President George W. Bush’s call for a review of the nation’s defense strategy early in his administration is only the latest in a series of attempts to reassess the basic defense strategy of the United States in the years following the end of the cold war. Like the others, this review is aimed at ensuring the nation’s security strategy is in line with current and future world realities and US funding priorities. The underlying thrust of this review is its attempt to change the habit of unquestioningly funding a defense institution that was created and sustained during the cold war...

Decision analysis, of which Keeney’s Value-Focused Thinking is a very well-developed example, is a methodology for thoughtfully structuring decisions based on clearly articulated values.¹ It provides a framework to relate the desired objectives in a decision context to the means used to achieve those objectives and to the values that determine the relative worth of the available alternatives. It requires that decision makers first define what qualities constitute a good decision in a strategic context, then use that definition to generate alternatives and compare them in specific decision contexts. By creating this definition or this decision-making framework, decision-making criteria can...

The use of military force is fundamentally tied to policy. As it was true in Schelling’s time, so it is true today. However, technological developments may not often be pursued with regard to the same policy. When they play a part in military strategy, they should be. Technology will change the ability of the military to carry out the objectives of policy. As enemies present new challenges, technologies will present new solutions. Military strategy must incorporate those technological solutions coherently to support national strategy. As discussed in the previous chapter, as long as the nation needs to employ force to...

There is an allure to technology, demonstrated by Dr. Edward Teller’s words, that beckons us to build new equipment, especially equipment for military purposes. In this technological age, advantage accrues to the one who can first employ the better tools of warfare. As the costs and the risks of technology rise, we must be prudent in the technologies we choose to pursue and the reasons we choose to pursue them. The Soviets, for example, pursued more and better weapons to their financial and political oblivion. Hitler sat atop a gold mine of technological talent and labor in his country during...

Both scholars above take pains to point out that we need a rigorously thought-out framework for assessing strategic plans and the technology that makes them possible. It appears we do not have such a framework yet—after a decade of strategy reviews, one of President Bush’s first actions in office is to reassess exactly what the military needs to do and then determine how it should do it. The previous chapters in this study have attempted to apply the type of rigorous thinking Sir Michael Howard warned that we needed. Hopefully, this study has presented a conceptual framework that can...