On Saturday I dropped by the Korean War Veterans Memorial. (No, I didn't see Justice Breyer fracture his shoulder.) I hadn't been there before. I kind of liked it. It is hyper-realistic, a real contrast to the Vietnam memorial just on the opposite, north side of the National Mall's Reflecting Pool.

As I walked around it I counted 19 statues of soldiers, of which several appeared to be carrying radios. (As in this foto, 3 appear to be carrying.) Why so many radios?

Nineteen also struck me as an odd number -- kind of midway between a squad and a platoon. I asked a docent and he said that the number, when reflected in the black rock, signifies the 38th parallel. I dunno.

When Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster offers a criticism of the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine, you know he's not just riding intellectual fashion. This is a guy who has done well both in conventional warfare (see 73 Easting) and counterinsurgency (see Tell Afar).

In a new publication by McKinsey and Company called McKinsey on Defense, McMaster tells Andrew Erdmann  that "our doctrine is still catching up" with how we need to fight. He explains:

We have the counterinsurgency manual, the stability operations manual, and the security-force assistance manual, but I don't think we have put the politics at the center of those manuals. So, for example, we assume in our doctrine that the challenges associated with developing indigenous security forces are mainly about building capacity, when, in fact, they're about trying to develop institutions that can survive and that will operate in a way that is at least congruent with our interests.

McMaster also says that, "We need leaders who have physical and moral courage on the battlefield, of course, but also the courage to speak their minds and offer respectful and candid feedback to their superiors. Our leaders can't feel compelled to tell their bosses what they want to hear."

I mention in another item today how much I liked the McKinsey interview with General McMaster. I was less taken with another article in the same issue, about what defense companies should do to weather the current decline in Pentagon spending. 

The article is laden with phrases that apparently carry great meaning for the authors, but might not be so evident to the reader. They recommend "reimagining the business portfolio." They want executives to "redesign the talent strategy" -- but they don't say what that means. (I am guessing it means hire different sorts of people, but who knows? And what sort of people?) They also call for "appropriately managing incentives." Why does no one ever call for "inappropriate" steps? Those might be more fun, and certainly more interesting. 

Their bottom line: "History shows that the time to act is in the depth of the downturn." My translation: "Buy low, sell high." In other words, what you need to do is simple: Just be the Warren Buffett of the defense industry. Any stockbroker will tell you this is easy to say, hard to do. 

This court finds the authors guilty of aggravated assault on the English language, and sentences them to remedial readings of Strunk & White, and then George Orwell's essay on clear thinking and clear writing.

This whole thing is feeling a lot like a Hitchcock movie. Calling Anthony Hopkins. Or the FSB.

Yesterday I was reading a paper on the future of the Marine Corps that bothered me because I thought it didn't ask tough enough questions. So I asked myself, What would those questions be?

This is what I wrote down:

• Right now the Marine Corps is too attached to measuring itself by its end strength. That is an Army approach, and a bad idea for the Corps. I think its competitive advantage is in its quality. That should be its position to defend, not size. Is it possible to change this emphasis? How?

• Over the last two decades, the Marine Corps spent billions of dollars on the V-22 and F-35. Sure, they might be effective. But are they worth it for the Marines? Is one of the lessons of the last 20 years that the Marines should not be in the business of technological innovation?  (And what do the Marines really need the F-35 for? Wouldn't an F-4 or a prop-driven plane be better for close air support?)

• If, as I suspect, the Marine Corps' real future role is to be the 911 force, why not adapt to that even more? Yes, develop a well-trained force led by adaptive officers and overseen by generals who speak truth to power. But take it another step: Make the Marines the military's premier "interagency" force, not only willing to take orders from the State Department or CIA, but thoroughly trained and prepared to do so. Lead the way in such exercises. Build on the foundation of Small Wars Manual to write counterinsurgency doctrine that actually takes politics into account. 

Here are the results of our survey of good books of military history that aren't about the U.S. military.

There were so many British books mentioned that I moved them into a second category. The first part here is genuinely foreign books -- not necessarily written by foreigners (though most are) but about wars in which the British and Americans were not major players, or at least not written from the Anglo-American perspective.

Most of these mentions were in the comments, but about 10 percent came in by e-mail.

I offer them in no particular order. Not even cleaned up -- just pasted in. For details on the books, go back to the comments section -- lots of explanations there about why a particularly book was nominated.

David Glantz, When Titans Clashed

Rommel's Infantry Attacks (2 nominations)

Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961-74

Zhuang-zhi

Epictetus

Martin Van Creveld, everything but especially Command in War

Michael Oren, Six Days of War (2 votes)

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon

Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory

Noel Mostert's The Line Upon a Wind

Patrick Rambaud's The Battle

Roland Perry, Sir John Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War

Larteguy's The Centurions and The Praetorians (3 nominations)

Harold Parker's Three Napoleonic Battles (short treatments of Friedland, Aspern-Essling, and Waterloo, with observations uniting all three)

John Elting's Swords Around a Throne (the Billy Yank/Johnny Reb treatment of what it was like for soldiers, leaders, and specialists in Napoleon's Grande Armee)

David Galula's Pacification in Algeria

Legionnaire, by Simon Murray

B.H. Liddell Hart's Caesar: Man, Soldier, and Tyrant

Colonel Saburo Hayashi, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War  

Hoito Edoin, The Night Tokyo Burned

No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, by Hiroo Onoda

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson

The Franco Regime, by Stanley G. Payn

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, by Peter Godwin

Sean Maloney's three-volume history of the Canadian experience in Afghanistan (Enduring the Freedom, Confronting the Chaos, and Fighting for Afghanistan). He also did a narrative of the first eight or so years entitled War in Afghanistan: Eight Battles in the South.

Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale (2 nominations)

The Reluctant Admiral, by Hiroyuki Agawa (Yamamto)

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War

Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, by his wife Dorothy with an introduction by David Halberstam

Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse Tung

Either The Code of the Samurai or The Hagakure or The 47 Ronin

Heart of Darkness for anyone about to do an AFRICOM rotation. (And one de-nomination.)

Lester Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

Avigdor Kahalani, Heights of Courage

Rabinovich's Yom Kippur War

On the Banks of the Suez: An Israeli General's Personal Account of the Yom Kippur War, by Avraham Adan

Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (2 nominations)

All Quiet on the Western Front, and the lesser known but just as powerful sequel to the book, The Road Back, both by Erich Maria Remarque

Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel

Coalitions, Politicians and Generals -- Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars, by Dominick Graham and Shelford Bidwell

Strange Victory, by Ernest May

Julian Jackson's The Fall of France

Witness to Surrender, by Brig. Siddiq Salik

The Way It Was, by Brig. Z.A. Khan

In the Line of Duty, by Lt. Gen. Harbaksh Singh

Guerrilla Warfare, by Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Afgantsy, by Rodric Braithwaite

The Jungle is Neutral, by F.Spencer Chapman

The War in Paraguay: With a Historical Sketch of the Country and Its People and Notes Upon the Military Engineering of the War, by George Thompson

On British military -- listed separately because more familiar

Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here (3 nominations)

John Masters, first two volumes of his memoirs

Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up

Keegan's Face of Battle

The Dambusters

William Slim, Defeat into Victory (4 nominations)

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, by Andrew Gordon (4 nominations)

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of The Great War, by Robert K. Massie (4 nominations)

The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941, by John Lukacs

How the War Was Won: Factors that Led to Victory in World War One and The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front & the Emergence of Modern War 1900-1918, two volumes by Tim Travers

Churchill's Generals

The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill

Churchill and Seapower, by Christopher Bell 

J.F.C. Fuller's Strategy

Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears (Zulu Wars)

Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood, and Poppycock (attempts to bust many of the popular myths about WWI on the Western Front)

Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (doorstopper-sized analysis of WWI)

Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders

The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of WWII, by Stephen Phelps

Not Mentioned in Dispatches

18 Platoon, by Sidney Jary

The Defence of Duffer's Drift, by Maj. Gen. Ernest Dunlop Swinton.

Brazen Chariots, by Robert Crisp

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Anthony Loyd, ex-British soldier in Bosnia.

The Swordbearers

Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War, by H. P. Willmott

Battle for the Falklands, by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins

Poetry

Sassoon's The War Poems

The Dark Hills, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Bingen on the Rhine, by Caroline E. Norton

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II/ Released

Taking life-saving measures on behalf of a MWD is something all handlers prepare for before they deploy, as do their dogs. Handlers' veterinary knowledge should extend beyond the basics of day-to-day care, and they are trained to do things like administer IVs, identify the onset of shock and poisonous bites, set broken bones, and bandage bullet wounds, among other specialized care that may be necessary in combat theater.

So, when handlers -- and the community of servicemen and women who support them outside the wire -- say that a MWD is treated like any other soldier or Marine in their ranks, they not only mean it, they practice for it.

In February, Ted, a yellow Labrador retriever and bomb specialist, and his handler U.S. Army Sgt. Leslie Langford, along with others at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, LA, practiced combat patient care and "aeromedical evacuation in a simulated combat environment."

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Joselito G. Aribuabo

The training consisted of what appears to have been a variety of simulated injuries -- human and canine alike. Together, Ted and Sgt. Langford endured a host of training exercises that included X-rays, having his leg set in a splint, and a litter carry to a Black Hawk helicopter.

Along with MWD Ted and Sgt. Langford from the 550th Military Working Dog Detachment out of Fort Bragg, the servicemen and women participating in these exercises were medical personnel (including veterinarians) attached 328th Combat Support Hospital among others.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. John R. Nimmo, Sr

Almost as important as defaulting to the proper motions of emergency care is preparing for the momentum of adrenaline and stress that builds during a combat crisis. A handler has to know how his or her dog will react under strain, to be braced for it, to be practiced at it as a team. From the photos -- especially this one -- it looks like Ted tolerated the chaos and the discomfort, if begrudgingly. 

Rebecca Frankel is away from her FP desk, working on a book about dogs and war.

By "One Gone Cat"

Best Defense guest columnist

I thought of offering to write an essay for you that gave my own reasons or that made my own arguments for how the officer corps can be improved to retain the best and the brightest, but thinking about it just made me angry. It made me angry because I knew it would not make any difference, just as the countless opinion pieces written by disgruntled junior officers and NCOs or concerned senior officers and NCOs won't make any difference. The military is too inflexible, the senior officers are too comfortable with the status quo, human resources command believes too strongly in whatever crazy algorithm they have determining entry assignments, and the civilian leadership is too intimidated by a bunch of men who just lost two wars to force a change.

Writing about my experience won't make a difference because senior leaders will look at it and say that it's an anomaly, or that I don't have the ability yet to see the big picture, or that I cannot reflect and see how things actually work very well, or maybe that I got the career I deserved based on my abilities. I understand that they cannot understand me, because I don't understand them.

• I don't understand how the military can go on pretending that we didn't lose the war in Iraq or that we're not about to lose the war in Afghanistan. Withdrawing with honor can still be losing. Lee withdrew with honor at Gettysburg. He also lost. He lost because the conditions on the battlefield as he withdrew were not in his favor, but they were in the favor of his enemy. The same is true of Iraq today. They might argue that the American people did not support the resources needed to win in Iraq or that the politicians made errors that could not be overcome by military genius. I do not know if that is true, but if it is true, we still lost -- we just should not blame generals.

• I don't understand how senior officers can avoid feeling ashamed that we seem to have no idea how to have a smaller budget without damaging training and readiness. I guess the Marines really are the best branch of service. The rest of us were simply propped up with ever-increasing budgets, and we wasted more of the taxpayers' money during the wars than anyone will ever know (no one will ever audit the amount wasted on things like the rent-a-captain program).

• I don't understand how the chief of staff of the Army can have a plan for decreasing troop levels that relies almost entirely on natural attrition without any discussion of a plan to ensure that our best stay and our worst are separated from service.

• I don't understand how they can waste so much money on education for officers through ROTC, and then show no desire to use the skills gained through specific degree programs. They should get rid of scholarships at every private school in the country. Hell, get rid of scholarships for everything but the cheapest state school in every state. The military doesn't care if you learn anything in college, right? They have no interest in recruiting and retaining officers with an intellectual bent. The military might be right that the elite, highly selective schools are no better than any other institution of higher learning. But I do know that the private sector and the rest of the federal government want the elite college graduates very badly, so let the kids go where they are wanted to work for employers interested in developing their passion and offering them direction.

Sorry for the rant. I had to get it out there. You seem like the right person to send it to, since my mentors wouldn't appreciate the tone very much. It probably figures that a bunch of guys trained in an Army that didn't want to admit it lost Vietnam are pretty schooled in the art of self-delusion. But I became an Army officer because I wanted to be among the best, not because I wanted to be part of a group so adept at making excuses and criticizing anyone who doesn't want to stay in for the glorious pension at the end of the rainbow of mediocrity.

"One Gone Cat" is, for a bit longer, a U.S. Army officer. But guess what? The views presented here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Army or the Defense Department.