Perilous Options: Special Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy by Lucien S.VandenbrouckeReview by: Eliot A. CohenForeign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1994), pp. 150-151Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20045955 .

Accessed: 11/06/2014 05:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.56 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 05:28:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

these handsomely printed volumes along,

making the encyclopedia an outstanding

resource for students of military affairs.

Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam to the Gulf War and Beyond,

by james f. dunnigan

AND RAYMOND M. MACEDONIA.

New York: William Morrow and

Company, 1993,320 pp. $23.00.

Dunnigan, a commercial war-gamer and

military history buff, and Macedonia, a

retired colonel and also a war-gamer, have written a book that poses an impor tant question. How did the American

military after Vietnam go from a demor

alized, in some cases undisciplined, and

certainly discontented armed force to the

confident, well-trained and well

equipped legions that stormed Kuwait? The book's chatty exposition ("Doc

trine du Jour" is one section title) and its

choppy presentation obscure the answer.

The discipline of footnotes and bibliog raphy (both absent here) would have forced the authors to document their

facts and perhaps temper their historical

judgments. There remains much for

scholars to describe, but this is a start.

Metaman: The Merging of Humans and

Machines into a Global Superorganism. by Gregory stock. NewYork:

Simon & Schuster, 1993,365 pp. $23.00.

A breathless, copiously illustrated exposi tion that brings together a bewildering array of information, presented with con

siderable ingenuity. Although the reader

may find the ultimate argument uncon

vincing (Stock sees man on the path to

"global union," a view that will leave

much of his audience unconvinced), the

book derives a quirky charm from its

intensity. Technology is moving at a pace that often exceeds our comprehension, and even if one

rejects the implications of

Stock's argument for international rela

tions, one should at least have to think

about why one does so.

Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control

of Nuclear Weapons in the United States.

BY PETER DOUGLAS FEAVER. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1992, 261 pp.

$34.50.

Notwithstanding its overly formal struc

ture (complete with dependent and inde

pendent variables): this is a well-written

and intriguing discussion of one of the most important yet least understood

dimensions of nuclear strategy. The

author explores the oscillation between

delegation and assertive civilian control

over the nuclear arsenal, focusing in par ticular on the early period of American

nuclear strategy. Where possible he

makes use of archival material, although for the period of the last 25 years or so,

not surprisingly, he is forced to rely on

secondary sources, newspaper articles and

interviews. The book contributes to the

study of civil-military relations at this

high level of national strategy and offers

its readers an interesting look into issues

that remain swathed in secrecy.

Perilous Options: Special Operations as an

Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy, by

LUCIEN S. VANDENBROUCKE. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 247 pp. $35.00.

A commendable study of four attempts

by the United States to use the coup de

[150] FOREIGN AFFAIRS-Volume73N0.2

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.56 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 05:28:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

main as a tool of foreign policy. The four

episodes examined?the Bay of Pigs, the

Son Tay raid, the Mayaguez rescue and

the Desert One fiasco?all left a bad taste in the mouths of the statesmen who

ordered them. Vandenbroucke offers pre

scriptions for presidents who wish to use

these kinds of operations and lets them

know what they are getting themselves in

for. Readers interested in the case studies,

however, may set aside the didactic con

cluding chapter and content themselves

with four well-researched cases.

Americas Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure after the Cold War. by

william E. ODOM. Lanham: The

American University Press, 1993,186

pp. $22.95.

Odom, the scholarly former director of

the National Security Agency, has writ

ten a short, prescriptive work calculated

to infuriate more than a few readers,

among them the entire U.S. Marine

Corps (an "antique luxury") and believers

in traditional methods of civilian control

of the military ("the bulk of the work should be left with the military service staffs and the Joint Staff" is a typical rec

ommendation). Odom favors a 12-divi

sion army but has less use for the other

services, whose principal tasks seem to be

to transport, support and enhance armor

heavy expeditionary forces, which he

believes are central to the future of

American strategy.

The United States STEPHEN E. AMBROSE

James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima

and the Making of the Nuclear Age. b y

james HERSHBERG. New York

Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 948 pp. $35.00. "Conant operated at the crossroads of

America's power elite," James Hershberg, the coordinator of the Cold War Interna

tional History Project at the Wilson Center in Washington, rightly asserts in

his introduction. Conant was at or near

the center of events in World War II and the Cold War. As the administrator of

the Manhattan Project, he provided the liaison between the White House, the

military and the scientists. He was pres ent at Alamogordo on July 16,1945 (his initial terrifying reaction to the light cre

ated by the explosion was that the thing had gotten out of hand and the world

was blowing up). As a member of the

Interim Committee, he played a critical

role in selecting Hiroshima as the target for the first atomic bomb. After the war,

he tried to persuade the Atomic Energy Commission to reject development of the

hydrogen bomb. He was president of

Harvard during the McCarthy era, where

his record in defense of academic free

dom was mixed. He was Eisenhower's

ambassador to West Germany, then com

pleted his career as America's leading educational statesman, working for

reform and improvement.

Hershberg began this study in Sep tember 1981 as his undergraduate history thesis at Harvard. In the past decade, he

To order any book reviewed or advertised in Foreign Affairs, fax 1-203-966-4329.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS March/April 1994 [l5l]

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.56 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 05:28:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions