Anthony H. Cordesman

Where do you go to get a good rundown on the military dimensions of critical events in the Middle East? You could do a lot worse than read or listen to the output of Anthony Cordesman—a 44-year old author, journalist and defense consultant who had credentials as convincing as the front end of a tank.

Fore the past three years, since leaving the government after two decades as a military and strategic analyst, Mr. Cordesman has been vigorously and prolifically propounding his views and views on the military affairs of the world: writing books and magazine articles, lecturing to military and civilian audiences, and producing special studies for clients. As is hardly surprising, a large chunk of his output—he estimates it at about a third—concerns the Middle East.

Publications Galore

Most of Mr. Cordesman's published views on military conditions around the world can be found in the pages of the Armed Forces Journal—a monthly which has been coming out for well over a century and of which he is the international policy editor. According to Mr. Cordesman's count, his articles in this and some other publications have totaled 128 since he began doing his latest thing in January of 1981. Since then he has also written two books on the Middle East—Jordan and the Middle East Balance, which came out last year (see review in The Washington Report of May 16, 1983), and The Gulf and Strategic Stability, which is to be published in early 1984. "This book will have more than a thousand pages and contain 100 charts and tables and 50 maps—so it did not represent a casual effort," he says with deadpan understatement.

The scope of all of Mr. Cordesman's recent efforts—as well as of his expertise—can be seen in the fact that he has also found the time to: prepare a paper on deterrence for the Institute of International and Strategic Studies; complete an analysis on the military balance in the Far East; put together a comparison of the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces; and write extensively on the international balance of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Mr. Cordesman developed his passion for military affairs while still an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and kept it up both while getting his M.A. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and during his doctoral work in Britain at the University of London and Hull University. His area of emphasis—beginning at Fletcher—was the Soviet military, but it was while he was based in London that he managed to take his first trips to the Middle East. After London, he joined the U.S. Department of Defense.

From the time he first joined the Department in 1962 as a management intern, up to and including the time 15 years later when he held the posts of secretary to the Defense Intelligence Board and Director of Intelligence Assessment for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (he later spent four years as a senior policy-level official for the Department of Energy), Mr. Cordesman lived in the DOD's mysterious world of international security affairs, policy planning, systems analysis and "net assessments" (comparisons of military effectiveness). This included a stint with the politico-military section of the U.S. Embassy in London on special assignment; a frustrating and "traumatic" stay in Iran during the high-flying days of the Shah; and more than five years with a NATO defense planning group in Brussels and Paris—during which he wrote an analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Later, Mr. Cordesman took over the production of a report by the U.S. Secretary of Defense on the "lessons" of the next Arab-Israeli war, in October, 1973. One of the lessons, which countered the conventional wisdom prevailing up to that time, was that the Arab successes during the war's early stages derived more from "a very skillful use of old technology" than it did from new equipment, he says.

Taking the Flak

Although Mr. Cordesman has often been a severe critic of the political and military policies of various Arab countries and the PLO—as well as those of Israel and the U.S.—most of the flak he has received has come from Israel's partisans. The most serious was in 1977—just after he left the Defense Department but before he joined Energy—when he wrote an article for the Journal called "How Much Is Enough?" The article argued that "we had given Israel a military edge which had really gone beyond reasonable proportions," Mr. Cordesman says, "and it was written at a time when the Israelis seemed to be much more anxious to make a pre-emptive strike against Syria—so what else is new?—than they were in making a peace agreement." The article did not appear until after he had joined the Energy Department, and angry pro-Israelis put on so much pressure that he came very close to getting fired.

Mr. Cordesman is free to write what he wants today without such risks—and this is probably just as well, because he still finds a lot to criticize in Israeli and U.S. policies. At the moment, he is faulting the U.S. for "using a large amount of military force (against Syria) with very few results." In this region, he says, "if we are going to use military force at all, we should be using a very little amount of it to achieve very large results."