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The Army Gets an Air Force: Tactics of Insurgent Bureaucratic Politics. By Bergerson Frederick A.. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Pp. xii + 216. $14.00.)

Foreign scholars are occasionally perplexed or amused by the attention given to bureaucratic politics by American political scientists. But it is clear that the practice and study of this phenomenon have been nourished by our distinctive social structure and ideological tradition. American egalitarianism encourages governmental processes which are open enough to enable outsiders to describe them in detail. At the same time, it develops enough entrepreneurial initiative in public officials to guarantee that the detail will be delicious. A direct line runs from Lincoln Steffens through early exponents of the case method like E. Pendleton Herring and Harold Stein to contemporary practitioners of the bureaucratic politics approach. Frederick Bergerson's book, which won a Leonard D. White prize, is a high-quality, thoroughly researched example of what that approach can accomplish. His topic is the revival of an army air capability that had been all but extinguished after the creation of an independent air force. He attributes this rebirth to "bureaucratic insurgency" a species of "social movement" that develops within large-scale organizations. In the struggle for an army air capability, the insurgents were a loose fraternity of middle-ranking officers and technicians held together by a common conviction that victory in combat was in jeopardy because the air force placed too low a priority on close air support of land operations. Bergerson's time frame runs from 1941 to 1970. Initially army aviators were used only for artillery targeting and unit liaison, later for medical evacuation and the transport of cargo and infantry, still later to operate gun platforms. But the victorious insurgents then developed a fixation on technology akin to that of their air force rivals, and overreached by requesting the Cheyenne. This high-speed, high-cost assault helicopter was rejected by higher authority as needlessly sophisticated for most Third-World environments while insufficiently lethal or survivable for NATO. Yet the insurgents had come a long way. Why? Bergerson supplies several reasons. One was technological: the advent of the helicopter. A second was the acumen of the insurgents. As specialized "fly boys" unlikely to make general, they sought allies among credentialed generalists destined for high command. A third was the strategy of the opposition. The air force sought to limit army aviation to logistics and communications, to confine it to a 60-100 mile battlefield zone, to restrict the weight of fixed-wing planes to 5,000 pounds, etc. At the same time, it neglected its own responsibility for close combat support because its leaders felt that their organization's "essence," to use Morton Halperin's term, lay in strategic bombing, that is, in ball-carrying, not in blocking or tackling for others. Moreover, the air force ignored the army's challenge too long. Bureaucratic insurgencies, Bergerson claims, are most easily put down at the outset.