Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: efrethei@BLACKBIRD.AFIT.AF.MIL (Erik J. Fretheim)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Defense Dept. Cuts
Message-ID: <11795@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 29 Nov 89 04:35:29 GMT
References: <11734@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: Air Force Institute of Technology; WPAFB, OH
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Approved: military@att.att.com



From: efrethei@BLACKBIRD.AFIT.AF.MIL (Erik J. Fretheim)

In article <11734@cbnews.ATT.COM> tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick) writes:
>
>
>From: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
>On the subject of cuts in the defense budget, a good reference is
>"Thoughts of a Soldier" by von Seeckt (who rebuilt the German army
>after WW1).
>
>In outline, von Seeckt's program for rebuilding the army in a
>time of severe constraints was to create a highly trained, highly
>mechanized, highly mobile, hard hitting force. Soldiers were to
>be trained so well that they could be immediately used at higher
>rank so that the army could be quickly expanded in case of need.
>


This has been exactly the philosophy of the United States for most 
of it's existance.  The simgle exception has been the post-Vietnam
period.  Of course, the US has also relied on the citizen soldier
(national gaurd, militia) as a portion of these forces, but the
idea has remain much the same and was a matter of considerable thought
for Eli Root and a whole bunch of other early American military
thinkers.  I guess it just became another of our exports.


erik





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