Star Spangled Security: Applying Lessons Learned over Six Decades Safeguarding America by Harold Brown with Joyce Winslow (review)

Harold Brown, who served as U.S. secretary of defense under Jimmy Carter and holds a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University, proclaims in his new book that he is a technological geek. Now that he is no longer on the fast track after more than six decades of accumulated experience in securing America’s military might, he most probably rejoices in reading the Science section every Tuesday and the Thursday Internet section of The New York Times. (The weekly science section of The Washington Post is filled with health tips and reflections, not with physics or other sciences that appeal to geeks like Brown.)

A learned Cold War–era scientist, Brown successfully operated through and around the unforgiving bureaucratic shoals of universities, scientific laboratories, the Defense Department, the military services, industry contractors, and Capitol Hill. His high-intensity focus has been on highly detailed, highly esoteric, and highly competitive fields of weapons systems, particularly thermonuclear weapons, sea- and land-based ballistic and cruise missiles, space technology, stealth aircraft, advanced satellite surveillance, and integrated communications and intelligence systems. He sought to hammer together civilian-uniform cooperation and military end-strengths agreements and to obtain sufficient funds to plan and procure these and other programs.

Some of these sophisticated tools became available only during Desert Storm (the 1991 Gulf War), others even later. As Brown acutely and fairly summarizes, “The Carter administration initiated and developed these programs, the Reagan administration paid for their acquisition in many cases, the George H. W. Bush administration employed them.”

Besides having an orderly scientific mind, Brown has displayed patience, coolness, and clarity of thought, an understanding of budgetary tradeoffs, and anticipation of what U.S. national defense will need over 5- to 15-year periods when assembling in the U.S. arsenal the most powerful machines of war the world has ever experienced. Brown has had a remarkable and rich career.

In contrast to the heated Senate debate in 2013 that delayed confirmation of the Obama administration’s latest secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, Brown was swiftly confirmed when Carter appointed him in 1977. In retrospect, his four years as the cabinet officer reporting to the president on military matters and overseeing 2.1 million uniformed and 1 million civilian personnel appears relatively smooth. Brown’s many years in the defense policy field, however, in particular his four years as defense secretary, were extraordinarily eventful and required the utmost experience, intelligence, and ability to maintain focus on the present and obtain federal funds in anticipation of the future. Or, as he repeats throughout the book, he sought “wisdom.”

This objectivity is only one side of the whole person, however. Where is the subjective man? Where is the passion? Reflecting on his lengthy and illustrious career, Brown keeps his narrative at arm’s length from the reader. Only fleetingly does he admit he is an “introvert,” (p. 38). Several pages later he acknowledges his “social reticence” and says he wishes he “were more at ease in personal relationships” (p. 67). He goes on to tell us that his real avocations are reading books and listening to classical composers, the latter not only at home but in the office. “I love to listen to Bach,” especially the Brandenburg concertos, and to Mozart. Brown notes that when Donald Rumsfeld served as secretary of defense under Gerald Ford (and again under George W. Bush) he played country-and-western music in that same Pentagon office.

Missing from this volume are rambunctious interactions among civilians and those in uniform, the two forces in the military policymaking world that occupy the middle ground on key decisions. One does not feel or smell the sweat of tensions surrounding events such as acquiring or not the overpriced B-l and B-2 bombers, the whys and wherefores of the Iranian hostage crisis desert debacle in 1980, and nuclear arms control deliberations within the...