Bureaucracy : what government agencies do and why they do it by Wilson James Q

Author:Wilson, James Q [Wilson, James Q]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Administrative agencies, Bureaucracy
Publisher: New York : Basic Books
Published: 1989-04-21T19:00:00+00:00

unique in this regard. Russell Weigley, in his history of the army, recounts many examples of reorganization as the size and mission of the army altered.^

But at a deeper level, very little changed. As Kevin Sheehan makes clear in his study of these four army doctrinal innovations, the army limited its innovations to thinking about better ways to counter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Every alteration in doctrine and structure was based on the assumption that the war for which the army should prepare itself was a conventional war on the plains of Germany. But during this period there was no such war. Instead the army found itself fighting in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada, and threatened with the prospect of having to fight in the Middle East and Central America. None of these actual or likely wars produced the same degree of rethinking and experimentation that was induced by the possibility of a war in Europe.^ As a result, changes in the army were essentially limited to trying to find ways to take advantage of new technological developments in the kind of weaponry that either it or its adversary might employ in Bavaria.^

Before 1930, the United States Marine Corps was a small service that in peacetime guarded the brigs on navy ships and the doors to U.S. embassies and in wartime occupied various Central American nations for brief periods while Washington politicians tried to figure out what to do with places they liked to call "banana republics." The marines had indeed fought ''from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli," but there was little in the history of these backwater wars that would have led an outsider to predict the extraordinary change that the corps was about to undergo. By 1940 it had been utterly transformed, from a conventional naval infantry force into one able to wage amphibious warfare against bitterly defended Pacific islands. J. F. C. Fuller was later to write that these amphibious operations were "the most far reaching tactical innovation of the war.""^

To understand the magnitude of the change one has to understand the difference between occupying Nicaragua in 1912 and occupying Iwo Jima in 1945. In the first case a few companies of marines stepped off ships tied up to serviceable docks, occupied the capital against little or no resistance, and raised the flag. In the second case several divisions of marines stormed a fiercely defended beach, launched carefully coordinated air and artillery strikes against dug-in Japanese troops, and waged hand-to-hand combat for weeks. As Steven Rosen notes in his illuminating history of this transformation, the hazards that had to be overcome were as much moral as they were technical: creating an organization that could train and equip men who were able and willing to wade ashore in the teeth of murderous fire without the advantage of surprise or concealment.^ To support them one had to design and acquire specialized landing craft and

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