Thinking Out of the Box: Reading Military Texts with a Different Perspective

摘要

By forcing the reader into a different perspective, deconstruction of U.S. military vision documents helps clarify their content and develop potential alternatives to their central themes. This paper adapts deconstruction, a philosophy based in literary criticism, and uses it to analyze military vision documents. This deconstruction technique uses clues from the document's structure and syntax as well as its actual content to identify central and marginal ideas in the text. By looking at the opposite of central ideas or by elevating the marginal to central, the 'possibilities left out' are identified. An examination of the results from this deconstruction process will reveal useful ideas for further consideration. Two case studies are employed to demonstrate deconstruction: 'Joint Vision 2010/Joint Vision 2020' and 'The US Marine Corps Vision Statement/Marine Corps Strategy 21.' Deconstruction of these two sets of vision documents results in considerations that were not apparent from a conventional reading. The deconstruction technique provides an alternate way to examine texts and allows the reader to develop critical and creative ideas from those readings.