To plan the size of the US military, Pentagon officials rely on what is known as a force-sizing construct, which reflects the upper limits of what the military is able to do. Most famously, in the wake of the Cold War, Pentagon planners relied on the two-war standard, which called for a military sized to […]
The world is awash in change. The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. It was created with elements we take for granted: the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods and more. The constructed order reflected the wisdom of those who […]
President Obama’s outlook on foreign and defense policy isn’t conventional. If it were, he’d be exerting himself against the sequestration cuts ravaging the defense budget. Modeled on the game of chicken (a lá James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”), sequestration was invented in the 2011 Budget Control Act as a mechanism for crude, large […]
Declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization dead has been a pastime of analysts since the end of the Cold War. The alliance, today 28-members strong, has survived 65 years because its glaring contradictions were often overlooked, given the dangers of an expansionist and nuclear Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact subjects. From its beginning, NATO […]
The Israeli missile-defense system known as Iron Dome once again finds itself in the international spotlight, causing many Americans to wonder if the U.S. has anything comparable. Here are a few important points about Iron Dome and missile defense in general for Americans to consider. (1) Iron Dome is a missile-defense system that intercepts short- […]