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.
National secuirty strategy is a vast subject involving a daunting array of interrelated subelements woven in intricate, sometimes vague, and ever-changing patterns. Its processes are often irregular and confusing and are always based on difficult decisions laden with serious risks. In short, it is a subject understood by few and confusing to most. It is, at the same time, a subject of overwhelming importance to the fate of the United States and civilization itself. Col. Dennis M. Drew and Dr. Donald M. Snow have done a considerable service by drawing together many of the diverse threads of national security strategy into a coherent whole. They consider political and military strategy elements as part of a larger decisionmaking process influenced by economic, technological, cultural, and historical factors. I know of no other recent volume that addresses the entire national security milieu in such a logical manner and yet also manages to address current concerns so thoroughly. It is equally remarkable that they have addressed so many contentious problems in such an evenhanded manner. Although the title suggests that this is an introductory volume - and it is - I am convinced that experienced practitioners in the field of national security strategy would benefit greatly from a close examination of this excellent book. Sidney J. Wise Colonel, United States Air Force Commander, Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education
Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty explores and examines why and how security communities prepare purposefully for their future defence. Professor Gray argues that our understanding of human nature, of politics, and of strategic history, does allow us to make prudent choices in defence planning.
Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force. The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies – that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention. As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.
The purpose of this book is to explore and examine the challenge to America's defense planners of needing to make purposeful and prudent choices in military preparation for the future. The problem for defense planning that is beyond resolution is the scientifically certain fact that we have no data from the future about the future. Moreover, this will always be a fact. No matter the scholarly discipline and tradition to which a defense planner owes or feels most allegiance, he or she needs to recognize and attempt to understand fully a personal and institutional condition of awesome ignorance of detail about the future. Further study, more cunning analytical methodology, even more powerful computers-none of these can reveal with any certainty what the future will bring. Fortunately, this does not mean that we are ignorant about the future; but it does mean that defense planning is guesswork and can only be such. Understandably, both senior policymakers and soldiers tend to be reluctant, even to the point of appearing to be evasive, when legislators question the plausibility of the answers given in congressional hearings. After all, it can be troubling to the conscience of honest and competent people to be obliged to affirm the integrity of choices made in defense preparation for national security in years to come, when there is and can be no certain way to know that one is sufficiently correct.
Superior defense plans fuse political, economic, military, technological, and sociological power in ways that cover state interests, while conserving resources to the greatest prudent extent. Poor products can increase costs without reducing risks, because forces and funds that support slipshod schemes often fail to furnish security. This critical appraisal of the U.5. defense planning system seeks to serve a five-fold purpose: set assessment standards, appraise U.S. planning in principle, appraise U.5. planning in practice, identify U.S. planning problems and present optional courses of corrective action. The study shows how domestic and foreign policy inputs from the White House, National 5ecurity Council, and State Department affect defense planning.
The challenge that is defense planning includes: "educated futurology" and the humanities as methodological approaches; futurists and scenarios, trend spotting and defense analysis; the impossibility of science in studying the future; the impossibility of verification by empirical testing of hypotheses; the value of the humanities which are politics, strategy, and history for defense planning; the use and misuse of analogy; learning from history; why and how strategic history works; and recommendations for the Army. What can be learned from history and what cannot are discussed in this analysis.
The challenge that is defense planning includes: "educated futurology" and the humanities as methodological approaches; futurists and scenarios, trend spotting and defense analysis; the impossibility of science in studying the future; the impossibility of verification by empirical testing of hypotheses; the value of the humanities which are politics, strategy, and history for defense planning; the use and misuse of analogy; learning from history; why and how strategic history works; and recommendations for the Army. What can be learned from history and what cannot are discussed in this analysis.
This report identifies key lessons from the first National Defense Panel (NDP) and makes recommendations to the Congress, the administration, and future NDP management teams about how the process can be made more effective. The NDP was established by the 1996 Military Force Structure Review Act as an independent effort to provide guidance to the Secretary of Defense and the Congress on long-term defense strategies and force structure requirements. This report reviews the motivations for creating the NDP, its administrative and logistical experience, the NDP's relationship to the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and the final NDP report. Some of the principal recommendations are that (1) the NDP should maintain its focus on defense issues, but do more to integrate its recommendations into the broader national security agenda; (2) future NDPs should be better coordinated with the defense planning cycle (i.e., the next NDP, preceding the next QDR, should complete its work before the new administration comes into office in 2001); and (3) future NDPs should deal more systematically with resource constraints than the first NDP.
