The Broken Wolf Brain

What to say about this?

Back in 2000 I visited the Chemical Defense Training Facility at Fort Leonard Wood as part of a SWAMOS delegation. Part of the visit included an evening with the international fellows, a large contingent of officers and men from dozens of different countries, including Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, who were in the United States to train up on chemical weapon defense. For those not in the know, SWAMOS is a program designed to train young scholars on the basic vocabulary of military affairs, created at a point when political science and history scholarship on national security had begun to suffer in visible ways from the growing gap between civilian and military life. The last generation of scholars who had been conscripted into the armed forces (and thus had some understanding of the functioning of military organizations) was passing out of productivity, while the ghosts of Vietnam still haunted enough of academic to make detailed knowledge of military affairs… a little bit sketchy and suspicious in both the faculty and graduate student lounges. As I’ve related to some of you, I was told point blank by both faculty and graduate students at both my graduate and undergraduate institutions that it was pointless to study international security because war was no longer a major policy concern.

Times change, apparently. And Naomi Wolf has, whatever contribution she might have made at some point in the past, become an awfully silly person.