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The Journal of Military History 67.4 (2003) 1355-1356



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The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military. By Dana Priest. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. ISBN 0-393-0102404. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp. 429. $26.95.

Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell spent his tenure as Chairman seeking to manage the transition to a post-Cold War military establishment so as to avoid an excessive broadening of military responsibilities and a concurrent civilianization of the armed services as they took on nontraditional missions. While the great number of overseas deployments of U.S. military forces since 1989 could be taken as evidence of the limited influence of Powell's well-known Doctrine, the effort to preserve the traditional warrior culture and function of the U.S. services was arguably quite successful despite the increasing number of "operations other than war" undertaken by the armed forces—a development that, while evidently positive from the perspective of maintaining military effectiveness in high-intensity combat, has had distinct negative consequences for American foreign policy and perhaps for civil-military relations as well.

Dana Priest, an investigative reporter and member of the Washington Post's impressive group of military-affairs correspondents, observes in The Mission that civilian leaders, recognizing the immense capability of U.S. military forces, have indeed turned to the armed services to perform an increasingly broad array of foreign policy roles—roles which the services have generally accepted gamely in true "can-do" fashion. The great human and material resources available to the regional commanders-in-chief (CINCs) in particular, and the great freedom of action accorded the operators of U.S. Special Operations Command have allowed these military organizations to perform foreign policy tasks which the appropriate civilian agencies are incapable of successfully completing. The energy and dispatch with which the military services have come to approach these missions has tended to conceal a serious problem, however, Priest maintains: relying on military forces as primary agents of foreign policy constrains foreign policy options to goals that can be achieved either through military-to-military engagement or through the use or threat of force. Instead of the military being civilianized, the foreign policy of the United States has in effect become militarized. Priest is empathetic toward both the limited options open to high-level military and civilian policymakers and the difficulties faced by servicemen and -women in the field in implementing those policy decisions, but argues that successive administrations have become excessively dependent on military forces to fulfill missions for which they are poorly suited. [End Page 1355]

Over two hundred interviews with figures ranging from four-star generals and admirals, ambassadors, and senators to platoon leaders, noncoms, and Kosovar civilians form the core of Priest's research. She cites as well a broad body of published works and a number of "insider" documents. For a current events-oriented, journalistic work, the background research is quite adequate. The Mission is divided into three sections. The first reprises Priest's insightful articles written in 2000 on the regional commanders-in-chief in greater detail, laying out the great resources and responsibilities of the CINCs and exposing the breadth of their policy role. Next is a series of chapters on the activities of the U.S. Special Operations Command, including a chapter on the activities of Army Special Forces teams in the Afghan war in 2001 and a chapter tracing the occasionally successful efforts of Pacific Command chief Admiral Dennis Blair to mold and moderate the actions of the Indonesian armed forces through military-to-military contacts. The final third of the book is an in-depth account of the U.S. KFOR mission in Kosovo, focusing on the challenges faced by a battalion of 82d Airborne troopers trying to preserve some semblance of order in the war-torn province (a particularly sobering account given the ongoing operations in Iraq). The end result of this structure is necessarily impressionistic, but certainly underscores Priest's question as to whether military forces...

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