Technology and the Changing Political Officer in the Armed Forces: The Polish and East German Cases*

DALE R. HERSPRING is a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State. He has previously served in Washington and Warsaw and is currently assigned to the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the Department of State in Washington. He was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1971. Dr. Herspring is the author of East German Civil-Military Relations: The Impact o] Technology, 1949-1972 (1973) and senior editor of the forthcoming Civil-Military Relations in Communist Systems. He has also published articles and essays on Communist civil-military affairs in such journals as Problems of Communism, Armed Forces and Society, The Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Studies in Comparative Communism, and The Naval War College Review, as well as chapters in books on the G.D.R. published in this country and West Germany.