““As great as the all-volunteer force had been under Ronald Reagan, that force had always been a mighty war ax, something designed to smite the country’s opponents with overwhelming combat power, rapidly destroying all resistance before being returned to the shed to be sharpened and hung back on the wall to await its next use. For years now, this awesome force had been used like a hatchet, thousands of small strokes steadily dulling its blade, no downtime allotted for resharpening. A new political philosophy for the use of America’s military had emerged in Washington, a violation of the Powell Doctrine that Jack called the “Strategy of Underwhelming Combat Power,” a term that yielded the unfortunate abbreviation “SUC””
