Strategy and Defence Planning
Strategy and Defence Planning

Author: Colin S. Gray

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0198701845

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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.

Defense Planning in a Decade of Change
Defense Planning in a Decade of Change

Author: Eric Victor Larson

Publisher: Rand Corporation

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780833030245

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The end of the Cold War ushered in an era of profound change in the international arena and hence in the policymaking environment as well. Yet the changes that have characterized the post-Cold War era have often proceeded at different paces and have at times moved in opposing directions, placing unprecedented strain on policymakers seeking to shape a new national security and military strategy. This report describes the challenges policymakers have faced as seen through the lens of the three major force structure reviews that have taken place over the past decade: the 1990 Base Force, the 1993 Bottom-Up Review, and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review. The report focuses on the assumptions, decisions, and outcomes associated with these reviews as well as the planning and execution of each. It concludes that all three reviews fell short of fully apprehending the demands of the emerging threat environment, and the budgets that would be needed and afforded, resulting in a growing imbalance between strategy, forces, and resources over the decade. Accordingly, the report recommends that future defense planners adopt an assumption-based approach in which key planning assumptions are continually reassessed with a view toward recognizing--and rapidly responding to--emerging gaps and shortfalls.

Defense Planning for National Security
Defense Planning for National Security

Author: Strategic Studies Strategic Studies Institute

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2014-12-29

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 9781505819137

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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.

Defense Planning for National Security: Navigation AIDS for the Mystery Tour
Defense Planning for National Security: Navigation AIDS for the Mystery Tour

Author: Colin S. Gray

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2014-06-14

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 9781312277915

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Defense planning unavoidably must be in the nature of a mystery tour. The inability to know the future is a permanent condition for defense planning, but it is one with which we must cope. This monograph by Dr. Colin S. Gray explores and examines the implications of our irreducible ignorance about the future. His purpose is to identify an approach to this critically important subject of security that leans heavily upon what we can and should know about the past and present, in order to anticipate future conditions. The monograph finds that, although the past does not repeat itself in detail, there are profound persisting reasons why it is repeated approximately in the challenges and dangers that security communities must face. Dr. Gray concludes that notwithstanding the facts of contextual change in strategic history, the "great stream of time" from the past, through the present, into the future commands critically significant continuities in history that yield an approach to the future...