Reconstituting America’s Defense: The New U.S. National Security Strategy

This book analyzes President Bush’s new Regional Defense Strategy - the master plan that will guide the transformation of US defence policy for the post-Cold War era. Most recent books on defence prescribe how US policy ought to change or critique past policies without taking Bush’s new strategy into account. This book takes a different approach, providing a comprehensive assessment of the new national security strategy, analyzing the consequences for US forces and alliance relations, and examining the political difficulties of transforming President Bush’s vision into reality. It explains major changes in US defence doctrine and strategy, force and command structure, future programming requirements, and the major question of how such a significant change was managed in the US. Much is new and even radical about the Regional Defense Strategy. Bush has built it around the concept of reconstitution, under which the United States will scrap the forces needed to fight a large-scale conflict and rely on the ability to create new forces if such a conflict looms on the horizon. However, reconstitution will impose demanding requirements on US intelligence and the defence industrial base. Congress will also have an important say over this proposal and the new national security strategy as a whole. So will US allies in Europe and the Far East, some of whom are already moving to recast the strategy’s proposals for basing US forces abroad. The primary audience of this book is politico-military strategic planners and those interested in organizational theory, management of change in large organizations, and government policy.