A Sharp Eye on the Pentagon
The tools of the trade of any serious Pentagon correspondent are a devotion to the national defense and an abiding skepticism of the ways in which the nation proposes to guarantee it.
“I left the Marine Corps after 20 years,” said Evans, “because I felt there was incredible opportunity for loyalists and rather more limited opportunity for men of character and hard work. I certainly didn’t want to continue to be a part of an organization whose major interest seemed to be budget share. I do think we ought to keep our guard up. I don’t think we need to break the bank in the process. I think we have. We gave the Pentagon a $750 billion transfusion of extra cash under Ronald Reagan, and they produced a smaller force than Jimmy Carter and with marginal levels of readiness. [There’s a scandalous shortage of simple shells and bullets.] That was obvious to me in 1986 and that’s why I left.”
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“The real national strategy is that war will never happen,” Evans told us, “and what we have here is a domestic patronage operation taking place under the guise of national defense.”
“And we see signs of it in our operations, which become exercises in brute firepower devoid of tactical skill or acumen, as in Grenada. The sad thing about Grenada is that, as in Vietnam on a much smaller scale, there was no self-examination. No publicly released after-action report. Nothing we could lay before the taxpayers and the parents, an accounting of what we did and where we needed to improve.”
What’s Happening in Copyright Law
Meanwhile, on the free enterprise front . . .
Much law often remains obscure to fiery young go-getters like Barry Brandwein, who tend not to appreciate subtle concepts like “common law right” and “secondary meaning” and “antidilution.” But those are the basis of the lawsuit Starbeat filed a few days ago against What’s Happening, Inc. Starbeat wants Brandwein to be forbidden to use the name. Circuit court Judge Robert Sklodowski scheduled a hearing for next Wednesday and told Brandwein not to advertise in the meantime. What a nuisance! Brandwein hopes to be off and running on May 26.
