Quote Originally Posted by Eden View Post
To posit a decline one has to either assume or demonstrate that things were somehow better in the past. If Kohn believes that there was some golden moment when the officer corps (as a whole) was:

1. Apolitical
2. Intellectual
3. Not prone to micromanagement
4. A moral exemplar
5. Capable of seamlessly integrating tactics, operations, and strategy

I wish he would point it out.
He did in a rather left-handed way with his comments about the military that won World War II. Reading his piece somewhat reminded me of reading Vegetius, who spends a lot of his verbage extolling the virtues of the Republican-era Roman legionnaires (who probably never really existed), or Tactitus' discussion in either his Germannia or Agricola, 2 examples of panegyric with significant hidden agendas.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.