Strategic Appraisal 1997: Strategy and Defense Planning for the 21st Century

Book excerpt: For U.S. defense planners, these are the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, with the collapse of our erstwhile Cold War adversary, basic questions of national security strategy are once again in play. In light of this change, there has never been greater scope for reviewing U.S. national objectives and threats to them, creatively weighing these against resources available, and crafting a strategy suitable to new and emerging conditions. At the same time, extraordinary developments emerging from the technology base are opening up possibilities for radically new ways of conducting military operations. Taken together, these trends should spark a wide-ranging set of debates about the best way for this nation to go about protecting and advancing its interests in the future, the roles that military power should play in U.S. national security strategy, and the appropriate size and mix of U.S. military forces. Yet, to date, these debates have seemed constricted, if not stillborn. Perhaps one reason for this is that Americans have not yet embraced a broad set of guiding objectives for U.S. foreign policy and security strategy. Too, the shrinking of the defense budget poses a seemingly endless set of management challenges as we try to downsize the defense establishment without severely disrupting the activities of commanders and forces in the field. Resource constraints have also heightened sensitivities, so that at the level of military force structure and program analysis, it is difficult to escape the feeling that every position is evaluated first through the lens of Service parochialism.