Some transitions from the Cold War military go well, others stuck in a time machine

■"Army/Navy Specials: Once Spurned by Developers, Shut-Down Military Bases Are Now Sought-After Sites," by Michael Corkery, Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2005, p. B1.

■"When The Army Gets It Wrong: Wounded soldiers often--too often--find themselves having to battle the Pentagon over pay mistakes," by Alex Kingsbury and Julian E. Barnes, U.S. News & World Report, 24 October 2005, p. 24.

Winning the Global War on Terrorism, as I say in the current issue of Esquire, is all about moving off the Cold War stance and accepting the reality of what it will take, in terms of force structure change, to generate lasting victories (i.e., winning the peace and not just the wars).

We in the national security community do this well in some instances, quite badly in others.

We've had a hard time reducing our basing infrastructure, in large part because so many in Congress fight this process tooth and nail, keeping open facilities in their districts that are no longer needed but provide jobs to their constituents.

Here's the painful rub on that one: time and time again when bases close, the local economy does better in the long run without them. Huge tracts of new land enter the market, both residential and commercial (to include industrial), and our private sector knows no bounds in its cleverness in generating new wealth from these opportunities previously held off-limits. Smart communities welcome base closures, knowing the short-term pain will be surpassed by the long-term gain.

So, sometimes the world's last centrally-planned economy, known as the Pentagon, gets it right (privatization of unneeded infrastructure).

And yet, sometimes it still gets it so wrong, like the horribly stove-piped information systems that so routinely screw up or delay salary payments, medical payments, travel voucher reimbursements, equipment purchase reimbursements, and basically any payment you can name.

If you're a defense contractor with a lot of money on the line, then you adjust and simply waste a lot of time and effort to make sure you get paid. But if you're rank and file, either uniform or civilian, you just suffer the slings and arrows.

When I worked for the government I got routinely shafted on travel, nickled and dimed like you wouldn't believe. Then every so often you'd get dramatically overpaid, and God help you if you pointed that out, because fixing the overages is even harder than fixing the shortfalls.

Here's the description of the pathetic state of affairs today in the Defense Department:

The problems result in part from the military's reliance on separate finance, medical and personnel databases. The current system, designed in the 1970s, is so antiquated that sometimes data on a particular soldier must be manually extracted from one database for use in another. The Defense Department is trying to create a combined system, but the project has fallen behind because of the sheer complexity of the task.

Yes, yes, combining databases in the Fed is SO much more complicated than doing it anywhere else.

Isn't it always amazing how we make changes far more easily in the realm of "stuff" than in the realm of people? Need to divest infrastructure. That works decently. But need to makes things work more efficiently for personnel? That's just SO complex!

But the same thing is true on strategy. Show me a strategic opponent that gets you lotsa stuff and that's a good enemy! But show me one whose defeat will demand mostly manpower. Oooh! That's SO complicated and complex!