Memo to the President-Elect: An Alternative National Security Strategy for the 21st Century

Download or read book Memo to the President-Elect: An Alternative National Security Strategy for the 21st Century written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We trust we have not taxed your time and patience too much with the length of this document, but we took to heart your injunction to offer as broad a view as possible of our national security and to question traditional assumptions. We also hope that nobody misinterprets our recommendations as neo-isolationism. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the most powerful nation on earth and a driving force behind the globalizing economy, the United States is more obligated than any other nation to remain engaged in world affairs. It is the nature of our global engagement, however, that we believe urgently needs to be transformed. Given the primacy of economics in world affairs which we have described, the United States can safely stand down from its Cold War posture and drastically reduce its overseas military encampments. Our current national military strategy, which is based on fighting two nearly simultaneous major theater wars nationally in Korea and the Persian Gulf needs to be changed. We agree with the National Defense Panel that the two-theater war strategy has no strategic logic and was adopted in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review solely as a rationale for keeping the military at its present size. It is beyond the scope of this paper to make detailed recommendations on future military force sizing and weapons procurement (you will be hearing plenty on that front soon enough from other sources!), but we would like to offer some general thoughts consistent with your charge to us and the global and domestic environment we have outlined. Given the extreme unlikeliness of massed force on force warfare, we should be moving away from heavy, Cold War legacy weapons systems. Not only will they be unnecessary in the likely conflicts of the future, but their costly development and acquisition siphons funds indirectly from other domestic needs and also directly from the military's own vital and often neglected areas of training, housing and maintenance.