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By Colin Gray
As the cold war melts and the wedges of the defense pie shrink, a mysterious image emerges: the murky future of the world. Only vigilance and history’s hard lessons can answer the tough questions that lie ahead for the military services.
On 24 May 1989, U.S. President George Bush noted that “the grand strategy of the West during the postwar period has been based on the concept of containment: checking the Soviet Union’s expansionist aims, in the hope that the Soviet system itself would one day be forced to confront its internal contradictions.” He then observed that “the ferment in the Soviet Union today affirms the wisdom of this strategy,” and ventured the challenging thought that “now we have a precious opportunity to move beyond containment.”
As of early 1990, the U.S. defense establishment is suffering from a crisis of uncertain higher direction that derives from the unanticipated measure of U.S., or Western, success in the East-West competition. The familiar caveat, “beware of your wishes, they may come true,” yields vital insight into the current condition. Not only has the Soviet Union all but abandoned its erstwhile hegemonic empire in East-Central Europe, but under the pressure of national-ethnic-religious discord around the territorial periphery at home and in the plain face of the perestroika program that failed to revive the economy, even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) is in process of being abandoned as the instrument of politically legitimate authority.
The military corollaries to these political upheavals include a budgetary slimdown, some systematic restructuring of the ground forces allegedly in favor of a much more defensive capability, and a shift in military doctrine toward a defensive orientation. Indeed, the Soviet Minister of Defense, Army General Dmitri T. Yazov, advises that in developing the theory and practice of the art of war, we are guided by the concept of a ‘defensive strategy.’ ” As the Eastern side of the balance of power melts away more rapidly than officials can prepare studies and briefings to analyze the course of events, so, inevitably, the Western end of the balance is breaking loose from its foundations. In 1989, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger predicted that “the Western alliance is bound to be shaken by the very events it is celebrating.” The pace of current events in the two Germanies shows that, if anything, Kissinger understated the scale and immediacy of the burgeoning challenge to NATO.
Trend spotting is much easier than is trend comprehension. U.S. policymakers are obliged not only to make overall sense of current trends, but also to define those trends for U.S. security and then to provide guidance for the design or redesign of suitable defense plans. What will U.S. national security policy be in the 1990s? What military strategy will support that policy? And which forces will be needed to express that military strategy?
A New Era, A New Challenge
The strategic novelty of the 1990s for U.S. policymakers and policy commentators is as unmistakable as the implications for policy, strategy, and force structure are obscure. People can become habituated to rapid change and can fail to appreciate just how great a total shift in the security universe may be effected by a series of related, if superficially discrete, events. The past year already has registered a strong claim to be one of history’s very special 12-month periods. To be specific:
- China abruptly and brutally changed course, turning its back on a process of political modernization.
- The Soviet hegemonic empire in East-Central Europe melted away comprehensively, once it became apparent that each local satrapy was on its own to make peace with its society if it could.
- The periphery of the Soviet territorial empire at home— the Baltic republics, Moldavia, trans-Caucasia, and the (turkmen) Central Asian republics—convulsed with a mix, by region, of intercommunal riot and nationalist agitation for secession (to the point where it is not unreasonable to question the physical security of elements of the huge Soviet nuclear arsenal).
- General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev secured the approval of the Central Committee of the CPSU to recommend the abolition of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which guarantees the leading role of the Party (Indeed, if the CPSU is disestablished, the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union is challenged.)
V The German Problem” became the ‘‘German Opportunity, ’ and from a distant possibility German reunification assumes the status of an all-but-accomplished fact.
- The West German government called for a thorough overhaul of NATO’s military strategy—with particular reference to the strong possibility that ‘‘flexible response” could bring short-range nuclear weapons to bear.
- From a condition in 1989 effectively of holding the line, or at most of slimming down with 2-3% real reductions each year for the next four to five years, the U.S. defense establishment early in 1990 is seriously menaced by the prospect of an astrategic free fall to who knows what level of budgetary support.
A Moscow manifestly reluctant to stamp on rioters in Baku, much less impose socialist discipline in the evaporating empire west of the Polish frontier, is hardly a Moscow plausibly in current need of much deterring by the military might of NATO.
The strategy challenge of the 1990s has no precedent in U.S. history. Radical-scale reductions in the defense effort in the past always have been associated with the conclusion of a war (1865, 1919, 1945-46, 1970-75). Given that the Soviet Union at the least is taking time out from much (though not all) of the traditional competition, and at the most is suing for a lasting peace, what is the central pillar of policy guidance for U.S. military strategy and posture? A Moscow manifestly reluctant to stamp on rioters in Baku, much less reimpose socialist discipline in the evaporating empire west of the Polish frontier, is hardly a Moscow plausibly in current need of much deterring by the military might of NATO. Ideas for the better defense of the old Central Front appear as atavistic as does the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for the conduct of central nuclear war.
Unfortunately, the certainty of the current Soviet time of troubles encourages what the late Herman Kahn used to call ‘‘surprise-free projections.” In short, one identifies the current very positive security trends, plots their postulated steady progress over five to ten years, and— reasonably enough—proclaims that peace truly is breaking out. Alas, history is more cyclical than linear, and trends generate countertrends. History is never surprise- free and (political) peace never endures long. Indeed, the sources of current optimism about the future in the West are the fuel sources for plausible conflagration tomorrow.
The 1990s are opening with all the signs of a new era in international security. Yesterday’s enemy, the centerpiece of extant U.S. strategic planning—indeed the object of the lion’s share of the U.S. defense budget—truly is low priority for a while (but only for a while). The architecture of Western security—the terms and conditions of transatlantic alliance—is under fundamental challenge as the Ger- manies reorganize themselves. It threatens to become open season for the redesign of U.S. policy, strategy, and force structure.
The novelty of the 1990s is real enough. Nonetheless, much of the geostrategic and other prudential logic that should help shape U.S. policy and the U.S. defense effort in this decade applies, regardless of the content of the political headlines of the day. No one can, or should attempt to, predict the future in detail. But if they pause to reflect upon the more enduring factors that influence statecraft and strategy, U.S. policymakers will realize that they can hedge quite adequately against many of the worst of tomorrow’s possible and unpleasant surprise effects.
Strategic Priorities and Principles
U.S. policymakers cannot know now what demands for strategic effectiveness they will be obliged to lay upon the armed forces in the 1990s. But, uncertain as they must be over the detail of future dangers, the application of six robust principles can help shape a prudent defense strategy and posture. These principles have major implications for choice of strategic priorities.
Protect survival interests first. Although the United States, as the first-class superpower, requires the full range of military capabilities in some measure, the priorities among those capabilities are as plain and as easily derived from military logic as they are from the permanent facts of geography. To be specific, the U.S. government is required to accord first priority to the strategic forces, second priority to naval forces, and third priority to ground forces (space and air power assets are subsumed as adjuncts to these broad categories). The reasoning behind this order of priority is inescapable.
Major errors in preparation for ground warfare could mean the loss of a campaign in some region distant from North America. One should bear in mind that in any substantial conflict the United States would wage coalition war. The United States will never field an army large and competent enough to challenge the greatest continental power of the day in Eurasia.
Major errors in policy toward the Navy could well mean that the United States was unable to fight anywhere abroad other than in Canada or Mexico. Without freedom to use sea lines of communication (SLOCs) more or less at will, the United States would find itself shorn of much ability to take the initiative beyond North America (since such initiatives would entail passage over uncontrolled seas) and, given the growing interdependencies of economies, would find defense mobilization all but impossible to effect.
Finally, major error with regard to the strategic forces could mean the loss of a war (and the country) in the course of an afternoon. Some kinds of errors in military posture would be much less likely to have unforgiving consequences for the United States than would others.
Minimize vulnerability to nuclear escalation. This second principle is a focused restatement of part of the implied content of the first principle. The reasons why nuclear weapons have such limited utility in all but the most severe of crisis situations are the same reasons why those weapons would likely be the threat or actual military option of choice in that close-to-unimaginable context of the most dire national peril. As the U.S. government plans the 1990s defense trim-down, it needs to reconsider all aspects of nuclear strategy. Nuclear weapons could be trumps in the hands of a state that appears sufficiently desperate as to be motivated to use them. In short, although the United States likely will have little practical need of its nuclear arsenal, if that need should arise, nothing else would do.
Plausible conflict scenarios of some nuclear character for the 1990s are easy to design, as the old East-West security order breaks down with more and more of its elements sailing out of convoy into uncharted waters. The theoretical grounds for optimism over the prospects of so- called “conventional deterrence” have assumed quite alarmingly fashionable status. Strategic warning time on the order of months is now promised, while the new geography of East-West military relations in Europe, not to mention the promise in new advanced conventional munitions (ACMs), would seem to imply that nonnuclear defense is becoming feasible as never before in the nuclear age. But if that judgment is indeed compelling, it implies that a state or coalition that anticipates conventional defeat could be strongly motivated to explore its nuclear options.
Exploit comparative national advantage. U.S. strategic priorities happen fortuitously to match the comparative national advantages of U.S. society. Capital intensity, not manpower intensity, is the traditional American way in defense preparation and the conduct of war. Plainly stated, the United States has an abiding love affair with machines. It has developed the attitudes appropriate to a continental- scale national success story, but it has never fielded— indeed has never had to (save between 1861 and 1865)—a mass army capable of waging the kind of continental war of which its strategic culture approved. (In 1917-18 and again in 1942-45, the U.S. Army was not the A-team in land power of its day.)
Technology is the United States. The U.S. armed forces, almost without notable historical exception, have been outstanding at waging machine warfare and at conquering space with a (machine-dependent) logistical excellence that other countries have only been able to watch in amazement.
Players have to be present. For a great power, let alone a would-be coalition leader, to function as a player rather than as an observer of regional security politics, it has to maintain a local military presence that is more than lightly symbolic in scale. The United States, notwithstanding Paul Kennedy’s outdated strictures against “imperial overstretch” (in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York: Random House, 1987), is a country in a class quite by itself at present. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was correct to claim early this year that:
“America’s global military posture and leadership promotes an international environment in which free peoples and those seeking freedom can prosper . . . not only does our presence deter Soviet influence, it also can dampen regional arms competition and discourage local powers from seeking to dominate their neighbors.”
Great power must be seen to be believed. If the United States is concerned, as it should be, that post-Cold War Europe might prove to be dangerously unstable, the country will need to face the fact that some form of residual, but geographically distant, security “association” with a new Western order on the continent would be a prescription for U.S. policy impotence. It is not clear just how much choice key European allies and the Congress will allow to a president, but all interested parties should understand that if the United States folds its military tents and comes home,” Washington inexorably will find itself disenfranchised from voting on the future of security in Europe. This is not necessarily to say that most, or even all, of the U.S. forces in Europe should not be withdrawn. But, it is to say that a United States that withdraws militarily will no longer be a player, let alone a very major player, in the course of European security history. Having intervened three times in this century (1917-18, 1941-45,
1947—present) to save the balance of power in Europe and Asia, U.S. policymakers should understand the consequences of current policy choices.
Maritime superiority can determine the general course and character of conflict. This is not invariably true, but it is true enough so that—with caveats—it merits the'status of a guiding principle. The future availability of many U.S. overseas bases (in the Philippines, for example) is very much in doubt. But the need for the United States to threaten or actually use force overseas is anything but in doubt. From time to time the greatest sea power of the period will have a single overriding strategic duty: For Great Britain’s Royal Navy from 1905-18, the (over-) balancing of Germany’s High Seas Fleet in the North Sea; or, for the U.S. Navy of more recent years, the confinement of Soviet naval power in its home waters away from key Western SLOCs. However, considering the whole history of sea power—from the ancient Greeks to the present day—it is quite usual for the dominant maritime state to regard its large and diverse naval assets as an enabling agent, valuable in its flexibility over a wide range of unpredictable (in detail, not generically) future needs.
In brief, U.S. policymakers and defense planners in 1990 must be uncertain over when, where, and against whom they may need to threaten or use armed force in the
next decade. But they can be assured that in all, save a few hypothetical exceptions that prove the rule, either the military instrument of choice or the critical enabling asset will have to be naval. For virtually all military purposes between the (airborne) dispatch of perhaps a battalion of elite troops and the launching of some modest fraction of central nuclear firepower, U.S. maritime power is the critical “enabler,” not just facilitator, of effective U.S. participation in conflict.
Retain the flexibility to adjust to change. Unless Francis Fukuyama is credited with more prescience than seems warranted (see his article “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989), the future of international security politics is likely to be very much like its past. Alliance ties may alter, and technology will shift, but strategic geography will remain a critical subject with persisting implications for U.S. defense planning. U.S. policymakers today do not know what lies “beyond containment,” so it is hardly surprising that U.S. defense professionals are clinging to some near steady-state policy guidance from yesterday.
There are many practical implications of this sixth principle. For example:
- Nuclear deterrence and a dominant navy are, and must remain, essential enabling agents for whatever military operations the United States may conduct. Fear either for the stability of nuclear deterrence or for the quality of local sea control would critically impair U.S. freedom to act.
- Technology investment today will have a traceable, and even calculable, legacy value for lead-times to weapon or weapon-support production in the future. The changing international circumstances of the late 1980s, for example, could alter U.S. policy toward strategic defensive deployments. Decisions today on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) budget, together with the terms and conditions of relevant arms control arrangements, will determine whether or not the United States of the late 1990s has near-term strategic defensive deployment options.
Planning for Uncertainty
For a while, at least, U.S. policymakers and defense planners will have to do without the great convenience of essentially uncontested and all but canonical threats that function as the tests of an adequate defense or a sufficient deterrent. Unfortunately, contrary to previous occasions of massive reductions in the level of the U.S. defense effort, a possible—if none too plausible—enemy will remain in the field, armed to the teeth. Media pundits of all persuasions are at liberty to urge their more or less optimistic beliefs upon the U.S. government, but its officials are responsible for worrying about some of the less implausible “what ifs” of future history. Some overarmament by the Western superpower threatens only the pockets of U.S. taxpayers and perhaps some political irritation on the parts of less cooperative foreign beneficiaries of U.S. guardianship. However, the U.S. government will not be able to function according to the dictates of strategic prudence, unless it can explain to the American people and their elected representatives why the apparent retirement of the Soviet enemy should not allow the United States to downscale its defense effort on a truly massive scale (for example, see the Time cover story of 12 February 1990, “How Much Is Too Much?”).
Public mood, and not closely reasoned strategic argument, always sets the level of the U.S. defense effort. Local political interests, confusion, or plain evidence of official incompetence assuredly will motivate the Congress toward micromanagement of the defense establishment, particularly as the budget tide falls sharply. Nonetheless, although officials cannot do much to persuade key legislators that the annual defense effort should be approximately $300 billion, rather than $250 billion, or even $200 billion, they can retain much of the authority they will need to ensure that the U.S. defense effort in the 1990s effects a controlled and internally cohesive slim- down, and not an utterly astrategic free fall.
The history of U.S. defense policy, when the tide is in flood and ebbing, provides scant grounds for optimism. It should be recalled that the one proposition to which virtually every critic of the Reagan administration’s defense buildup subscribed was the plausible charge that it neglected overall strategy. A country that neglects strategy when it builds up (presumably when people in high places are taking foreign threats very seriously) is scarcely likely to be more attentive when it is building down (when foreign danger is judged to be in recession).
Local political interests, confusion, or plain evidence of official incompetence assuredly will motivate the Congress toward micromanagement of the defense establishment, particularly as the budget tide falls sharply.
In fact, the U.S. need for strategic guidance will be no less in the 1990s than it was in the early 1980s, but such guidance will be more difficult to formulate and much more difficult to explain to a skeptical public. Even the thoughtful and arresting testimony (before the Senate Armed Services Committe, 30 January 1990) of former Secretary of Defense for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, James R. Schlesinger, is as liable to mislead as it is to help provide guidance for a new era. Schlesinger advised that:
“America has fulfilled its historic responsibility. . . . For forty years we have stood the watch. We have won.
. . . [T]he international environment has now been transformed. We must not go on doing what we have done in the past on the premise why change a successful strategy? . . . [I]t would prove self-defeating.”
Alas, Schlesinger did not spell out the points that, although the United States has “won,” the victory is not as
it was in 1919 or 1945—the Soviet Union remains very much intact and very much equipped with first-class armed forces. Furthermore, although the current time of trouble for Soviet imperialism is a triumph of the human spirit toward the cause of political liberty, it is a mixed blessing for the cause of international order. Victories do not always stay won in international politics. Popular democracies are particularly prone to the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory. The Soviet decline and the CPSU’s pending fall have not been preordained by some universal law governing the life cycle of empires. It is true to say of the Soviet Union of the 1980s (as one could say wisely in retrospect of any collapsing, or actually defunct, policy in history) that it contained the seeds (and more) of its own demise. The leading reason why those seeds were able to grow lies in the strength and steadiness of the Western, and particularly the United States, will to compete. If that will evaporates faster in the 1990s than does the residual or renewable will in Moscow, then current dreams of peace likely will end in nightmare.
Policy and Strategy in a Changing Climate
Policy. The Soviet-U.S. Cold War may be eroding rapidly. Indeed, peace may be breaking out in the structurally simple bloc-to-bloc world of East-West strategic relations. Paradoxically, although the current improvement in East-
A reunified Germany deeply involved in the economics and politics of a thoroughly weak Eastern Europe, which has a plethora of local combustible materials, is exactly the kind of setting in which powder trails to great war inadvertently could be ignited.
West relations reduces the perils of a Soviet blitzkrieg in Europe, or of a surprise nuclear assault upon the United States, some of the causes, manifestations, and plausible consequences of the political improvement give promise of a more dangerous world.
It was never likely that the Soviet Union would elect to lunge westward in Europe as its preferred method of establishing a definitive regional geopolitical primacy. It was even less likely that Moscow would leap in one fell bound from a condition of superficially deep peace to a central nuclear war. U.S. defense planners were, and are, wise to ensure that neither of those classic (grotesquely hypothetical) threats should even be briefable in Moscow as high roads to victory. But a reunified Germany deeply involved in the economics and politics of a thoroughly weak Eastern Europe, which has a plethora of local combustible materials, is exactly the kind of setting in which powder trails to great war inadvertently could be ignited.
In other words, the political upheavals in East-Central
Europe, including the Soviet Union, which we applaud and which in a real sense are the consequence of Western resistance to Soviet imperialism, also are destabilizing. The fact that a hateful security order in the East is being destabilized does not diminish the fact of instability. It follows that although Secretary of Defense Cheney must plan for a world from which the classic threats do indeed appear to be receding, he must also plan for a context that is objectively more dangerous. Peace in Europe will not be as secure in the 1990s as it has been for the past 40 years.
Next, it will be very much in the U.S. interest in the 1990s, as it has been throughout the country’s history, that power continue to be balanced in Europe. For the time being it is not at all clear how much power balancing in Europe will need to be effected, let alone effected by distinctively U.S. assets. It would not be a sound idea for the United States to be replaced as the Western alliance leader in Europe by a reunified Germany. Strictly speaking, much of the guardianship duty performed well enough by the United States over the past four decades could be devolved upon a successor defense entity in Western Europe. However, one needs to register strong reservations on the nuclear side, given the weight of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and the current prohibition against German nuclear weapons.
Germans may believe, and may even be correct in believing, that their political future lies in their own hands. But U.S. policymakers should not allow themselves to be blackmailed by German demands for self-determination (i.e., we will remain faithful to the Western alliance only if we can secure reunification now, or soon). The consequences of a reunified Germany are potentially so important that the United States should approach its 1990s defense planning challenge with a view to supporting the balance of power in Europe broadly, as well as providing for the discouragement of residual or renewable classic military menaces from the East.
By continuing to provide for such deterrence, as the Soviet Union or a Russian successor state—may require in the 1990s, U.S. defense planners should keep in mind the particular importance of a U.S. military presence on the ground in Europe, as Germany “shakes down” in its new, or renewed incarnation.
A major part of the U.S. defense planning challenge for this decade and beyond is to transcend a “dominant scenario” approach to force structure. Instead, U.S. officials should endeavor to provide a flexible military posture suitable to the stabilizing roles of the first-class superpower. Imperial Athens and imperial Britain built, and by and large maintained, the scale and kind of navy appropriate to the dominant “ordering” power of the era. Notwithstanding its loss of economic/financial hegemony since the 1940s and 1950s, the United States will be the only true, multi-dimensional superpower in the 1990s. Defense planners and strategic theorists in Washington can speculate on the apparent evaporation of the classical Soviet threats to Europe and South and East Asia, but they should not forget that the United States will be invited to redress any unexpectedly dangerous upset to the balance of power in Eurasia. By virtue of its economic size, the scale of its military forces, its global mobility, and the cover of its nuclear deterrent, the United States will remain in a class by itself as a power for order and stability.
Strategy and Force Structure. The U.S. armed forces should be flexible, prepared for employment over enormous distances, and balanced with respect to strategic objectives and policy goals. It is difficult to be optimistic, but there is no case for a defense budget slim-down that is balanced in an astrategically mindless, but politically astute, manner. Despite congressional clamor to the contrary, the perils of a dynamically reordering Europe and a distinctly unstable Soviet Union are such that the United States should disarm with deliberate speed (or less).
Peace may be breaking out in dimensions of long-standing formal interest to Western defense planners (surprise attacks on the Central Front, or missile assaults “out of the blue”), but the real stuff of which great wars are made is threatening to accumulate at a frightening rate in Europe. U.S. and NATO officials understood the strategic world of 1949-89; the strategic world of the 1990s may well not be understood by the navigators of the ships of state, East or West.
The U.S. defense posture in the 1990s should be designed to achieve asymmetrical results among different (though complementary) kinds of capability. It should not be assumed that the U.S. armed forces will face only light duties for the next several decades. As of today, no one knows what demands a new security, or perhaps insecurity, structure in Europe could place upon the United States. A Soviet government, fearful of the future, might decide that its medium-term security situation would be intolerable, squeezed between an emerging super-state, China, and a German-led Europe.
In order to accomplish any balance of power in Europe and/or Asia, whatever the immediate cause of the alarm, it is safe to predict that the United States would require a robust nuclear force posture for counterdeterrence and a navy assuredly able to win, when and where necessary. Opinions will vary as to “how much is enough,” but history and logic suggest that popular democracies will most certainly guess overoptimistically. There is little danger that the United States would find itself over-armed if asked to come to the aid of the balance of power for the fourth time in a century.
It is unusual for a state to be placed in a position where, mainly because of prior successful efforts, domestic and foreign conditions will permit an important change in military strategy. Policymakers and defense planners in the United States today should welcome the challenge of a politically mandated budgetary slim-down and a currently favorable balance of power in Europe, in order to correct some of the more glaring weaknesses in U.S. military strategy—in good part because of NATO. In particular, the nuclear thread that dominates “flexible response” should be reconsidered in favor of a more global and maritime concept of war, which would play to Western economic and geopolitical strengths. Also, U.S. central-war strategy should be reexamined with a view to probing just how much “strategy” really informs the guidance for, and the planned direction of, the so-called strategic forces.
Conclusion
Today it is popular for defense professionals and amateurs alike to plan their favorite force reduction schemes for the 1990s. Policy guidance is looking “beyond containment”; but looking to what? U.S. defense planning is in the process of losing its political and military threat anchors. Soviet military capabilities indeed persist on a frightening scale and (by and large) with state of the art quality. But fewer and fewer Americans believe that the current leaders in Moscow have the incentives or the will to use that military power. Overall, the U.S. defense establishment is in the middle of being deprived of its now traditional political justification—the assumption that Soviet military power expressed ill-will and could fuel incentives to act. The 1990s truly are uncharted waters for the United States as a national security community.
When faced with the uncertainties that loom in this decade, an anxious U.S. policymaker or defense planner needs to have recourse to some enduring principles for guidance and should consider what is known about the future, as well as what is not. The “right” strategy and the proper implementation of military posture cannot possibly be identified with high confidence. It is unclear how much, if any, containment the Soviet Union of 1995 or 2000 will require. The responsible U.S. official has to appreciate what is impossible: to predict the future course of Soviet, German, or general European history. That U.S. official must attempt to design U.S. strategy and force structure in accordance with what is known. For example, it is as certain that the United States will face some severe security alarms in the future, as it is that those alarms will require U.S. responses that will prove practicable only if the country has adequate nuclear deterrent cover and control of the relevant SLOCs.
The U.S. government in 1990 should not be seeking a correct understanding of the country’s defense needs in 1995 or 2000; such cannot be achieved. Rather, it should search for a fault-tolerant strategy, force structure, and set of technology investment decisions. The United States cannot plan not to be surprised, but it can certainly plan to sustain a military posture tolerably secure against the worst that could happen. Provided U.S. policy remains committed to sustaining a balance of power in Eurasia, and provided U.S. strategic nuclear and naval forces are able to protect both the U.S. homeland and the ability to use the seas at will, the potential damage to U.S. vital interests will be limited.
Above all, the U.S. defense establishment needs the flexibility to be responsive to rapidly changing policy and strategic guidance and to be forgiving of the unexpected.
Dr. Gray frequently offers commentary on maritime strategy matters in Proceedings. He is president of National Security Research, Inc., and chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia. Dr. Gray has studied at the universities of Manchester and Oxford. A U.S. citizen for nine years, he is coeditor of Seapower and Strategy, a collection of theories and histories of maritime strategy released in September 1989 by Naval Institute Press. His book War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century will be published in 1990 by Simon and Schuster, New York.