and as Deputy Director. Force Development and Strategic Plans. Additionally, Admiral Hilton served two tours in OP-06, the Navy staff that handles JCS matters for the Chief of Naval Operations. Since retiring, he has worked for the chairman on two occasions the last as director of a 1988 study of the organization, functions, and manpower of the Joint Staff
Lethal Frontiers: A Soviet View of Nuclear Strategy, Weapons, and Negotiations
Alexei G. Arbatov. Kent D. Lee, translator. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988. 286 pp. Key. Notes. Bib. Ind. $39.95 ($35.95).
Reviewed by Stephen P. Gibert
Soviet Alexei G. Arbatov has written a comprehensive book on Soviet-U. S. strategic nuclear relations. According to its translator, Kent Lee, “The book is arguably one of the most sophisticated and intellectually honest interpretations of U. S. strategic policy and U. S.-Soviet relations to come out of the Soviet Union in the postwar era.” Lee believes it should enjoy a wide readership, especially in the United States. Indeed, the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee published 100,000 copies through its prestigious press. Political Literature Publishers.
“Sophisticated and intellectually honest” may sound like faint praise, but both the translator’s note and the foreword by Foreign Affairs magazine editor William G. Hyland suggest complete sincerity. Lethal Frontiers certainly is sophisticated. But that is a problem as well as an advantage.
Arbatov, head of the Department of Disarmament and Security Affairs in the Institute for World Economy and International Relations of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, certainly knows his material. Relying largely on U. S. sources, he skillfully weaves together the history of Soviet-U. S. strategic nuclear relations beginning with the Kennedy administration. He highlights superpower nuclear deployments, nuclear arms control, and the so-called arms race up through the Reagan era. Arbatov includes a description of the post-Reykjavik May 1987 and July 1987 draft treaties for large-scale reductions in strategic offensive arms and the December 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) accord. But the problem is this: A reader who does not know the details of nuclear weapons acquisition policies of the superpowers, including dates that various systems became operational and the resulting strategic balance, could be persuaded by Arbatov to believe interpretations of events that simply are not true. Thus, despite its impressive scholarship, this book is a propaganda tool in service of the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear and arms control policies.
The book contains numerous examples that illustrate this admittedly harsh appraisal. For instance, Arbatov refers to the 1979 NATO decision to deploy, beginning in 1983, 108 U. S. Pershing II ballistic missiles and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in Europe, capable of striking Soviet territory. But he makes no mention of the critical reasons for this policy, rather portraying the NATO decision as wholly unjustified. First, Arbatov does not explain that NATO planned to use the four- year period from 1979 to 1983 to try to persuade the Soviet Union to negotiate removal or reduction of the SS-20s aimed at Western Europe. In short, the deployment of the U. S. missiles was one track of a two-track decision, with the hope that an arms control agreement would obviate the need for the Pershing IIs and the GLCMs. But Soviet unwillingness— until the December 1987 INF agreement— made it necessary to begin implementing the U. S. missile deployment.
Second, Arbatov does not mention that even after a full U. S. deployment, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs would be dramatically inferior, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to the Soviet SS-20 force. Toward the end of the book he obliquely acknowledges this when he praises the Soviet government for agreeing in the INF accord to make greater reductions than NATO, thus arriving at a “zero-zero” position.
Finally, the NATO decision on the U. S. missiles was described as being arrived at “under intensified U. S. pressure.” In fact, of course, the suggestion, to deploy U. S. missiles originated with the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Helmut Schmidt. A writer as learned as Arbatov obviously knew these well-known facts; omission of them was a deliberate attempt to mislead the lay reader.
Throughout the book we find matters expressed in such a way as to criticize the United States and exonerate the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example, is described as the “introduction into Afghanistan of a Soviet military contingent”; other nuclear powers are urged to “follow the USSR’s example” in order to further common security; the U. S. decision to deploy the MX missile in existing silos must “imply [U. S.] plans for using this weapon system to deliver a first strike” on the Soviet Union.
Most important, the theme running throughout the book is that the United States has bitterly resisted accepting strategic nuclear parity with the Soviet Union despite the fact that superpower parity is the inexorable logic of the nuclear age. According to Arbatov, U. S. policy has been uncertain, belligerent, and dangerously unwilling to arrive at arms control agreements that are vital if the world is to survive. Translator Lee may find this view “intellectually honest,” but his opinion will not be widely shared by knowledgeable people in the West.
This does not mean that this book is useless. On the contrary, it will serve to show American experts how formidable an opponent serious Soviet scholarship can be when placed in the service of the Soviet state. This book reminds us of the vital necessity not just to know the broad generalities but to steep ourselves in the arcana of Soviet-U. S. strategic nuclear relations and in the details of arms control negotiations and agreements.
Dr. Gibert is Director of the National Security Studies Program and professor of government at George town University.
Books of Interest
By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U. S. Navy
Admiral Harold R. Stark: Architect of Victory, 1939-1945
B. Mitchell Simpson, 111. Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1989. 326 pp. Notes. Bib. Inti. $24.95 ($22.45).
Admiral Stark was Chief of Naval Operations from 1939 to 1942. He had earned the trust and respect of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was instrumental in laying the foundations for the “two-ocean navy” that played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II. He also helped solidify Anglo-American cooperation and aided in the planning for the invasion of Europe. Simpson, a former faculty member of the Naval War College, provides a well-researched and very readable biography.
The American Steel Navy
Commander John D. Alden, U.S. Navy (Ret.). Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989. 108 pp. Photos. Illus. Append. Bib. Ind. $49.50 ($37.12 until 10/31/89).
This photographic and historical classic is once again available after more than a decade out of print. Covering the years 1883-1909, it recounts the U. S. Navy’s transition from Wooden hulls to the steel ones that became Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet.” Nearly 400 photographs and line drawings reveal the historical importance of this period and provide an inside view of shipboard life.
Arms and Judgment: Law, Morality, and (he Conduct of War in the Twentieth Century
Sheldon M. Cohen. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. 226 pp. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $38.50 ($34.65) hardcover. $16.95 ($15.25) paper.
“Why is it permissible to destroy a city’s center with aerial bombs, but not with car bombs?” “Why is it permissible to camouflage a tank to look like a hot dog stand, but not to disguise its crew to look like hot dog vendors?” “Why do the legal restraints on naval and ground forces differ?” These and other intriguing questions concerning the legal and moral aspects of warfare are discussed in this very readable, scholarly work. Cohen argues the importance of understanding the changes that technological progress has wrought in both the law and the morality of warfare.
C-130: The Hercules
M. E. Morris. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1989. 130 pp. Photos. Illus. Figs. Append. Gloss. $12.95 ($11.95) paper.
Morris, a naval aviator for 30 years and a successful novelist, provides a fitting tribute, through words and pictures, to this Lockheed marvel. Despite his not-so-fond memories of too many flights in these extremely uncomfortable (but incredibly capable) aircraft, he gives grudging but sincere recognition to the many missions and the importance of this aviation workhorse. Whether penetrating the ice frontier of the Antarctic, flying tanker missions for the Marine Corps, or performing searches and rescues for the Coast Guard, the C-130 has long been an unsung hero of military aviation.
Defense Technology
Asa A. Clark IV and John F. Lilley, editors. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989. 304 pp. Tables. Figs. Notes. Bib. Ind. $49.95 ($44.95).
What are the ramifications of increased U. S. reliance on advanced technology? What technologies should be pursued and for what purposes? Defense officials, scholars, and military officers discuss such issues concerning the role of technology in national defense.
Dictionary of Marine Technology
D. A. Taylor. Boston, MA: Butterworths, 1989. 244 pp. Illus. Tables. Figs. Append. Gloss. $105.00 ($94.50).
Abbreviations and terms used in marine technology, including marine and offshore engineering, naval architecture, ship operation, as well as relevant electronics and computer terms, are explained in this comprehensive dictionary. The author provides line drawings to assist in some explanations and includes several useful appendices.
The Royal Navy on the Danube
Charles E. J. Fryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 228 pp. Illus. Maps. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $25.00 ($22.50).
A little-known aspect of naval history is explored in this book: the Royal Navy’s role in preventing the enemy from sending munitions to Turkey by way of the Danube in the early days of World War 1. Relatively few men and little equipment were involved in this venture, but Fryer contends that it played a crucial role in the Dardanelles campaign.
Scraps of Paper: The Disarmament Treaties Between the World Wars
Harlow A. Hyde. Lincoln, NE: Media Publishing, 456 pp. Photos. Illus. Charts. Append. Bib. Ind. $18.95 ($17.05) paper.
“ . . .In recent years the record of our earlier treaties has been neglected,” writes former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., U. S. Navy (Retired), in his foreword to this book, “because examining the record would call into serious question many of the cherished assumptions used by those who now advocate a new attempt at achieving peace through disarmament.” Scraps of Paper remedies that neglect by carefully recounting the many serious attempts at arms control in the years 1921-39. Hyde enhances the account by some thought-provoking analysis and appendices containing the actual text of the treaties.
The Soviet Union and the Gulf in the 1980s
Carol R. Saivetz. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 139 pp. Maps. Charts. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $22.50 ($20.25) paper.
Saivetz argues that opportunism—rather than ideology or a vision of world domination—has dictated Soviet policy and actions in the Persian Gulf region. On this assumption, she analyzes Soviet actions in this volatile area by reviewing the historical context and scrutinizing more recent events, including the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev and the significance of the lran-Iraq War.
Strategic Defense Initiative: The First Five Years
A Conference Report. Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 1988. 90 pp. Photos. $2.50 paper.
In March 1988 a conference was held in Washington, D.C., to review the impact of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (more popularly known as the “Star Wars” strategy). This report recounts those proceedings and includes, as appendices, President Reagan’s keynote address and a piece by author Tom Clancy entitled “Hardware is Not Enough.”
Computer Simulation
Thunderchopper
John B. Rosenow. Champaign. IL: ACTIONSoft Corporation. 1987. 256K. 5¼" or 3½" disk. CGA/EGA/VGA graphics card. $39 95 ($35.95).
When you use this helicopter flight simulator, you are in the pilot’s seat of a high-performance rescue/attack helicopter The simulator responds very much like a real helicopter and you may choose from a variety of missions, including rescue at sea, land rescue, land convoy escort, and air-to-ground attack. Various skill levels and a variety of weapons keep the program fresh and challenging From simple landings to rescues at sea under fire, Thunder- chopper brings the excitement of helo flying to your computer.
Other Titles of Interest
A-4 Skyhawk in Detail & Scale
Bert Kinzey. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab Books, 1989. 72 pp. Photos. Illus. Tables. $9.95 ($8.95) paper.
Airlift Doctrine
Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Miller, U. S. Air Force. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988. 435 pp. Photos Illus Maps. Figs. Notes. $17.00 ($15.30).
Alliance Under Tension: The Evolution of South Korean-U. S. Relations
Chung-in Moon, Manwoo Lee, and Ronald McLaurin. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. 229 pp. Tables. Notes lnd. $35.00 ($31.50).
Armies in Low-Intensity Conflict
David Charters and Maurice Tugwell. editors Washington, DC: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1989. 272 pp. Maps. Figs. Notes lnd $45.00 ($40.50).
The Day I Owned the Sky
Brigadier General Robert Lee Scott, Jr., U S Air Force (Retired). New York: Bantam Books, 1988. 238 pp Photos lnd $17.95 ($16.15) hardcover. $4.50 paper.
Defense and Foreign Affairs Handbook 1989
Gregory R. Copley, editor Alexandria. VA: International Media Corporation, 1989 1,392 pp. Maps. Tables. Figs. Append. Gloss. Bib. $192.00 ($172.80).
The Eagle’s Talons: The American Experience at War
Colonel Dennis M. Drew. U. S. Air Force, and Dr. Donald M. Snow Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 1988. 421 pp. Maps. Bib. Ind. $16,00 ($14.40).
History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Test of War, 1950-53
Doris M. Condit. Washington. DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense. 1988. 701 pp. Photos. Maps. Tables. Figs. Key Notes Bib. lnd. $42.00 ($37.80).
Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons
Duncan S. Lennox, editor. Alexandria. VA: Jane’s Information Group, Inc , 1988. Photos. Illus. Tables. Ind. $300.00 ($270.00).
Saying Goodbye: A Memoir for Two Fathers
M. R Montgomery. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989. 256 pp. Photos. Maps. $18.95 ($17.05).
Secret Intelligence: The Inside Story of American’s Espionage Empire
Ernest Volkman and Blaine Baggett. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 265 pp. Photos. Notes. Ind. $19.95 ($17.05).
Stress, Strain, and Vietnam: An Annotated Bibliography
Norman M. Camp, Robert H. Stretch, and William C. Marshall. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. 315 pp. Figs. Bib Ind. $49.95 ($44.95).