Military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post,
Priest won the 2001 Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. She argues, in what is essentially a series of expanded columns, that the military, steadily and by default, has been assuming a spectrum of authority and responsibility in international affairs that it is ill-prepared to exercise wisely. Central to the process has been the growing power of regional commanders-in-chief, who since Desert Storm have been acting as virtual proconsuls for successive administrations unwilling to develop and assert coherent foreign policies. Priest's defining figure is Gen. Anthony Zinni, the maverick Marine who thoroughly enjoyed the perquisites of his appointment as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East, central Asia and east Africa, and in the process seemed to regard himself as a bridge between the states of the Middle East and a Washington that persistently failed to understand the region. Arguably even more useful is Priest's treatment of the deployment of a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division as peacekeepers in Bosnia—the event that led Condoleeza Rice to say that the U.S. did not maintain elite combat forces to escort children to school. There is a good human interest essay focusing on a civilian woman who served as a contract interpreter in Kosovo. The work concludes with a survey of the shortcomings of the U.S. effort in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The individual pieces, however, never quite add up to an integrated work. From general criticism of the concept of overseas military satrapies, Priest turns to a critique of the system that gives soldiers on the ground poorly defined missions and little specific instruction on how to proceed. This is a legitimate criticism, but Priest does not advocate any particular solution. As reportage, The Mission
has merit, but as defense analysis, it falls short. Author tour. (Mar.)
