Word: commandant
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...Egyptian military command made a thorough study of the kind of desert war that would have to be fought against Israel and trained the army carefully for it. That meant, for one thing, that the goal was not to occupy territory but to destroy the enemy forces. "A desert is like an ocean," an Egyptian officer told Wynn. "A navy doesn't try to occupy a big segment of the ocean; it tries to destroy the enemy fleet. The desert is a paradise for a tactical commander but hell for a logistics officer...
...ease and relaxed, despite the occasional incoming rounds of artillery. Reinforcing their confidence was the arrival at the front of supplies airlifted to Israel from America. The roads were full of trucks with English markings. A further encouraging sign to the troops was the exodus of many senior commanders from a permanent command post in the middle of the Sinai. When we asked where these officers had gone, we were told with a wink that they were "far forward." We assumed that meant on the Egyptian side of the canal...
...problem, however, is that after bureaucracy reaches a certain size, the chain of command is stretched fairly thin, making it relatively tempting, and often easy, for bureaucrats to forget the source of their authority and to arrogate policy-making authority to themselves as a supplement to their policy-executing duties. This possibility is easiest in those areas of government activity where legislated policy is loosely defined and subject to varying interpretations. It is exacerbated when bureaucracies grow so large and independent as to develop a life of their own, and become more concerned with serving their own prerogatives than with...
...cannot abide free-floating guilt. But scapegoats are getting harder to find these days (vide Richard Nixon and his Watergate problems). After My Lai, the U.S. Army thought they had a pretty good sacrificial offering in Lieut. William Calley-until corrosion began eating its way up the chain of command. The Army's containment plan was not helped by Journalist John Sack, who moved in with Calley for one of those total immersions that have become the baptismal rites of the New Journalism...
...artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences...