This book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It is a philosophical and conceptual book for helphing people think deeply, clearly, and insightfully about complex policy issues. This books reflects the viewpoint that the best policies normally come from efforts to synthesize competing camps by drawing upon the best of each of them and by combining them to forge a sensible whole. While this book is written to be reader-friendly, it aspires to in-depth scholarship.
This book is intended to help fill a void in the literature while making a contribution to public awareness. Most books on national security affairs focus on substantive issues, such as nuclear proliferation, arguing in favor of one policy or another. This book addresses something more basic: how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It illuminates how key methods of analysis can be employed, by experts and nonexperts, to focus widely, address small details, or do both at the same time. To my knowledge, there is no other book quite like it.
Analyzes the history, evolution, and processes of national security policies This text examines national security from two fundamental fault lines-the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks-and considers how the resulting era of globalization and geopolitics guides policy. Placing this trend in conceptual and historical context and following it through military, semi-military, and non-military concerns, National Security for a New Era treats its subject as a nuanced and subtle phenomenon that encompasses everything from the nation to the individual.
The New Era in U.S. National Security focuses on the emerging threats of the second decade of the twenty-first century, well after 9/11, and well into the age of globalization. It is a thorough, technically competent survey of the current arena of conflict and the competition for political and economic control by state and non-state actors. Starting with the current national security establishment, it discusses the incompatibility between the threats and the structure organized to meet them. It then looks at the supply chain, including containerization and maritime security as well as cybersecurity, terrorism, and transborder crime networks. The last section of the book focuses on existing industrial and defense policy and the role the private sector can play in national security. Pulling together different areas, such as the logistics of the supply chain, the crime-terrorist nexus, and cyberwarfare, the book describes the landscape of today’s new battlefields. It shows how the logistics of asymmetrical warfare, the rise of the information age, the decline of the importance and effectiveness of national borders, the overdependence on fragile infrastructures, and the global reach of virtual, paramilitary, criminal, and terrorist networks have created new frontlines and adversaries with diverse objectives. This core text for international security, strategy, war studies students is technical yet accessible to the non-specialist. It is a timely and comprehensive study of the realities of national security in the United States today.
This accessible and stimulating new book from renowned security scholar Donald Snow examines the United States' national security situation today and what policies the U.S. should adopt to confront it. National Security for a New Era is the first comprehensive examination of American national security policy since the events of 9/11 galvanized change. It starts from the premise that there have been two fundamental fault lines in national security policy over the past 15 years, the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Each transformed security policy: the end of the Cold War ushered in the era of globalization for the 1990s, and 9/11 initiated a shift to a more traditional geopolitical view of the world for the early 2000s. The text attempts to place these traumatic events into the context of the prior American experience of the Cold War, traditional concerns over American interests, politics, and military problems, and to extend that experience into the future. Asymmetrical warfare, the Iraq war precedent, the neo-conservative challenge, state building, and the future reconciliation of globalization and geopolitics are all examined.
How can countries decide what kind of military forces they need, if threats are uncertain and history is full of strategic surprises? This is a question that is more pertinent than ever, as countries across the Asia-Pacific are faced with the military and economic rise of China. Uncertainty is inherent in defence planning, but different types of uncertainty mean that countries need to approach decisions about military force structure in different ways. This book examines four different basic frameworks for defence planning, and demonstrates how states can make decisions coherently about the structure and posture of their defence forces despite strategic uncertainty. It draws on case studies from the United States, Australian and New Zealand, each of which developed key concepts for their particular circumstances and risk perception in Asia. Success as well as failure in developing coherent defence planning frameworks holds lessons for the United States and other countries as they consider how best to structure their military forces for the uncertain challenges of the future.
This book examines US naval strategy and the role of American seapower over three decades, from the late 20th century to the early 21st century. This study uses the concept of seapower as a framework to explain the military and political application of sea power and naval force for the United States of America. It addresses the context in which strategy, and in particular US naval strategy and naval power, evolves and how US naval strategy was developed and framed in the international and national security contexts. It explains what drove and what constrained US naval strategy and examines selected instances where American sea power was directed in support of US defense and security policy ends – and whether that could be tied to what a given strategy proposed. The work utilizes naval capstone documents in the framework of broader maritime conceptual and geopolitical thinking, and discusses whether these documents had lasting influences in the strategic mind-set, the force structure, and other areas of American sea power. Overall, this work provides a deeper understanding of the crafting of US naval strategy since the final decade of the Cold War, its contextual and structural framework setting, and its application. To that end, the work bridges the gap between the thinking of American naval officers and planners on the one hand and academic analyses of Navy strategy on the other hand. It also presents the trends in the use of naval force for foreign policy objectives and into strategy-making in the American policy context. This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime strategy, US national security and international relations in general.
MySearchLab provides students with a complete understanding of the research process so they can complete research projects confidently and efficiently. Students and instructors with an internet connection can visit www.MySearchLab.com and receive immediate access to thousands of full articles from the EBSCO ContentSelect database. In addition, MySearchLab offers extensive content on the research process itself-including tips on how to navigate and maximize time in the campus library, a step-by-step guide on writing a research paper, and instructions on how to finish an academic assignment with endnotes and bibliography.- In this new edition of "National Security in a New Era," renowned security scholar Donald M. Snow continues to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the United States' national security situation and the security policies the U.S. adopts. This text examines national security from two fundamental fault lines-the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks-and considers how the resulting era of globalization and geopolitics guides policy. Placing this trend in conceptual and historical context and following it through military, semi-military, and non-military concerns, "National Security in a New Era" treats its subject as a nuanced and subtle phenomenon that is evolving to encompass everything from the nation to the individual.
