Winter 1999-2000
American Purpose
Issue 2, Volume 13

Publication Date: December 1, 1999
Posted: Wednesday, December 12, 1999

This issue includes 'Keeping Ahead: How to Maintain American Military Superiority'; 'The American People and Their Military'; 'The Reagan Restoration'; 'Promoting Indifference'; 'Tomorrow’s Strategic Challenges'; 'Four Modern Challenges'; 'Guidelines for Strategic Thinking'; 'Technology and Military Strength'; 'Components of the Revolution'; 'Implications for Defense Investment'; and 'Creating Multiple Options'.


In This Issue :

Keeping Ahead
How to Maintain American Military Superiority
How can the dominant American position in world affairs be maintained? There is no doubt that maintaining our military superiority is a key—and complex—part of the answer to that question. There are strategic issues relating to the use of American power and to the overall national security policy of the United States. There are technological issues relating to the modernization of the military and the use of advanced communication and information devices, lasers, miniaturized weapons, outer space, and weapons of mass destruction, for offense and defense. And there remain critical issues relating to the structure of our military, the recruitment of adequate manpower, the promotion of the best officers to the top, and civil-military relations in an era when the military is smaller and more professionalized and therefore less of a "citizens' army" than it has been during most of U.S. history. [More]

The American People and Their Military
My chief qualification for commenting on this subject is to have been an observer. I was witness to the disintegration of the American military in its closing moments of agony in Vietnam. And I observed at first hand the condition of that military in the immediate aftermath of the war and during the difficult but exhilarating years of recovery. [More]

The Reagan Restoration
If these crucial reform efforts predate the Reagan era—just as reversing the post-Vietnam decline in military spending predates the Reagan era—it nonetheless remains true that but for the contribution of President Reagan himself, efforts to revive American military power may well have come to naught. Reagan's most important contribution, in my judgment, was to repair the bond between the military and society that Vietnam had shattered. [More]

Promoting Indifference
But in the years since Desert Storm, the relationship of people, government, and army has gradually unraveled. Today the prevailing public attitude toward the military is not antagonism as in the days after Vietnam but sheer indifference. [More]

Tomorrow’s Strategic Challenges
In 1999 the United States military looks roughly like this: a budget of $260 billion, 1,370,000 troops organized into ten Army and three Marine active divisions, some twenty active and reserve air wings, and eleven active aircraft carriers. Its forces are armed with M-l tanks, F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft, and F-117 bombers, and sail Nimitz-class carriers. These forces are organized into unified and specified commands, governed primarily by the Goldwater Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. [More]

Four Modern Challenges
The U.S. military today faces four strategic challenges, all quite different from those of the Cold War. To some extent these require different hardware and organizations than those of the past. But far more importantly, they require different outlooks on the military profession, different ways of operating, and different organizational schemes. These are not, at the moment, larger or more daunting tasks than those of the past; but they are more ambiguous and subtle, less resolvable than the more straightforward challenges of the Cold War. The Cold War categories of defense "hawk" and "dove" no longer make sense, and the old catchwords of American strategy—"containment," "flexible response," and "overwhelming force"—are no longer useful. [More]

Technology and Military Strength
The defense situation at the time of the Reagan buildup was very different from the one we face today. With a couple of obvious exceptions—the Strategic Defense Initiative and the B-2 stealth bomber—the Reagan buildup did not face major technological challenges. Mostly it bought more of what was in the pipeline or moved to turn recent advances into military systems. Although spending on research and development (R&D) increased substantially under President Reagan, the primary features of the buildup were force expansion, near-term modernization of warfighting capabilities, and enhancement of readiness. [More]

Components of the Revolution
As in several previous transformations of warfare, this still emerging military revolution is closely linked to broader, societal transformations, in this case, twin revolutions in information technology and biotechnology. The emerging RMA is being brought about by multiple and complementary advances in ten principal areas: awareness and connectivity, range and endurance, precision and miniaturization, speed and stealth, automation and simulation. [More]

Implications for Defense Investment
For a host of reasons, the path currently pursued by the Clinton administration is unlikely to result in revolutionary change in our military capabilities by 2025. Although the Administration rhetorically acknowledges the need to transform the armed forces to prepare for an uncertain future, it emphasizes near-term concerns. The military it foresees in 2020 is a smaller but essentially similar version of the one that won the Persian Gulf War three decades earlier. [More]

Creating Multiple Options
In the emergence of a new industry or way of war, several competing alternatives often vie for supremacy before a "dominant design" is settled upon. Hence the creation of multi-dimensional options available to be exercised later is essential. Although there will almost certainly be an "efficiency" penalty in developing options not all of which are subsequently exercised, the potential gains in effectiveness are well worth the added cost. [More]