Part II – Can History Help Us Develop Better Plans?

In Barry Ritholtz’  book “The Bailout Nation,” he quotes Bob Algern, the former counsel for BP Amoco regarding a “key lesson from history: We should pay heed to the sheer number of empires that became overstretched militarily and then sunk under their own weight.  We need a military and intelligence system structured for the next century, not the last one.  And just as important, we need to be able to size these endeavors at a level we can afford.  We can’t continue to subsidize the entire free world by acting as the globe’s policeman.”

By the same token, if we decide to get involved anywhere in the world, it would appear that the military strategy would need to be predicated on “winning” in the sense of turning around a dangerous or untenable situation.  It also would appear that history could provide many “lessons learned” that would enable the military strategists to avoid some of the mistakes made in prior conflicts.

We’ll look at Korea & Vietnam in next week’s blog.