Wilton Park, England:  Here at a conference on Professional Military Education, attention is being focused on one small sliver of the largest challenge facing militaries in general and Western forces in particular:  people.  While John Paul Jones may be less popular in these isles than across the Atlantic, paraphrasing one of his better bon mots captures this perplexing challenge:  “People are more important than guns in the rating of a ship.” Over the next year and led by the Strategic Choices Review undertaken by the Pentagon and to be finished by month’s end, the latest Quadrennial Defense Review will be conducted.  The mega-challenges are clear.  Regardless of the effect of [...]

If asked, most Americans would agree that economic and financial chaos or a stunning terrorist attack by foreign Jihadis possibly with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction constitute among the gravest threats to the United States.  But America faces other more immediate, yet tolerated dangers that have done and are doing irreparable harm to the nation. Sadly, these dangers do not provoke enough public fury or even attention to motivate corrective action. These tolerated threats are bad governance, hubris and self-delusion. Bad government is so wide spread that the public now accepts Washington’s dysfunctionality as the new norm. And hubris and self-delusion have been so assimilated into the national [...]