The Next War | Caspar Weinberger, Peter Schweizer | A disturbing view of future world conflicts.

The Next War | Caspar Weinberger, Peter Schweizer | A few technical flaws, but a needed wake up call

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The Next War

	The Next War Caspar Weinberger, Peter Schweizer Regnery Publishing, 1998 - 470 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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A disturbing view of future world conflicts.

I enjoyed this book, despite the fact that there were several military items that were given to excede their specifications. Otherwise, it is a book for all those who have seen the significant reducton in US Armed Forces technology. My favorite is the new Russian empire scenario.

A few technical flaws, but a needed wake up call

This book does indeed have some technical flaws, especially with regard to military nomenclature, but that should not be allowed to weaken the compelling message that the New World Order is long on new and short on order. The Clinton Administration has balanced the federal budget on the backs of the Social Security Trust Fund and the Defense Budget. The result is a hollow military force incapable of performing the missions it needs to handle and a nation that will one day be vulnerable to ballistic missiles not just from Russia and China, but nations like North Korea and Iran. Our world is still a dangerous place and at some point Bill Clinton's neglect of our national security will cost American lives and jeopardize our peace and security.

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It's not a Clancy novel, but that's not it's purpose.

If you want to read a gripping novel on the next U.S. war scenario, this book will disappoint you. If you are looking to delve a bit further than the printed word and think about the scenarios themselves, that is, if you want a book to make you think about our current national defense strategy and the state of affairs in our armed services, this book will do just fine. The former SecDef has outlined several plausible scenarios where the U.S. is caught short due to our current (and drastic) reductions of the armed services. One problem I have with the scenarios is that Weinberger overplays the use of nuclear weapons. He minimizes the thought process a foreign leader would use before employing such a weapon. However, our current national defense strategy is to fight, and win, two seperate regional wars/conflicts simultaneously. Read the book, examine the scenarios, then think on your own. Can we meet the objectives of such a strategy?

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Some very interesting ideas, but...

The Next War struck me as a bit uneven. There were several interesting ideas here (infecting a US Army base with biological agents, insurgency in Mexico, underground Iranian terroist cells in the US, etc. etc.) many of which appear frequently in wargames the military is now playing. In fact, the military is beginning to openly look at ways to deal with some of the woes that befall US forces in books like this. So with its flaws, I found it worth reading and somewhat entertaining. My biggest concern with this book though, is that the reader must suspend judgement and believe that other countries, which are mostly much worse off than the US, are capable of developing technology and/or military forces that can cause real problems for American forces. The author almost universally blames cutting back on intelligence budgets for the surprising disasters the US goes through here, (as if our intelligence community has a serious role to play in telling us what is going on in other countries!!) Intelligence lapses of the magnitude portrayed here are much more likely to befall our enemies than us. In fact, people in the US would have to stop reading books or watching TV to miss as much as required in these scenarios to cause the US so much trouble!! I think Weinberger's problem is that he has never lived in a Third World country. If he had, he would realize just how ridiculously impossible some of his assumpions are. He also apparently believed the propaganda turned out by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about the power of the Soviet Union and other countries (a flaw shared by many SecDefs I am sorry to say). So, I say, check it out of a library if interested, but as someone who has read a great deal about future military scenarios, problems, forces, foreign policy, etc. etc., it's not that compelling.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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