Bøger af Donald M Snow

National security strategy is a vast subject involving a daunting array of interrelated sublements 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, at the same time, a subject of overwhelming importance to the fate of the United States and civilization itself. The authors have done a considerable service by drawing together many of the diverse threads of national security into a coherent whole. They consider political and military strategy elements as part of a larger decision making process influenced by economic, technological, cultural and historical factors. Air University Press. United States Air Force.

Americans have traditionally viewed war as an aberration in the normal course of events. Although paying lip service to the Clausewitzian dictum that war and politics are two parts of a tightly knit whole, we have traditionally waged wars as great crusades divorced from political realities. Thus we have been nonplussed in the last half of the twentieth century by our involvement in limited wars waged for limited objectives. America's responsibilities as a superpower with worldwide interests forced upon us the unpleasant notion of using our armed forces as practical instruments of political policy. The reality of this notion has been difficult for many Americans to understand and accept. Col Dennis M. Drew and Dr. Donald M. Snow have performed a significant service by producing a volume that places the American experience at war in its proper political context. Going further, they have also placed the American experience in a technological context and analyzed how political and technological factors influenced the conduct of American wars. In addition, they have combined all of these factors and analyzed their influences on the outcomes of our wars, what Sir Basil Liddell Hart called "the better state of peace," which is the fundamental objective of warfare. One can find a number of military, political, and technological histories that address the American experience at war. However, I know of no other single volume that addresses all of these aspects in such a concise and readable fashion. But Eagle's Talons is much more than just a history of the American experience. If gaining insights about where we are going requires an understanding of where we have been, Colonel Drew and Dr. Snow provide a key to understanding how and why the United States might employ its military power in the future.

This book is about national security strategy: what it is, what its objectives are, what problems it seeks to solve or at least manage, and what kinds of influences constrain and create opportunities for the development and implementation of strategies. The heart of the problem with which national security strategy deals is the series of threats-normally military, but increasingly semi- or nonmilitary in character-that the country must confront and somehow overcome or contain. When the original version of this book1 was published in 1988, the set of threats facing the United States was reasonably static-those problems associated with the Cold War confrontation with a communist world led by the Soviet Union-even if there were signs of change on the horizon. In the ensuing decade and a half, that configuration of problems largely dissolved, along with the concrete parameters within which we operated. In its place is a much more diffuse, shifting, and controversial set of problems that is simultaneously simple, compelling, and arguable. Making strategy is no longer a simple, straightforward process, if it ever were. The making and implementation of strategy at the national level is largely an exercise in risk management and risk reduction. Risk, at that level, is the difference between the threats posed to our security by our adversaries and our capabilities to counter or negate those threats. Assessing risk and resolving it has two primary dimensions. The first is the assessment of risk itself: what conditions represent threats to our security, and how serious are those threats relative to one another and to our safety? The answers to these questions are not mechanical and obvious but are the result of subjective human assessments based on different political and philosophical judgments about the world and our place in it. The other dimension is the adequacy of resources to counter the threats that we identify. In circumstances of plenty, where there are adequate resources (manpower, materiel, perceived will, etc.) to counter all threats, this is not a problem. In the real world, each of these dimensions presents a real set of issues, which we must acknowledge up front.

The author examines the bases of American military participation in the array of Third World activities falling under the general rubric of peacekeeping and peace-enforcement. The relevance of this inquiry was underscored by President Clinton in his Inaugural Address, when he added situations where "the will and conscience of the international community are defied" to traditional vital interests and as times when American military force might be employed. He considers the major instances in the post-cold war world where so-called humanitarian interventions have occurred or may occur: the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The author then examines the effects of these actions on the principle of sovereignty. He next turns to the emerging roles of peacekeeping and peace-enforcement and the conceptual and practical differences between them, and concludes with some cautionary lessons for the Army.

The change reshaping the Soviet Union and other former members of the Communist bloc has also altered the strategic equation for the United States. Given that nuclear weapons and the intense superpower rivalry of 40 years of cold war have helped foster a certain air of predictability in international affairs, the present flux in the international system has created a number of possible security scenarios. The author explores these possibilities as they relate to the strategic future of the Soviet Union, the possible evolution of a new European system of collective security, and the challenges of regional conflict in a multipolar world. Of primary concern is the question of the continued validity of traditional concepts of deterrence in a system characterized by the profusion of advanced military capabilities, which no longer possesses many of the stabilizing strategic counterweights of the cold war.