Abstract

Discussion of the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review has focused on military readiness and modernization issues. Many policy leaders contend that the US military is suffering the effects of a severe "strategy-budget" mismatch. There is significant support to "put strategy in the driver's seat" -- to let strategy determine budgets. For some policy makers and analysts, this implies increasing the annual defense budget by $40 billion or more. But this approach to understanding and resolving the recent problems in US defense policy is too narrow. The 2001 QDR debate should have a broader purview. At minimum it must confront three persistent paradoxes of post-Cold War US defense policy: (i) the paradox of rising requirements despite declining threats; (ii) the paradox of our stalled defense reform and transformation efforts despite a global context of multiple revolutions -- strategic, technological, and economic; and, (iii) the paradoxical or inadvertent effects of emphasizing America's military power as a tool to stabilize the post-Cold War world, which have been to sow dissent among our allies, feed anti-Americanism in some important corners, and stimulate counter-balancing behavior. Putting more resources behind the present US military strategy will not resolve these paradoxes; it may only deepen them. A more profitable approach would be to re-examine (i) the security goals that motivate our strategy, (ii) the strategy itself, and (iii) the nature and mix of security instruments that the nation has at its disposal. For our armed forces the most important requirement is transformation -- not a large new infusion of resources.

1. Introduction

It is remarkable that a decade that began as the 1990s did -- with the conclusion of the Cold War -- should end as the 1990s has ended: with defense spending again on the rise and Cold War security concepts, institutions, and practices enjoying a renaissance of sorts. As the Pentagon begins in earnest to prepare the second Quadrennial Defense Review, defense managers have focused their attention on military readiness issues and the challenge of modernizing or "re-capitalizing" the US military. Within the Washington defense policy community there is a near consensus on one proposition, if no others: the solution to the problems of readiness and modernization involve increased defense spending. But if the QDR process is to be true to its purpose, decision-makers should pause before dipping the budget ladle, step back, and reconsider today's problems in light of the profound geostrategic changes of the past decade. Never has our nation and its allies enjoyed so much relative strength and influence. At no point in the past hundred years has the potential for general conflagration been so low. So what is the source of our difficulties? How can peace be so expensive?

Given some perspective, the recent difficulties in US defense policy seem more like paradoxes than garden-variety "problems." From a distance, the stated military readiness and modernization needs of our nation are not so much "challenging" as they are "bewildering". This suggests that today's problems have been improperly framed or defined; we are treating them at the wrong level of policy. A common conceit is that our military suffers a severe "strategy-budget" mismatch and that what we need to do is to put strategy in the driver's seat. We might more profitably re-examine the security goals that motivate our strategy, the strategy itself, and the nature and mix of the instruments that the strategy has at its disposal. This back-to-the-drawing-board agenda best suits the purpose of QDRs.

The QDR debate should begin not by addressing narrowly-defined "problems", but by confronting the persistent paradoxes of post-Cold War US defense policy. Three paradoxes stand out:

2. Paradox One: Mounting Requirements -- Declining Threats

The first paradox is that defense spending has remained near Cold War levels (in real terms) and is now rising, despite the continuing decline in the magnitude of military threats to vital US interests. The Pentagon budget for 2001 is 82% as high as the inflation-adjusted average for the 1980s, the peak decade for peacetime defense spending. Per person expenditures will be 12% higher in 2001 than in 1989.

It is common practice to portray America's post-Cold War military retrenchment in terms of a comparison between the highest spending year of the 1980s and the lowest of the 1990s, which indicates a spending decline of one-third or more. But comparing aggregate spending during the 1980s and 1990s belies this impression. Aggregate Pentagon spending during the 1990s was 86.5% as high as the total for the 1980s (adjusted for inflation) -- $3.11 trillion compared to $3.61 trillion.¹ This, despite the so-called "procurement holiday".² Thus, we were able during the 1990s to extract a financial peace dividend of approximately $500 billion -- a sum equivalent to 15 months of spending during the Reagan-Bush peak. Calculated on a per person basis, the Pentagon actually spent 11 percent more in real terms during the 1990s than during the 1980s.

Despite the post-Cold War decline in total US military expenditures, America's share of world military spending has increased 20 percent since 1985. Whereas in 1985 the United States spent only 65 percent as much on defense as did potential "threat states", it will spend more than twice as much as this group in 2001. In other words, our standing relative to "threat states" has improved by a factor of more than three -- from only 65 percent of their total in 1989 to more than 200 percent today.³

At the geostrategic level, the pivot point of the two decades -- what separated and distinguished them -- was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of Russia, and the defection of most of its former European allies to the West. Together these events comprised a geostrategic revolution of a magnitude hard to appreciate. This may help explain why, ten years after the fact, we still have not come to terms with it.

2.1 Threats-- then and now
During the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact commanded a military organization of eight million active-duty troops and first-line reserves. In many respects these troops were the peers of their Western opposites and they had at their disposal more than 9000 tactical aircraft, 65,000 tanks, thousands of advanced missiles of all ranges, and more than 50,000 nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

Two million of the Warsaw Pact troops stood permanently within easy striking distance of the Western heartland, able to launch a total assault with only a few months warning -- some said a few weeks. A Western loss or sacrifice of 100 miles along the European "central front" would certainly have meant the fall of continental Europe. In terms of America's strategic interests, such a loss would have been incalculable; the cost of reversing it, unimaginable.

Today this threat lies in ruins -- dismembered, disaffected, and disabled militarily, politically, and economically. Russian arms production for foreign or domestic use is 10 percent of the 1991 level. Russian military expenditure is today only 18 percent of Soviet spending in 1987 -- speeding the military's transition from crisis to ruin.⁴ Presently the Russian economy is only 20 percent as large as the Soviet economy of 1987 and, of course, Moscow no longer commands the resources (or territory) of Eastern Europe. Someday Russia may revive to effectively counter Western prerogatives, although its geostrategic position would be less favorable than before. Certainly the desire to "rise again" militarily is greater in Russia today than before NATO expansion and the Kosovo war. However, as the past decade indicates, any process of reconstituting Russian power -- which must encompass the Russian polity, economy, and military -- will take decades.

The practical military response in the West to Soviet collapse has been to treat it principally as a European regional issue. But, of course, the Soviet threat was a global one -- and not simply because of the global reach of the Soviet military. For four decades the former Soviet Union served as the organizing center, training camp, and supply depot for war against the West.

During the 1980s the Warsaw Pact countries poured $300 billion worth of arms into the world. Since 1989, however, the arms exports under Moscow's control have declined by 90 percent -- down to less than $3 billion per year presently. Notably, China has not risen to take the place of the Soviet Union as a peer arms trade competitor to the West: its arm exports fell from 2.6 billion in 1987 to less than 1 billion today. Neither have other arms producers in the third world faired well in the new market: as a group (including China), their arms exports have fallen since 1987 from approximately $6 billion to $2.6 billion today.⁵

As a consequence of the geostrategic revolution, the armed forces of "rogue" states have been in steep decline for a decade.⁶ Taking Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea as a group: since the late 1980s their military spending has fallen 70 percent; their arms imports are barely 10 percent of what they once were. The Defense Intelligence Agency has found in several successive Outyear Threat Reports that armored threats like that posed by Iraq in 1990 are rapidly diminishing. DIA calculates that by 2005 such threats are likely to be less than 20 percent as large as those of the early 1990s.⁷ More generally, without the technical support, funds, and arms once provided by superpower patrons, yesterday's rogue giants have lost the capacity to equip, train, sustain, or employ armed forces of the size and quality typical of the 1980s.

It is conventional wisdom that "rogue states" will become more reliant on terrorism, ballistic missiles, and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Notably, this type of threat is asymmetric to the vast bulk of present Western military investment and preparation. However, in preparing responses to asymmetric threats it is important to pay attention not only to their character, but also their magnitude. In all cases the missile and WMD threats are modest, minor, or simply prospective compared to those the West confronted during the Cold War. Similarly, with regard to the threat of foreign terrorist and guerilla attacks against US targets: incidents have declined, not increased, since the 1980s.⁸

Since 1989, 105 Americans have been killed in 41 attacks against US targets overseas, including the recent attack against the USS Cole. During the 1980s, 571 were killed in 69 attacks. Within the United States there has been a marked increase in terrorist killings, but these were overwhelming of domestic origin; indeed, most the killings during the 1990s -- 95 percent -- were due to a single incident: the 1995 bombing of the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. And almost all terrorist attacks everywhere during the 1990s have relied on small arms and explosives, rather than unconventional means.⁹

2.2 Increased "requirements" reflect more ambitious goals
Key to understanding the discrepancy between US budget trends and the evolution of military threats are the post-Cold War changes in how the US defense establishment calculates military requirements. In several important ways today's practices differ from those of the Cold War period:

• First, statements of requirements have become detached from any close, empirical assessment of concrete threats or threat potentials.
• Second, the strategic and operational goals against which requirements are assessed have grown more ambitious.

The diminished status of "real and present dangers" in calculating military requirements is codified in so-called "capability-based planning", which contrasts with the Cold War practice of "threat-based planning". The capability-based approach lowers the threshold of concern to allow a variety of future possible and hypothetical threats to take positions of prominence in the calculus of requirements. Military capabilities are then devised to counter (more or less) this broader, longer-term range of potential threats.

Implicit in this approach is a fundamental change in the objective of our military preparations -- indeed, an unacknowledged change at the level of national security goals. Whereas once we sought to deter and defend against threats that were known or visibly emerging, today we seek to hedge against the possibility of threat itself. But this conceit begs an important question: how does one prepare effectively and efficiently against that which one does not know?

There is a tendency, perhaps irresistible, to fill the void of uncertainty with the image of past dangers -- and this can give outmoded structures and capabilities a new lease on life. At best, the ghosts of past threats vie with visions of future possible threats in the calculation of military requirements -- and both square-off against real and present needs. At any rate, the imagination is always richer than the treasury and, for this reason, capability-based planning virtually guarantees perpetual shortfalls in the funding of "requirements."

Complementing the change in how we calculate requirements is a growth in US strategic objectives. This is evident in the increased emphasis on the "environment shaping" role of the armed forces, as distinct from its traditional functions of defense, deterrence, and crisis response. Environment shaping involves using military power in ways short of war to channel strategic developments down chosen paths. Shaping activities include military-to-military contacts, some multinational exercises, military assistance programs, and global military presence. (Peacekeeping and stability operations mix "environment shaping" and crisis response goals). The increased emphasis on environment shaping entails an expanded role for the armed services in the conduct of US foreign policy. And its success is supposed to depend on the maintenance of US military primacy.

Turning to the operational goals of our military: increased ambitions are evident in regional war plans that seek to deploy, fight, and win multiple major conflicts ever faster, with fewer casualties, and across an expanding range of possible contingencies and scenarios. More ambitious operational goals are also evident in the military's increased reliance on new forms of strategic warfare as putative means for achieving fast, decisive, low-risk results. One such form is information warfare. Another was demonstrated in the Kosovo war: standoff precision attack on homeland political, economic, and communications infrastructure targets.

These operational goals serve a strategic one: the translation of America's post-Cold War military primacy into a useful lever of influence. When global superpower contention ended, America's obvious security interests in far-flung conflicts declined, making it more difficult to build and sustain a domestic political consensus favoring intervention. And the political difficulties grow proportionately with the time, risk, and casualties associated with an intervention. Thus, the utility of America's post-Cold War edge in military power depends on translating it into a capacity for fast, low-risk operations. (Apart from actually putting such a capability to use, simply possessing it would increase America's influence abroad.)

Given these tendencies in recent defense planning and goals it is not surprising that military "requirements" are rising despite a recession in the magnitude of threats. Another factor contributing to the appearance of a budget-requirements mismatch is the failure of defense reform efforts. This failure defines the second paradox of post-Cold War US defense policy.

3. Paradox Two: The Failure of Reform in an Era of Change

3.1 America's paradoxical military readiness crisis
Central to recent discussions of US military requirements have been concerns about military readiness. These figured prominently in former President Clinton's 1999 decision to add $112 billion to future defense budgets and they play a major role today in proposals to further increase spending.

However, like the question of military requirements generally, paradox pervades the readiness issue.¹⁰

• The readiness problems that purportedly reached crisis proportions in 1997-1998 bear no clear relationship to funding levels. Readiness spending per person in uniform averaged 22 percent more (in inflation-adjusted terms) during the Clinton years than on the eve of the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
• Smaller-scale US military operations are supposed to have driven our armed forces to the breaking point, but on an annual basis these operations have required deployment of only 4 percent of active-duty personnel.

DoD frequently asserts that the number of named contingency operations have increased three- or four-fold since 1989, but this measure is almost entirely lacking in analytical value. It says nothing about the change in size or duration of missions. Another factor that diminishes the value of this measure is the increased tendency during the 1990s to name operations or to parse individual operations and assign names to all the parts. Thus, since 1992, there have been 45 US operations undertaken with regard to situations in just two places: the former-Yugoslavia and Iraq.

Readiness, more than any other aspect of military capability, depends on how a military is organized and carries out its business. For this reason a failure to adapt the organization and functioning of our armed forces to new circumstances might express itself as readiness problems. And, indeed, in a variety of ways defense managers have failed to adapt our armed forces to the new era.

3.2 The failure of reform
The past decade has been shaped by a series of interlocking "revolutions" -- strategic, economic, and technological. The need to adapt our armed services is broadly recognized. Talk of a "military revolution" is common in the services. Nonetheless, beginning with the 1995 Commission on Roles and Missions, the actual progress of US military reform, restructuring, and transformation has been desultory. Ten years have passed but our armed forces remain poorly adapted to the challenges and opportunities of the new era. This is the second paradox haunting US defense policy.

A partial exception to this paradox concerns the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which the Pentagon seems to embrace. But, to the consternation of RMA advocates (both inside and outside the military), their vision has been largely co-opted by the Pentagon status quo. It now functions not as a blueprint for fundamental structural reform but as a rationale for "re-capitalizing" traditional structures along fairly traditional lines -- at fabulous expense. Today, the RMA is more a shopping spree than a revolution. As for other aspects of defense reform (such as infrastructure reduction): these have disappeared almost entirely from the policy agenda.

This second policy paradox (lack of reform) contributes to the first (rising budgets) because it entails various types of inefficiency:

• One type is manifest in excess infrastructure -- a Cold War residue. Today the armed forces still maintain 20 percent excess infrastructure. Crude, costly, and seemingly intractable, this problem has had little political salience.
• A second type of inefficiency derives from inter-service rivalry and redundancy.
• A third type of inefficiency involves having military "tools" and procedures that do not correspond closely to today's operational challenges. In a rough analogy, our military is trying to drive screws with a hammer.
• A final type of inefficiency results from the failure to fully exploit information-age technology and organizational principles, which could reduce structural redundancies in our military and increase its flexibility. By contemporary business standards, our military remains an industrial age organization.

The relevance to readiness of having to support excess infrastructure should be clear: it drains money away from base training, maintenance, and quality-of-life accounts. Having the wrong tools for today's jobs also pertains to readiness problems. Much of the concern about readiness focuses on so-called "high-demand, low-density" assets and units, such as special operations forces, military police units, various types of service support units, A-10 attack aircraft, and electronic warfare, reconnaissance, and lift aircraft. That these shortages persist despite the expenditure of more than $250 billion on procurement during the past five years indicates a failure to configure our armed forces to meet current needs. And, it is worth noting, "high-demand, low-density" assets do not figure prominently in future modernization plans either -- even though these plans may drive defense spending up by another $20-$30 billion annually. In the case of one such asset, the A-10 attack plane, neither its outstanding service in Desert Storm nor the continuing demand for its services can sway its owner, the US Air Force, from pursuing procurement on the opposite end of the equipment spectrum, where the F-22 resides.

Finally, the impact of organizational issues on readiness is evident in the failure to distribute operational burdens more evenly among commands, thus creating pockets of overly stressed units. This is what happened to the Air Force during the mid- and late-90s: some commands were ground down while others carried a much lighter load. One imperative of operations in the new era is that our armed forces become more flexible in allowing assets to flow across commands and theaters to where they are needed.¹¹

Together the two paradoxes that we have summarized so far imply a military that is larger than necessary for narrow defensive purposes, relatively inefficient, and increasingly irrelevant (thus ineffective). To this litany of negative attributes we can add another: In important respects, our current military strategy is counter-productive. It undermines some of the goals that it is supposed to serve.

4. Paradox Three: Seeking Security, Prompting Competition

The third paradox of recent US policy involves its emphasis on military power as a lever for stabilizing the strategic environment and consolidating US global leadership. This emphasis is apparent in American military activism and the expanded foreign policy role of the US military; it is implicit in today's emphasis on environment shaping missions. It also drives US arms transfer policies, missile defense initiatives, enhancements to regional intervention capabilities, and efforts to develop new forms of strategic warfare.

Unfortunately, rather than reassuring friends and dissuading potential competitors, these efforts have sown dissent among allies and stimulated anti-Americanism among those outside the Western sphere.¹² They also have added impetus to regional arms races. These dynamics portend a dangerous combination of weakened alliances and increased tensions. At the same time, multilateral security mechanisms -- such as arms control regimes and inclusive security organizations -- have been devalued and weakened during the past decade. In these ways the emphasis on bolstering and exploiting military primacy invites competition and undermines the stability goals it is supposed to serve. It helps sustain a militarized international system and could eventually lead to a repolarization of the world. In sum, the present orientation runs the risk of contributing to its own problem set.

A greater emphasis on routine environment shaping activities also implies greater vulnerability for our armed forces. The necessary concomitant, the flip-side, of engagement is exposure. So while global military activism may stimulate opposition, expanded peacetime engagement may provide it with easier targets. A case in point is the 12 October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, which claimed 17 lives. The attack may have been the latest round in the duel of bombings and cruise missile strikes that have followed the 1998 US operation against Iraq. The Navy's use of Aden -- an insecure port in an unstable country governed by a barely functioning state -- was itself part of an "environment shaping" effort authorized by the chief of Central Command.

Another worrisome instance of inadvertent affects concerns the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). As the United States improves its singular capacities for strategic information warfare, rapid regional intervention, and stand-off precision attack on strategic targets, the attraction of fielding asymmetric countermeasure -- including WMDs -- increases among that subset of countries that can imagine getting on the wrong side of American power. Likewise, deployment of missile defenses inspires countermeasures. These elementary principles of arms race stability have been occluded by today's fixation on military primacy. Few nations will simply acquiesce to a widening of military power differentials that they find disadvantageous, especially if these are associated with military activism; they will do what they can to narrow the gap. And because these dynamics breed fear, suspicion, and uncertainty on all sides, they add an independent impetus to political tensions that might otherwise be more manageable.

5. QDR 2001: Fund the Status Quo or Set a New Course?

One source of the paradoxes in recent US defense policy is the shift from threat-based to capability-based planning. Another is the ambitious military strategy first codified in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), although operative earlier. The 1997 QDR proposed that the United States develop and use its armed forces to do three things: respond to crises, shape the strategic environment in ways favorable to US interests, and prepare now for possible future threats. Maintaining a distinct and permanent military superiority over all current and prospective threats was an explicit corollary of this strategy.

Formally, the QDR strategy was a collaborative effort of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. Actually, the joint and service staffs (and their contracted think tanks) exerted predominant influence over most inputs to the review: threat assessment, strategic concepts, conflict simulations, and the definition of force requirements. The intellectual lineage of the QDR's ambitious strategy traces back to the 1992 National Military Strategy and 1992 Defense Guidance document, which were developed under the auspices of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz during the first Bush administration. The 1992 documents introduced most of the concepts that later surfaced as central to the QDR, including the two war strategy. The QDR itself draws heavily on the logic and language of studies that Rand Corporation conducted for the Joint Staff beginning in the late-1980s.

The principal conservative critique of Clinton defense policy actually accepted as sensible most features of the QDR strategy. (The role of humanitarian operations, a Clinton Administration innovation, was an exception.) But the main thrust of the conservative critique had to do with resources. Conservatives argued that President Clinton's defense budget, force structure, and modernization plans did not adequately support the Administration's own (actually, the Joint Chiefs') QDR strategy. Of course, if this were true, then the QDR strategy should have been rejected outright as failing to fulfil the basic imperative of strategy: to relate ends and means.

During its last two years, the Clinton administration, mired in crisis and with an eye toward the 2000 election, acceded to the conservative critique on resource issues, declaring the peace dividend over and agreeing to increase the Pentagon's budget substantially. This set the terms for the defense policy "debate" during the 2000 election campaign and it is presently the starting point for discussion of the next QDR. Today, the de facto or working consensus among top defense managers is to make more resources available for the strategy set out in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review. Of course, fully resourcing the QDR will not resolve the recent problems of US defense policy because these are rooted in the strategy itself.

Rather than carrying forward the legacy of the 1997 QDR, the current review and debate should aim for a fundamental rethinking of US post-Cold War policy. This can begin by confronting the persistent paradoxes of recent policy, especially the three summarized above. These draw attention to problems in how we assess security threats and problems in our strategy for dealing with them. The third problem area is defense reform -- or, rather, the lack of it.

Attention to defense reform in particular provides a basis for collaboration across the traditional political divide in defense debates. Defense reform --encompassing infrastructure reduction, business reform, military restructuring, doctrinal innovations, and changes to the personnel and training systems -- aims to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance of our armed forces. These are goals with appeal for liberals and conservatives alike. Equally important, there is widespread support for defense reform among military personnel, especially below the ranks of top administrators. Many service people see the personnel and training systems as broken -- a key source of readiness problems; many see the existing division of labor among the services and branches as tradition-bound, redundant, and increasingly obsolete; and many appreciate the need for adapting the armed forces -- their structures and doctrines -- to meet new era challenges.

Notes

1. Historical budget figures are derived from, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 2001 (Green Book).

2. America's "procurement holiday" during the 1990s was distonctly a "working holiday." Aggregate US outlays for military procurement during the 1990s were 76 percent as high as the total for the 1980s. During the 1990s the United States procured 70 naval fightingships, 700 fixed-wing combat aircraft, and 1450 tanks, artillery, and other armored vehicles.

3. Principal sources for international spending comparisons are International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2000-2001 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2000 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); and, US Department of State, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2000)

4. Charles Dick, "Russia -- Down but not out," Jane's Defence Weekly, 1 August 2000; Stephen Blank, "Preconditions for a Russian RMA; Can Russia Make the Transition?" National Security Studies Quarterly (Spring 2000); Walter Parchomenko, "The State of Russia's Armed Forces and Military Reform," Parameters (Winter 1999-2000); Paul Mann, "Russia's Defense Facing 25-Year Rehabilitation," Aviation Week ΠSpace Technology, 8 November 1999; Alexei G Arbatov, "Russia: Military Reform," SIPRI Yearbook 1999 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Stephen Kotkin, "The Rubble," The New Republic, 25 January 1999; and, John Lloyd, "Russia sinks in slow-motion," New Stateman, 23 October 1998.

5. SIPRI Yearbook 1999, 2000; World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998; Debra Mohanty, "Defence Industries in a Changing World: Trends and Options," Strategic Analysis (January 2000).

6. Good overviews of changing regional threat potentials by Anthony Cordesman are available at the Strategeic Assessment page of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Also useful are the annual Strategic Assessment publications of the National Defense University. On the Middle East specifically see, Shlomo Brom and Yiftah Shapir, eds, The Middle East Military Balance 2000-2001 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000). Finally, for useful summaries see, Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, "Backwards into the Future: How the Quadrennial Defense Review Prepares America for the Wonrg Century," PDA Briefing Memo 13, 13 June 1997; and Russell Travers, "A New Millenium and a Strategic Breathing Space," Washington Quarterly (Spring 1997).

7. John Barry and Evan Thomas, "Does America Need Faster Striking Power or Bigger Guns?" Newsweek, 22 November 1999; also see, General Accounting Office, Defense Acquistions: Reduced Threat Not Reflected in Antiarmor Weapon Acquisitions, GAO/NSIAD-99-105 (Washington DC: GAO, July 1999).

8. Joseph Cirincione and Frank von Hippel, "The Last 15 Minutes: Ballistic Missile Defense in Perspective", On-Line Edition (Washignton DC: Stimson Center, October 2000); Cirincione, "The Ballistic Missile Threat," expanded report based on testimony before the Subcommittee on International Security, Committee on Governmental Affairs, US Senate, 9 February 2000; available on Carnegie Endowment Website; Cirincione, "The Declining Ballistic Missile threat to the United States," slide presentation. Also see Ballistic Missile Proliferation resources at the Carnegie Endowment Web site and the databases and publications of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.

9. Bruce Hoffman, "America and the New Terrorism: The American Perspective," Survival (Summer 2000), pp 161-172; US State Department, Patterns of Global Terrorism 1999 (Washington DC: State publication 10687, April 2000); Jonathan B. Tucker & Amy Sands, "An Unlikely Threat," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July/August 1999); Federal Bureau of Investigation, Terrorism in the United States 1998 (Washington DC: FBI, 1999); and, John Parachini, "Hype or Siege," Intellectual Capital, 10 December 1998.

10. For a critical overview of the readiness issue see, "The Armed Forces -- used too much supported too little?", a PDA commentary (Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, September 2000). For a thorough case study see, Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, The Readiness Crisis of the U.S. Air Force: A Review and Diagnosis, PDA Briefing Report 10 (Cambridge MA: Commonwealth Institute, 1999).

11. For an analysis of how asset management problems has contributed to Air Force readiness problems see Conetta and Knight, The Readiness Crisis of the US Air Force: A Review and Diagnosis, section 4.3.2, "Managing Operational Tempo".

12. Tyler Marshall and Jim Mann, "Goodwill Toward U.S. Is Dwindling globally; The Nation's Prominence as the World's Sole Superpower Leaves Even Allies Uneasy," Los Angeles Times, 26 March 2000; Michael Elliott, et. al., "A Target Too Good to Resist," Newsweek, 31 January 2000; Jonathan S. Landay, US 'Bullying' Faces a Backlash, Christian Science Monitor, 20 November 1997.

Citation: The Paradoxes of post-Cold War US Defense Policy: An Agenda for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Memo #18. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, February 2001.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0102bmemo18.html

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