Future Visions For United States Defense Policy

"Though threats to American security have changed dramatically in the last decade, U.S. defense policy and military forces look a lot like they did during the closing days of the Cold War - only smaller. Are the policies and the forces about right to deal with a wide range of threats and uncertaintiesfrom resurgent big powers to civil/ethnic wars to Persian Gulf-like wars to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction - or should they be redesigned before it's too late? That question drives this book." "Council on Foreign Relations staff, joined by a wide range of other experts, offer four choices: First, meet present threats seriously, that is, by building up forces with a 10 percent spending increase; second, anticipate breakthroughs in military technology by possible future adversaries and concentrate now on U.S. technological superiority at about present spending levels: third, focus more on low-level but serious threats from terrorists and civil/ethnic wars and answer with greater reliance on our allies and international organizations, like NATO or the United Nations, and cut expenditures by 15 to 20 percent; or fourth, maintain present capabilities and hold spending at about $250 billion yearly." "The book presents these choices as "Presidential" speeches, so that they can be read and understood by interested Americans."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Though threats to American security have changed dramatically in the last decade, U.S. defense policy and military forces look a lot like they did during the closing days of the Cold War. The new administration has promised to make significant changes to U.S. defense spending, yet no book, until now, has explored the options and implications of each approach. Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy, a revised and updated Council Policy Initiative (CPI), explores these alternatives to U.S. defense policy through four "presidential" speeches. The alternatives are the following: the present level of funding, which the Council CPI labels "a prudent defense," allows the U.S. military to wage two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously and to do some peacekeeping for about $300 billion per year; the "enhanced defense" option, which would increase defense spending to $330 billion per year and assure the United States that it can execute the two-war strategy by improving U.S. military capabilities across the board and relying on allies for peacekeeping missions; a "cooperative defense," which emphasizes building ad hoc international coalitions and focusing U.S. military forces on the real threats to U.S. interests--"civil and ethnic violence"--allowing a 15 percent to 20 percent budget cut; and an "innovative defense," which keeps spending at the current level but switches defense dollars to future technologies rather than maintaining the existing force structure and buying additional current-generation weapon systems. The case for a national missile defense is made in the enhanced defense option, the case against it in cooperative defense. This book is required reading for members of the Bush administration and anyone else concerned with America's national security.

The National Military Strategy (NMS) supports the aims of the National Security Strategy (NSS) and implements the National Defense Strategy (NDS). It describes the Armed Forces' plan to achieve military objectives in the near term and provides the vision for ensuring they remain decisive in the future.

Donald Rumsfeld¿s vision of a transformed U.S. military has been discussed by many and understood by few, and this lack of understanding has resulted in both significant simplifications and sweeping generalizations. If Rumsfeld¿s Transformation is indeed dead, does this mean that Transformation as a greater process is dead as well? This report discusses the answers to this question, which requires one to understand first that ¿Rumsfeld¿s Transformation Vision (RTV)¿ is the result of multiple influences that predate his time in office. Second, RTV is actually an umbrella term for 3 different things: a new way of war, a process, and a defense strategy. And third, the military services shaped, and at times limited, the effectiveness of his program. Illus.

This book analyzes President Bush's new Regional Defense Strategy--the master plan that will guide the transformation of U.S. defense policy for the post-Cold War era. Most recent books on defense prescribe how U.S. policy ought to change or critique past policies without taking Bush's new strategy into account. This book takes a different approach, providing the first comprehensive assessment of the new Regional Defense Strategy, analyzing the consequences for U.S. forces and alliance relations, and examining the political difficulties of transforming President Bush's vision into reality. It explains major changes in U.S. defense doctrine and strategy, force and command structure, future programming requirements, and the major question of how such a significant change was managed in the United States. Much is new and even radical about the Regional Defense Strategy. Bush has built it around the concept of reconstitution, under which the United States will scrap the forces needed to fight a large-scale conflict and rely on the ability to create new forces if such a conflict looms on the horizon. However, reconstitution will impose demanding requirements on U.S. intelligence and the defense industrial base. Congress will also have an important say over this proposal and the new national security strategy as a whole. So will U.S. allies in Europe and the Far East, some of whom are already moving to recast the strategy's proposals for basing U.S. forces abroad. The primary audience of this book is politico-military strategic planners and those interested in organizational theory, management of change in large organizations, and government policy.

Safe from the battlefields of Europe and Asia, the United States led the post–World War II global economic recovery through international assistance and foreign direct investment. With an ardent decolonization agenda and a postwar legitimacy, the United States attempted to construct a world characterized by cooperation. When American optimism clashed with Soviet expansionism, the United States started on a path to global hegemony. In US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy, the authors analyze the strategic underpinnings of hegemony, assess the national security establishment that sustains dominance, consider the impact on civil-military relations, and explore the intertwining relationships between foreign policy, defense strategy, and commercial activities. Eschewing conventional analyses, the volume not only identifies drivers and continuities in foreign policy, but it also examines how the legacy of the last sixty-five years will influence future national security policy that will be characterized by US leadership in an increasingly competitive world. From civil-military relations to finance, and from competing visions of how America should make war to its philosophy of securing peace through reconstruction and reconciliation, US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy offers unique insights into the links between military and commercial power as it charts the rise of a historical rarity: the incidental superpower. This accessibly written book is suitable for students and general readers as well as scholars.

The National Military Strategy (NMS) supports the aims of the National Security Strategy (NSS) and implements the National Defense Strategy (NDS). It describes the Armed Forces' plan to achieve military objectives in the near term and provides the vision for ensuring they remain decisive in the future.

The U.S. Army is facing a time of great change. The security environment is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, with defense challenges multiplying. At the same time, the Army is adjusting to rapidly diminishing operational demands, falling endstrength, reorganization, and tightening budgets. Given these new realities, the CSIS Harold Brown Chair in Defense Policy Studies examined the current state of the soldier/squad system and how it might be best advanced in the face of constrained budgets. The effort was conducted under the rubric of the Ground Forces Dialogue, a Brown Chair effort aimed at facilitating a broad, sustained, web-based conversation about the future of U.S. ground forces.

From the John Holmes Library collection.