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Pentagon Flexes Its Altruism Muscle
Submitted by jgehring on Mon, 07/28/2008 - 9:41am.
Story summary:
Having learned the limits of force in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military strategists are rewriting decades-old military doctrine to place humanitarian missions on par with combat, part of a new effort to win over distrustful foreign populations and enlist new global allies, according to top commanders and Pentagon officials. The Defense Department is implementing a series of new directives to use the American arsenal for more peaceful purposes even as it prepares for war, including a little-noticed revision this year to a document called "Joint Operations," described as the "very core" of how the military branches should be organized.
Pentagon Flexes Its Altruism Muscle
Boston Globe
7-28-08
The effort illustrates a growing recognition that, to combat radical ideologies and avert future wars, the Pentagon must draw more heavily on its deep reserves of so-called soft power - its ability to set up medical clinics in a remote part of the world, for example - to balance the more traditional "hard power" of military force, according to more than a dozen US military officers in several regions of the world and planners inside the Pentagon. "Things have changed significantly," Jerry Lynes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now chief of education and doctrine for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview. "We have taken our traditional principles of war and added to them."