Word: hacketts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PROPHETIC SCENARIOS fleshed out into popular bestsellers share one common flaw--they invariably prove wrong. To his credit, General Sir John Hackett, a former NATO army group commander with a string of letters dangling from his double-titled name, recognizes this...
...Hackett knows as well as any of us that any effort to describe an international showdown between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. leading to world war can call to its aid only hypothesis and speculation, not prediction and calculation. Nevertheless, one can ask of our "top-ranking NATO generals and advisers" at least a little understanding of the international power structure they seek to preserve...
Even in the handful of months since its conception, Hackett's book has become laughably dated. The military details of tank strengths and armor-piercing capabilities Hackett keeps under rigid command and control, but the basic premises that lead him to conclude a European land war is conceivable fall out of his influence even as he tries to marshal them...
...like these cast doubt on the most basic premise of his book. The Third World War is a call to rearmament, a shrill blast of the trumpet for Western governments to boost their military expenditures now, before it's too late and the crawling armies of Bolshevism engulf what Hackett calls "the free nations of the Western world." He believes the advent of "flexible response" military policies in the sixties--abandoning automatic massive nuclear retaliation in favor of both conventional and nuclear forces--makes land war in Europe a distinct possibility over the next decade...
...Third World War, Hackett...