If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration
About this book
If We Can Keep It is the latest in the series of monographs sponsored by the Straus Military Reform Project of the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information. Unlike other publications now coming out on the Iraq War and the counterinsurgency campaign there, retired Air Force Col. Chet Richards rejects the notion that policy-makers can predict how well any such effort will work. The track record of military occupations in culturally and religiously alien lands in modern times is not good in terms of the end result for the occupier, the effects on the indigenous population, and the standing of the occupying nation and army in the eyes of the rest of the world. The next U.S. administration, whether Republican or Democrat, should not think that we have discovered, with the Pentagon's counterinsurgency doctrine, an effective policy tool for reshaping the world, or even the rogue nations in it. Richards explores alternatives to the invade-occupy-fight paradigm and draws some surprising, important and instructive conclusions about what future forces and weapons should look like if America is to survive on its own terms in the world.