Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Strategic Assessment 1995: U.S. Security Challenges in Transition

Strategic Assessment 1995: U.S. Security Challenges in Transition

The Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University
Reviewed by By Eliot A. Cohen
July/August 1995
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
The Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University
National Defense University
1995
206 pp.
$19.00

The first in what one hopes will be a series from the U.S. Naval Institute. The chapters of this survey, written by Naval Institute staff and a few consultants, consider a range of subjects from the security problems of the world's regions to international disputes about the oceans and peacekeeping to information technologies and changes in the very nature of the sovereign state. The result is an intelligent and occasionally provocative collection of studies. Handsomely produced, this volume makes ample and skillful use of color graphics, including charts, maps, and tables.

Related

Essay, Nov/Dec 2000
Defending America in the Twenty-first Century
Eliot A. Cohen

Despite a vast budget that dwarfs the military spending power of both friends and foes, the U.S. military today remains stuck in the past. American strategy still relies on a Cold War-era view of the world, and U.S. technology is ill-suited to current missions. Meanwhile, demoralization is creeping through the ranks. The next president must seize the opportunity to remake the military by forcing it to focus on the missions of the future rather than those of the past. The alternative -- more of the same -- is too dangerous to consider.

Read
Essay, May/Jun 2002
A Tale of Two Secretaries
Eliot A. Cohen

Donald Rumsfeld has gotten better press as a secretary of war than he did as a secretary of defense. But the latter job is tougher, so he deserves some sympathy. The dilemmas of U.S. defense policy today reflect more than individual foibles and the difficulty of transforming a giant, often dysfunctional bureaucracy. Even more important, they stem from America's profoundly ambivalent and only semiconscious acceptance of its unique, world-historical role. Whatever the pace at which the Pentagon adapts to that fact, it must do so, and the more swiftly the better.

Read
Review Essay, Nov/Dec 1995
Playing Powell Politics: The General's Zest for Power
Eliot A. Cohen

One does not rise through the bureaucracy as spectacularly as Colin Powell has without shrewd insight into of the game of government. But to understand Powell's views on issues ranging from the use of force to civilian control of the military, one has to return to his foot-soldier origins.

Read