"Transformation," Meigs believes, has become an ideology in a Pentagon where dissenters are not particularly welcome, even though this "transformed" future force has never been clearly defined and the amount of money needed to create it could jeopardize highly effective current capabilities. military must either radically "transform" itself with "skip-a-generation" technologies - to use Bush's phrase - or risk meeting the same fate as the French. He doesn't subscribe to the theory that there are periodic "revolutions in military affairs." And he is downright dubious about the idea that the U.S. RMA theorists believe that the Germans fused new tactics and emerging technologies - the internal combustion engine, the radio, the mounted machine gun and improved aircraft design - to produce a highly mobile style of warfare that left the French, hunkered down along the Maginot line and other defensive perimeters, simply unable to cope. If the United States is in the midst of the third and last RMA of the 20th century, built upon precision, stealth and high-speed data, the German blitzkrieg is generally considered the first. The Ardennes forest offers a powerful lens for viewing the transformation debate because the blitzkrieg occupies a special place in RMA theory. fighting capabilities in the event of a war with Iraq. Some people worry that it's also feeding overconfidence about U.S. This belief is guiding the Pentagon's plans for future acquisitions. military is in the midst of an "RMA," or "revolution in military affairs." That idea, associated most closely with Andrew Marshall, the director of the Pentagon's in-house think tank, suggests that emerging technologies and new concepts periodically change the nature of war and produce dramatic gains in military effectiveness. Bush's faith in transformation is based on the belief that the U.S. Rumsfeld promise will finish turning a supposedly plodding industrial-age military into a nimble information-age force. His questions also carried a subtext, questioning the latest Pentagon obsession - military "transformation," which President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Meigs was leading a group that included two dozen of his subordinates, myself and a handful of generals from Germany, Russia and Britain on what the Army calls a "staff ride," a century-old teaching device that lets up-and-coming commanders walk historic battlefields, study the terrain and ponder the decisions taken by the great and not-so-great generals of the past. Because, right now, the American military is the winner. "Why does the loser learn quicker and better than the winner?" Meigs asked as we began a drive along the Semois River, which elements of Germany's XIX Panzer Corps forded on their way through Belgium.
Army forces in Europe seemed puzzled by what had happened here in May 1940, when the Germans, having learned from their defeat in World War I, punched through this forbidding terrain, crossed two rivers, maneuvered around the supposedly "impenetrable" Maginot line and knocked France out of World War II in just six weeks. Meigs arrived one afternoon last month in search of answers. The index does not reflect updates to the Guide.In the dense Ardennes forest, where the Germans began their daring blitzkrieg invasion of France, Gen. This alphabetical index to the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States is based on a paper version with the same title compiled in 1995. Federal Records Guide: Alphabetical Index - A