Reconstituting America's Defense – The New U.S. National Security Strategy

Reconstituting America's Defense
192 Pages
ISBN 978-0275942496

This book analyzes President Bush's new Regional Defense Strategy--the master plan that will guide the transformation of U.S. defense policy for the post-Cold War era. Most recent books on defense prescribe how U.S. policy ought to change or critique past policies without taking Bush's new strategy into account. This book takes a different approach, providing the first comprehensive assessment of the new Regional Defense Strategy, analyzing the consequences for U.S. forces and alliance relations, and examining the political difficulties of transforming President Bush's vision into reality. It explains major changes in U.S. defense doctrine and strategy, force and command structure, future programming requirements, and the major question of how such a significant change was managed in the United States.

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 U.S. intelligence and the defense industrial base. Congress will also have an important say over this proposal and the new national security strategy as a whole. So will U.S. allies in Europe and the Far East, some of whom are already moving to recast the strategy's proposals for basing U.S. 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.

Jim Tritten

About Jim Tritten (Corrales, New Mexico Author)

Jim Tritten

Jim retired after a forty-four year career with the Department of Defense including duty as a carrier-based naval aviator. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Southern California and formerly served as a faculty member and National Security Affairs department chair at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Dr. Tritten’s publications have won him twenty-three writing awards, including the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award from the Navy League of the U.S. He has published five books and over three hundred chapters, short stories, essays, articles, and government technical reports.

Jim was a frequent speaker at many military, arms control, and international conferences and has seen his work translated into Russian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.