Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy

by Frederick W. Kagan

In Finding the Target, Frederick Kagan describes the three basic transformations within the U.S. military since Vietnam. First was the move to an all-volunteer force and a new generation of weapons systems in the 1970s. Second was the emergence of stealth technology and precision-guided munitions in the 1980s. Third was the information technology that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Golf War. This last could have insured the U.S. continuing military preeminence, but this goal was compromised by Clinton's drawing down of our armed forces in the 1990s and Bush's response to 9/11 and the global war on terror.

Genres: History, War, Military Fiction, Military History

432 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 2006

About the author

American military historian and political scientist

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of Frederick Kagan’s Finding the Target represents the U.S. military’s increasing ability to find targets and destroy them with precision and accuracy. Yet as Kagan points out in his conclusion, “war is not about killing people and blowing things up. It is a purposeful violence to achieve a political goal. The death and destruction, through the most deplorable aspect of war, are of secondary importance.” This quote summarizes Kagan’s overarching argument. His book shows that the American military has improved greatly at tactical and organizational levels. Nevertheless, it has failed to progress—and perhaps has even regressed—at a grand strategy level. Kagan recaps innovations and breakthroughs in military strategy since the atomic age, with a special interest on the military transformation of post-Vietnam 1970s. He uses the more recent examples of American armed conflict, Afghanistan and Iraq, as telling examples of America’s failures in strategy. In each theatre, American forces excelled at executing tactical maneuvers and in destroying targets. In each case, however, political goals were not simply left unachieved, they were never considered by strategists. In short, Kagan’s book is a reminder to strategists of Clauswitz’s famous dictum that war is meant to be an extension of politics.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive look at the evolution of American military doctrine post-Vietnam. This book also challenges the conventional wisdom that states a revolution in military affairs is underway. The author argues that military policy is divorcing itself from achieving political ends by focusing on high tech hardware, and effective changes in military doctrine only develop in reaction to a perceivable threat.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Wild Amazone

Military planning must include the desired political results

Frederick Kagan has written a very important book that may help guide our thinking about military transformation back onto the very successful path we pursued in the 70's and 80's. Our focus at that time on defeating the Soviet military threat with limited manpower and taking advantage of our all volunteer force gave us a military that is second to none in its ability to win against a stand-up enemy.

He points out (correctly I believe) that we have changed our focus from a specific future threat to the task of destroying abstract future improvements in such a stand-up enemy's army. The goal has become how we can improve our forces destructive capabilities rather than emphasizing the political goal to be achieved by a war.

He believes we have gone adrift in our attempts to leapfrog generations of military hardware not because the equipment is not impressive or useful but because it does not efficiently address the process of imposing our will on an enemies political options.

Now that terrorist type enemies have emerged as the principal foe, we have been caught with a military still in some ways focused on how warfare might have evolved over the Fulda Gap.

He suggests we return to positing each potential enemy and planning what political outcome is needed if a war is necessary with that foe.

We need to plan wars and their aftermath starting with the desired new political arrangement and work back toward the forces needed.

The current hardware orientation is understandable given the budget competition among the services (and the various congressional delegations), but it is now obvious after the Afghanistan and Iraq experiences that refocusing on the political goals to be achieved is very necessary.

He includes some suggestions for augmentation of the regional combat commands with planning staffs focused on the desired post-war political arrangements.

Since Kagan's book is about the thinking necessary to generate military transformation, he makes very few suggestions about specific current problems.

Among those items he offers is that because of the up close and personal nature of regime-change wars, our army and marines are undersized by about 200,000 men. Also the M-1 tank has received much criticism because its extreme weight seriously slows its deployability. Kagan defends it and shows that it's ability to work close to a potential foe without personnel loss is essential in the type of war we are now actually engaged in. While weight is a serious problem it's capabilities cannot be addressed by vehicles that must operate in a stand-off mode.

Frederick Kagan has written a valuable and clearly argued attempt to bring our military planning focus back to the actual potential enemies. I only hope everyone serious about the future of our country reads this book.

Donald N. Anderson

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Publishers Weekly

Kagan, currently resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is emerging as a leading voice among national security analysts. In this important work, his 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.

[Michael Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be read by every senior military leader and anybody responsible for dictating US military policy. It is insightful and exceptionally provocative. It explains that the US can find and destroy any enemy but is a failure when it comes to victory.