An instructive deep dive into a system that requires vast improvement efforts.
A detailed examination of the flawed U.S. national security apparatus, which costs more than $1 trillion per year to operate.
Hoehn, research director at the RAND Corporation, and Shanker, the director of the Project for Media and National Security, bring great expertise to their subject, knowledge they bolster with further wisdom from a small army of Beltway experts and former officials. Despite massive expenditures, the last few presidential administrations have often been stunned by events at home and abroad. The authors divide the system into “the warning machine,” aimed at identifying emerging threats, and “the action machine,” tasked with dealing with those threats. Much of the problem is that these two parts have different mindsets, and debate often degenerates into interagency conflict. A related issue is that the national security agencies were initially designed for the Cold War environment, and they have been slow to adapt to a nonbipolar world. After 9/11, the pendulum swung toward terrorism. As that threat receded, China emerged as the central security concern. Hoehn and Shanker identify a parade of new-generation threats, from cyberwarfare to climate change to biological attacks on the food supply. But therein lies the problem: There are so many things to worry about that information overload is a systemic danger. The authors are clearly aware of the many pitfalls involved, and they propose the creation of a series of standing joint task forces to work across agencies. It’s a worthy idea but one that could lead to deeper layers of bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the authors’ forceful message about the necessity of meaningful action is significant. “If recent decades have taught us anything,” they write, “it is that the seemingly urgent has a way of displacing the quietly important. The immediate overshadows the pending. Not always, but often enough.”
An instructive deep dive into a system that requires vast improvement efforts.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780306829109
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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