U.S. Defense Policy Options: The 1990s and Beyond

The sudden collapse of the Warsaw Pact and of communism has thrust the United States into an entirely new era without the comforts of a neat bipolar balance of power. Just as the debate got under way on the shape of the new world structure, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the resulting war demonstrated that the post-Cold War world will be not very different from the pre-Cold War world. American national security strategy needs major overhaul, with substantial reduction in numbers of strategic and theater nuclear weapons. The force structure needs reconfiguration away from heavy positional forces for the garrisoning of NATO and toward more flexible and deployable forces. Manning of the new force structure should be shifted substantially to a higher percentage of reserve manning, with both active and reserve depending entirely on voluntary enlistment. Emphasis should remain on using high-technology and high-quality people to substitute for high numbers. The bloated Pentagon bureaucracy, last holdout of Stanlinist organization, will continue to be a major obstacle to rational national security policy in the 1990s.