Soldiers and Civilians

About this book

In a 1997 speech at Yale University, Secretary of Defense William Cohen raised the possibility of "a chasm . . . developing between the military and civilian worlds, where the civilian world doesn't fully grasp the mission of the military, and the military doesn't understand why the memories of our citizens and civilian policy-makers are so short, or why the criticism is so quick and so unrelenting" (Cohen 1997).