No More Nuke CO's?

There is a really intriguing book making the rounds in DC right now called America’s Defense Meltdown. The biggest point they make about the Navy is that the it is run by engineers not warfighters. Conservative author William Lind wrote the Navy portion of the book and slams Lord Rickover's basic philosophies of Nuke power first, everything else second.

Get a load of this part: Lind contrasts the dominance of engineers in the Navy to what he describes as the preference for tacticians elsewhere. All U.S. submarine skippers are nuclear engineers, “in strong contrast to Britain’s Royal Navy, whose submarine commanders have nuclear engineers where they belong, in the engine room,” and

"...the Navy’s culture is inward-focused, risk-averse and centralized, preferring obedience to initiative and relying on top-down control rather than self-discipline."

While all of this Nuke bashing is music to Coners ears, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Despite stating that it supports a strong defense but opposes excessive expenditures or forces, the Center for Defense Information has opposed nearly every new major U.S. weapons system developed over the past two decades - including the B-1 bomber, the Trident submarine, cruise missiles, neutron warheads, and even the stealth bomber.

Additionally, CDI is a spin-off project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a think tank that often has Marxist-leaning policies and you can make your own judgements by their board memebrs with deep military experience like the late actor Paul Newman and his wife Joann Woodward and Ben & Jerry's founder Ben Cohen.

Despite their leftist tendencies, America’s Defense Meltdown is at least a good read and can be downloaded here.