Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/June 2017/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

In Australia, the centrepiece of military history in public memory is the iconic Gallipoli Campaign, mainly because they get reminded of it every year on Anzac Day. In 1992, the Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, attempted to raise the Kokoda Campaign to a similar status.

A sign of the increased interest in Kokoda is a number of books on the subject, For this one, the offspring of a conference at the Australian War Memorial, Karl James assembled a pantheon of distinguished historians, including Antony Beevor, Peter Dean, Edward J. Drea, David Horner, Richard B. Frank, and John Lundstrom. The campaign had not been neglected over the years though; as David Horner points out in his chapter on the historiography of the campaign, Kokoda has been a well-known story in Australia since Damien Parer won an Oscar for his documentary film Kokoda Front Line! in 1942. Official histories started to appear in the late 1950s, and there has been a steady procession of works since.

The response of military historians to the recent works of populist writers and myth-makers like Paul Ham and Peter FitzSimons has been swift. The inconvenient facts begin with the fact that Kokoda, like Gallipoli, was a defeat, not a victory. In popular myth, General Douglas MacArthur is pilloried for sending troops to fight in terrible terrain against overwhelming odds, privately criticising their performance, and demanding the relief of commanders who did all that was humanly possible; while General Thomas Blamey is criticised for supinely obeying MacArthur and the Australian government. The consensus of historians does not agree with this assessment. In Peter Wiliams' chapter on relative Australian and Japanese strengths during the Kokoda campaign, he demolishes the myth that the Australians were outnumbered. Instead, the historians argue that the string of defeats were the result of faulty tactics and poor decision making. In his chapter on "Command failures on the Kokoda Trail", Rowan Tracey endorses the controversial reliefs of Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, Major General Arthur Allen and Brigadier Arnold Potts, all of whom are objectively assessed to have failed the test of battle. In his chapter on Buna, Peter Dean also supports the relief of Major General Edwin F. Harding by Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger. Haruki Yoshida's chapter on the Japanese perspective is particularly good. FitzSimons has called the military historians "brave academics waving their tattered flag of truth".

Recommended.

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 * By Hawkeye7

The second volume in the History of Acquisition in the Department of Defense series covers the 1960s, a period dominated by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who attempted to bring escalating defence spending under control. The 1960s saw a re-orientation of defence priorities away from nuclear war and towards conventional warfare. Much of the promise of the era, and of the man himself, was lost in the Vietnam War; but many of his reforms survived.

There are two broad types of contract: the cost-plus contract, which is based on reimbursement for costs, and the fixed-price contract, which is based on an agreed price. Both types can incorporate incentive bonuses for cutting costs, early delivery or improved performance. The fixed-price contract is generally simpler to administer, and performs well when the specifications are firm, there is market price competition, there is experience in producing the product, and costs can be predicted with reasonable certainty. Attempts to impose fixed-price contracts when these conditions did not hold ended badly. Nor was the profit motive an overriding concern for corporate America. In the end, the book concludes that the use of fixed-price contracts failed to save any money.

The book goes into several projects in detail. There is the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, where the specification was based around variable-sweep wings, which turned out to be a fad, and the attempt to enforce features that were not required (fast turns at high speed) led to compromise on ones that were (range). In the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy project, the first to post a billion-dollar cost overrun, when the contractor suggested using higher-performance engines, the Department of Defense insisted on sticking to the specification. This was met by lightening the wings, which eventually led to metal fatigue and billions of dollars of additional costs a decade later. There is also an entire chapter on the US Air Force's misguided manned space program.

If you are interested in the weapons of the 1960s, some of which are still in service, you will find this an interesting read. It could have degenerated into a technical and financial treatise written in Pentagonese, but the author keeps it all easy to read and understand. A nice feature is infoboxes with biographical details of various generals and officials with involvement in the acquisition process.

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Multiple recent books on the Six Day War and its aftermath Multiple recent military history works