If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration

by Chet Richards

If We Can Keep It is the latest in the series of monographs sponsored by the Straus Military Reform Project of the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information. Unlike other publications now coming out on the Iraq War and the counterinsurgency campaign there, retired Air Force Col. Chet Richards rejects the notion that policy-makers can predict how well any such effort will work. The track record of military occupations in culturally and religiously alien lands in modern times is not good in terms of the end result for the occupier, the effects on the indigenous population, and the standing of the occupying nation and army in the eyes of the rest of the world. The next U.S. administration, whether Republican or Democrat, should not think that we have discovered, with the Pentagon's counterinsurgency doctrine, an effective policy tool for reshaping the world, or even the rogue nations in it. Richards explores alternatives to the invade-occupy-fight paradigm and draws some surprising, important and instructive conclusions about what future forces and weapons should look like if America is to survive on its own terms in the world.

166 pages, Paperback

Published January 31, 2008

About the author

Chet Richards was a close associate of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd from the mid-1970s until Boyd s death in 1997. Boyd had asked him to review the mathematical portions of his first civilian paper, Destruction and Creation, and this led to a collaboration that eventually included applications to the business world.

Chet Richards career began at the Pentagon in 1971, and has included employment with Northrop, the professional services company CACI in Washington DC, and Lockheed. A consultant since 1999, he maintains his practice in strategy for business, marketing, and communications through Tarkenton & Addams, Inc., a public relations firm in Atlanta, GA.

Chet is the author of several publications all involving applications of Boyd s strategies. His most recent, A Swift, Elusive Sword, addresses how we can re-fashion the US Defense Department to defend ourselves against the types of non-traditional enemies we will likely face in the 21st Century. It was published by the Centers for Defense Information shortly before 9/11, has been translated into Russian, and is now in its second printing. He has lectured on this subject to commercial organizations in the US and abroad, including the US Army Command and Staff College and the Air War College, and is the only person to have delivered Boyd s Patterns of Conflict since Boyd s death.

Chet is also a retired colonel in the US Air Force Reserve, where he served for many years as the Reserve Air Attaché to Saudi Arabia. Prior to that, he was a reservist on the Air Staff in Washington, where he built computer models of fighter aircraft effectiveness. He was commissioned in 1969 through the Army ROTC program at the University of Mississippi.

Chet and his wife, Ginger, live in Atlanta, where, in addition to their work with Tarkenton & Addams, they build custom web sites to support the marketing communications needs of their clients. They also own and operate two sites devoted to John Boyd s strategic legacy, Defense and the National Interest (http://www.d-n-i.net) and Belisarius.com (http://www.belisarius.com.) They have two daughters who, as this is written, are both in graduate school in Georgia, and one very overweight cat.

(Barnes and Noble)

Reviews

[Gabe Mounce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Same comment as for "Certain to Win" by Chet Richards