Reply #150: Certainly

[KDLarsen]

The whole thing is online at http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDef...

Let's start with what the whole transformation thing is about

"To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs. Information technologies,in particular, are becoming more prevalent and significant components of modern military systems. These information technologies are having the same kind of transforming effects on military affairs as they are having in the larger world. The effects of this military transformation will have profound implications for how wars are fought, what kinds of weapons will dominate the battlefield and, inevitably, which nations enjoy military preeminence".

Page 50 (62 in the PDF)

So they wanted the military to employ a greater use of information technology. What does that have to do with 'employing military to secure resources'? Not a whole lot. The whole point of the document was, that the missile shield that was being promoting back then, would be useless against a guy with a bomb in a suitcase or, as 9/11 showed, when airplanes turned into missiles.

Hell you even had Carl Levin saying in June 2001:

(we're) lavishing money on missile defense and not "putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security ... like terrorist attacks."

And Joe Biden saying on 9/10/2001:

If we spend billions on missile defense, he said, "we will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threats come into this country in the hold of ship, or the belly of a plane."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronic...

But what about the invoking of Pearl Harbor, the whole 'The US is attacked by surprise and must swiftly go to war' thing? That's not quite what the PNAC was talking about

Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.

Page 67 (79 in the PDF)

In other words, they're invoking Pearl Harbor in the context of an attack for which the US military has no immediate response. The whole thing should be read as, updating the US military to face the future is going to take a long time, unless an attack makes the flaws very visible.