It was a Space Shuttle with a mission - to drop a weaponpayload anywhere on Earth and to do so while approachingits target at hypersonic velocity - 18,000 miles perhour. Between 1957 and 1963 the Dyna-Soar programconsumed $430 million of the US taxpayer's money.However, it never flew. Cancelled less than two weeksafter President ......
The purpose of this book is to provide graduate students, professional engineers, military officers, and weapons-systems planners with a comprehensive grounding in the technology, evolution, functions, costs, impacts on society, utility, and limi tations of modern strategic weapons systems. Since the subject is often left to the specialists, this work should introduce the general reader to the fundamentals of such systems in an informed manner. Nowadays the intense interaction of means and ends sym bolized by strategic weapons has stimulated a changing dis cipline in which new missile systems and the intricate logic of nuclear force and counterforce hold the stage alongside the truths of conflict, alliances, fears, games, and subtle gains and losses. Many readers with new personal interest or public responsibility in this complex field will require an overall guide to it. This book will not prepare the reader to become an expert in the vast subject of strategic weapons systems. It will, however, enable him to understand, evaluate, and form reasonable opinions about these systems, their capabilities and effective ness. The subject is dealt with more from the viewpoint of the user (investor) rather than the architect (systems engineer) and builder (design engineer). While the user will be concerned with both political as well as technical options which may be available to solve a problem, the systems and design engineers are concerned with analyzing and building technological weapons devices once their requirements are generally known.
This compilation of 10 articles by frequently published arms-control experts captures the story of a young Air Force's initial (and limited) impact on arms-control negotiations and outcomes. It documents a growing awareness by the service that it was better to help craft the US position than merely to be a passive recipient. This book also highlights the lesson the Air Force belatedly learned in the early days of arms control: that it has to plan and budget for treaty implementation as aggressively as it works to protect its equities during treaty negotiations. When a treaty goes into effect, the Air Force needs to be ready to execute its responsibilities to ensure complete and timely treaty compliance. Though the Air Force did not seize a prominent role in the early days of post-war arms control, it made up for it quickly and forcefully as it gained a fuller appreciation of what was at stake.
The making of policy for nuclear security requires a strong grasp of the associated technical matters. That grasp came naturally in the early decades of the nuclear era, when scientists and engineers were deeply engaged in policymaking. In more recent decades, the technical community has played a narrower role, one generally limited to implementing policies made by others. This narrower role has been accentuated by generational change in the technical community, as the scientists and engineers who conceived, built, and executed the programs that created the existing U.S. nuclear deterrent faded into history along with the long-term competition for technical improvements with the Soviet Union. There is thus today a clear need to impart to the new generation of nuclear policy experts the necessary technical context.That is the purpose of this paper. Specifically: to introduce a new generation of nuclear policy experts to the technical perspectives of a nuclear weapon designer, to explain the science and engineering of nuclear weapons for the policy generalist, to review the evolution of the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons design, to explain the main attributes of the existing U.S. nuclear stockpile, to explain the functions of the nuclear weapons complex, and how this all is integrated to sustain deterrence into the future.
Interest in reviving strategic culture as a field of study results from the inadequacy of traditional analytical approaches and calls to develop a new framework to guide policymaking in the post-9/11 security environment. The book considers 10 case studies of WMD decision-making, profiling culture in terms of geography, shared narratives, group relationships, threat perception, ideology, religion, economics, leadership style, and more. Strategic culture can help us more accurately evaluate intelligence regarding dangers emanating from other cultures and improve our strategic communications. A strategic cultural perspective makes us appreciate the requirements for promoting U.S. global responsibilities in a multi-cultural context, negotiate across cultures more effectively, and forecast the implications of cultural change for strategic planning purposes.
Weaponry does not equal strategy, argues Colin Gray, but the two are often confused, resulting in such linguistic errors as strategic weapons. There may be an interactive relationship between policy, strategy and weaponry but, he contends, policy and strategy always take the front seat.
This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.
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