357th Support Battalion Deactivation

According to this story in today’s Banner-Herald, “The 357th’s deactivation marks the second time in two years that a reserve unit has been dismantled here during the Army Reserve’s ongoing reorganization process. However, that reorganization could mean Athens will have more – not fewer – reserve units in the future.”

The fate of this Reserve unit, a function of the same BRAC process that is relocating the Navy Supply Corps School from Athens to Rhode Island, prompted thoughts on a book I’m currently making my way through, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick W. Kagan.

The author, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, postulates that the failure of American involvement in Vietnam prompted various synergistic transformations beginning in the late 1970s that produced the unrivaled conventional military power America used in defeating Iraq in the first Gulf War and in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime in the second version. However, he further thinks that the 1990s and early 2000s produced a rush to “transform” the military into an information age force dedicated to direct combat that did not fully take into account the nature of the foes the United States would face in the 21st century when dealing with terrorism, nation-building, etcetera (known as Operations Other Than War or OOTW). Anyway, if you find military policy, grand strategy, force structures, and such interesting, check it out.

Oops, I forgot that Pat Schroeder says we GOP types don’t read books. I’ll try to do better by reading less and sloganeering more.

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