Reassessing U.S. Strategy in the Aftermath of the Korean War

This article examines the reassessment of U.S. strategy that Dwight D. Eisenhower directed after replacing Harry S. Truman in the White House in January 1953, as he worked to bring the Korean War to an end and then confronted the problems remaining in its aftermath. Despite much of the rhetoric of the early Eisenhower administration, the outcome of that reassessment fit more closely the objective of containment than key strategic formulations of its predecessor. Why was this so? How did the orientation apply to ending the war in Korea and sustaining the U.S. position there and elsewhere after the armistice? What insights, if any, do the process of reassessment and its outcome provide for the present? Answers to these questions serve to emphasize the dynamic and contingent nature of American strategy in the early Cold War and the importance of flexible, engaged leadership in the White House.     

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency

Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to “high-intensity” or “conventional” combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency’? In many ways, the ongoing reorientation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resistance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence - and the eventual fall-out from the troubled Iraq campaign - the ongoing learning of counterinsurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military.     

History, War, and the Future

This article aims to delineate several issues raised by an historically based approach to understanding the present and the future. Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact that drastic changes have had on the international environment, the article then outlines what history suggests about human nature's influence on the course of future events; the future of war; the nature of governance and the United States. This essay does not attempt to provide answers, but rather suggests how policy makers, strategists, and military leaders might think through the complex political and cultural questions they need to be asking in the making of strategy. This is the essential first step for Americans. If they fail to ask the right questions, most answers will prove irrelevant to the challenges of the future.     

The regular article tracking developments at the national level in key European countries in the area of IT and communications – Co-ordinated by Herbert Smith LLP and contributed to by firms across Europe

This column provides a concise alerting service of important national developments in key European countries. Part of its purpose is to compliment the Journal's feature articles and Briefing Notes by keeping readers abreast of what is currently happening “on the ground” at a national level in implementing EU level legislation and international conventions and treaties. Where an item of European National News is of particular significance, CLSR may also cover it in more detail in the current or a subsequent edition.     

Air and Space Power, Lead Turning, the Future

To optimize security investment for the future, the Department of Defense (DoD) should adopt an approach that rewards the services for developing innovative methods to attain national security objectives with the least risk in both blood and treasure. To accomplish this, the DoD may have to re-visit its former practice of providing each service with relatively equal slices of the military budget. Under such an approach, the services are motivated to make incremental changes to the concepts and weapons of the previous war and have little reason to take risks to increase productivity of man and machine alike. What is needed—particularly in these times of increasingly complex national security challenges, rising costs, and shrinking budgets—is a plan for going forward that is centered on a shared vision of the variety of threat conditions we are likely to face, an honest evaluation of their significance, and a mature appraisal of what will be required to deal with them. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting an overall defense strategy that will allow us to shape the environment and act flexibly across the entire range of operations, and that will also provide a framework upon which to base our jointly focused resource and investment decisions.¹     

Roosevelt, Truman and the Development of Postwar Grand Strategy

After its victory in World War II, it was clear that United States should move beyond the disastrous policies of the 1930s, but it was less clear how. Ultimately, a lasting postwar strategy was forged under President Truman. Appreciating how Truman moved well beyond Roosevelt's guiding assumptions is essential to understanding the evolution of American grand strategy. One sees that wartime planning and grand strategy formulation can prove quite inadequate for dealing with postwar challenges. An administration cannot be locked into assumptions, but must constantly test them. Thus, the Truman administration eventually developed and adopted containment and moved far beyond FDR's approach. More substantively, the fundamental geopolitical lesson of World War II and the early Cold War was that the United States must assume the essential balancing role relative to other major powers.     

De-Europeanization by Default? Germany's EU Policy in Defense and Asylum

Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model "Europeanist," Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.