Download or read book Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration written by Michael E. O'Hanlon and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition incorporates lessons from the war in Afghanistan, other developemnts since September 11, and a critical assessment of the Bush administration's defense strategy and budget plan, both of which were formulated and publicly unveiled after the release of the book's first edition. "O'Hanlon has insightfully separated what the nation needs to maintain an adequate defense from what the military and its suppliers want, crafting a realistic and affordable proposal for defense spending for the coming decade." --Robert D. Reischauer, President, Urban Institute "The best unclassified study to date of the military implications of a China-Taiwan conflict for the United States. His sobering analysis makes a compelling case for a cautious arms sales policy toward Taiwan as well as prudent U.S. military planning." --Mike Mochizuki, George Washington University

Download or read book Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration 2001 2005 written by Michael E. O'Hanlon and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation This latest study in the Brookings series on U.S. defense strategy and the defense budget reviews current American military capabilities and offers suggestions for the new administration and Congress. Michael O'Hanlon makes sense of the hot political topic of military readiness, questions the continued relevance of the current two-war framework for structuring most conventional combat forces, and challenges the wisdom of current plans for the procurement of advanced jet fighters, helicopters, and submarines. The book also focuses on missile defense, other means of homeland defense, the so-called revolution in military affairs, and possible conflicts between Taiwan and China that could involve U.S. forces. Throughout, the author looks for ways to close the gap between the cost of projected U.S. defense forces and the budget actually available to the Pentagon.

Download or read book Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration 2001 2005 written by Assistant Keeper Ethnography Department Michael E O'Hanlon and published by . This book was released on 2001-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews current American military capabilities and offers suggestions for the new administration and Congress. Throughout the book, the author looks for ways to close the gap between the cost of projected US defense forces and the budget actually available to the Pentagon.

Download or read book QDR 2001 Strategy Driven Choices for America s Security written by M. Elaine Bunn and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-09-16 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every new Presidential administration seeks to implement its policy objectives rapidly, but in the vast organization of the U.S. Government, such changes take time. The Quadrennial defense Review (QDR) of 2001 offers the new Bush administration an important opportunity, as well as a great responsibility, to reexamine America's defense priorities in a comprehensive, top-to-bottom, strategy-to-program approach and provide early guidance for change. This is a gargantuan task. Current legislation requires the final report of QDR 2001 to be provided to Congress in September 2001. Even with early Senate confirmation of top defense officials, completing such a thorough review in just eight months is a daunting charge. One of the lessons learned during QDR 1997 was the advance efforts to identify key issues for the review process can be critical to success. Fortunately for the incoming administration, an independent effort to develop intellectual capital for QDR 2001 was started in the autumn of 1999. This effort consisted of a small working group which was chartered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and established in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Leading the group was Michele A. Flournoy, a veteran of the QDR 1997 effort and the former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction. This volume is a product of the group's work as well as contributions from outside experts associated with the project. A major conference on the project was held at NDU in November 2000, at which a final report was issued. This book provides the intellectual underpinnings of that report. To some extent this book is very much like the results of screening at an archeological dig. The issues in the book are not new; they are already part of the defense policy debate of our great democracy. But the authors carefully unearthed insights and options in a systematic manner, placing the issues in context. No defense issue lives in isolation; all are part of the process of priority-setting that is required to craft a successful strategy in the context of a finite budget. To help the new administration set its priorities, the working group and outside contributors have outlined a series of integrated paths that lead from strategy alternatives to force-sizing criteria to force structure and other programmatic issues, and they identify the forks in each path and the signposts along the way. This valuable book provides a unique service to the Department of Defense and the Nation, whether the new administration uses the QDR or some other review process as its primary vehicle for setting defense priorities. It represents an effort to transcend both the tyranny of the urgent and the bureaucratic rivalries that tend to dominate the analyses conducted within the Pentagon. It does so in a practical, logical, and supportive manner. It does not provide solutions but instead offers options form which the Bush administration can craft a new defense policy. In a sense this book represents a consummate menu of choices: an outside view that only knowledgeable insiders can provide. There are options identified in this book that some might support enthusiastically, and others might oppose. But no one can fail to be impressed by the fairness of this effort and the professional skill with which it was completed. This book represents a service to the Department of Defense and the new administration with few parallels. It provides an excellent starting point for a review of defense strategy, policies and programs.

Download or read book In Defense of the Bush Doctrine written by Robert G. Kaufman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2007-05-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A foreign policy expert “presents a thoughtful, comprehensive case” for the War on Terror—a “historically powerful support of Mr. Bush and his doctrine” (Washington Times). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, shattered the tranquil and prosperous optimism that had blossomed in the United States during the 1990s. President George W. Bush responded with a preemptive Global War on Terror. This controversial strategy led the nation into protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and ignited passionate debate about America’s role in the world. In Defense of the Bush Doctrine offers a vigorous argument for the principles of moral democratic realism that inspired the Bush administration's policy. Conservative columnist Robert G. Kaufman argues that the purpose of American foreign policy is to ensure the integrity and vitality of a free society and that America’s grand strategy must be guided by the cardinal virtue of prudence. Kaufman provides a broad historical context for America’s post-9/11 foreign policy, connecting the Bush Doctrine and other issues, such as how the United States should deal with China, to the deeper tradition of American diplomacy. Drawing from positive lessons as well as cautionary tales from the past, Kaufman concludes that moral democratic realism offers the most prudent framework for expanding the democratic zone of peace and minimizing threats to the United States.

Download or read book To Start a War written by Robert Draper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Essential . . . one for the ages . . . a must read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post “Authoritative . . . The most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.” —LA Times One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 To Start a War paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. Robert Draper’s fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective scurrying for evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false—evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.

Download or read book Undermining Science written by Seth Shulman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-05-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shulman asserts that the Bush administration has systematically misled Americans on a wide range of scientific issues affecting public health, foreign policy, and the environment by ignoring, suppressing, manipulating, or even distorting scientific research.

Download or read book Rise of the Vulcans written by James Mann and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-09-07 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When George W. Bush campaigned for the White House, he was such a novice in foreign policy that he couldn't name the president of Pakistan and momentarily suggested he thought the Taliban was a rock-and-roll band. But he relied upon a group called the Vulcans—an inner circle of advisers with a long, shared experience in government, dating back to the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and first Bush administrations. After returning to power in 2001, the Vulcans were widely expected to restore U.S. foreign policy to what it had been under George H. W. Bush and previous Republican administrations. Instead, the Vulcans put America on an entirely new and different course, adopting a far-reaching set of ideas that changed the world and America's role in it. Rise of the Vulcans is nothing less than a detailed, incisive thirty-five-year history of the top six members of the Vulcans—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice—and the era of American dominance they represent. It is the story of the lives, ideas and careers of Bush's war cabinet—the group of Washington insiders who took charge of America's response to September 11 and led the nation into its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Separately, each of these stories sheds astonishing light not only on the formative influences that brought these nascent leaders from obscurity to the pinnacle of power, but also on the experiences, conflicts and competitions that prefigured their actions on the present world stage. Taken together, the individuals in this book represent a unique generation in American history—a generation that might be compared to the "wise men" who shaped American policy after World War II or the "best and brightest" who prosecuted the war in Vietnam. Over the past three decades, since the time of Vietnam, these individuals have gradually led the way in shaping a new vision of an unchallengeable America seeking to dominate the globe through its military power.

Download or read book Tested by Zion written by Elliott Abrams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the full inside story of the Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Written by a top National Security Council officer who worked at the White House with Bush, Cheney, and Rice and attended dozens of meetings with figures like Sharon, Mubarak, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and Palestinian leaders, it brings the reader inside the White House and the palaces of Middle Eastern officials. How did 9/11 change American policy toward Arafat and Sharon's tough efforts against the Second Intifada? What influence did the Saudis have on President Bush? Did the American approach change when Arafat died? How did Sharon decide to get out of Gaza, and why did the peace negotiations fail? In the first book by an administration official to focus on Bush and the Middle East, Elliott Abrams brings the story of Bush, the Israelis, and the Palestinians to life.

Download or read book In Uncertain Times written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Uncertain Times considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro have assembled an illustrious roster of officials from the George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations—Robert B. Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric S. Edelman, Walter B. Slocombe, and Philip Zelikow. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of NATO, the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of eminent scholars address these same topics. Bruce Cumings, John Mueller, Mary Elise Sarotte, Odd Arne Westad, and William C. Wohlforth probe the unstated assumptions, the cultural values, and the psychological makeup of the policymakers. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future.

Download or read book Policy Analysis in National Security Affairs written by Richard L. Kugler and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2006 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It is a philosophical and conceptual book for helphing people think deeply, clearly, and insightfully about complex policy issues. This books reflects the viewpoint that the best policies normally come from efforts to synthesize competing camps by drawing upon the best of each of them and by combining them to forge a sensible whole. While this book is written to be reader-friendly, it aspires to in-depth scholarship.

Download or read book Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis written by Michael P. Scharf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All ten of the living former U.S. State Department legal advisers from the Carter administration to that of George W. Bush examine the role international law played during the major crises on their watch.

Download or read book Duty written by Robert M. Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he’d long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

Download or read book Sailing the Water s Edge written by Helen V. Milner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How U.S. domestic politics shapes the nation's foreign policy When engaging with other countries, the U.S. government has a number of different policy instruments at its disposal, including foreign aid, international trade, and the use of military force. But what determines which policies are chosen? Does the United States rely too much on the use of military power and coercion in its foreign policies? Sailing the Water's Edge focuses on how domestic U.S. politics—in particular the interactions between the president, Congress, interest groups, bureaucratic institutions, and the public—have influenced foreign policy choices since World War II and shows why presidents have more control over some policy instruments than others. Presidential power matters and it varies systematically across policy instruments. Helen Milner and Dustin Tingley consider how Congress and interest groups have substantial material interests in and ideological divisions around certain issues and that these factors constrain presidents from applying specific tools. As a result, presidents select instruments that they have more control over, such as use of the military. This militarization of U.S. foreign policy raises concerns about the nature of American engagement, substitution among policy tools, and the future of U.S. foreign policy. Milner and Tingley explore whether American foreign policy will remain guided by a grand strategy of liberal internationalism, what affects American foreign policy successes and failures, and the role of U.S. intelligence collection in shaping foreign policy. The authors support their arguments with rigorous theorizing, quantitative analysis, and focused case studies, such as U.S. foreign policy in Sub-Saharan Africa across two presidential administrations. Sailing the Water’s Edge examines the importance of domestic political coalitions and institutions on the formation of American foreign policy.

Download or read book Indecision Points written by Daniel Zoughbie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Although George W. Bush memorably declared, “I'm the decider,” as president he was remarkably indecisive when it came to U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His administration's policymaking featured an ongoing clash between moderate realists and conservative hard-liners inspired by right-wing religious ideas and a vision of democracy as cure-all. Riven by these competing agendas, the Bush administration vacillated between recognizing the Palestinian right to self-determination and embracing Israeli leaders who often chose war over negotiations"--Front flap.

Download or read book American Government 3e written by Glen Krutz and published by . This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black & white print. American Government 3e aligns with the topics and objectives of many government courses. Faculty involved in the project have endeavored to make government workings, issues, debates, and impacts meaningful and memorable to students while maintaining the conceptual coverage and rigor inherent in the subject. With this objective in mind, the content of this textbook has been developed and arranged to provide a logical progression from the fundamental principles of institutional design at the founding, to avenues of political participation, to thorough coverage of the political structures that constitute American government. The book builds upon what students have already learned and emphasizes connections between topics as well as between theory and applications. The goal of each section is to enable students not just to recognize concepts, but to work with them in ways that will be useful in later courses, future careers, and as engaged citizens. In order to help students understand the ways that government, society, and individuals interconnect, the revision includes more examples and details regarding the lived experiences of diverse groups and communities within the United States. The authors and reviewers sought to strike a balance between confronting the negative and harmful elements of American government, history, and current events, while demonstrating progress in overcoming them. In doing so, the approach seeks to provide instructors with ample opportunities to open discussions, extend and update concepts, and drive deeper engagement.

Download or read book Exercise of Power written by Robert M. Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed #1 bestselling memoir, Duty, a candid, sweeping examination of power, and how it has been exercised, for good and bad, by American presidents in the post-Cold War world. Since the end of the Cold War, the global perception of the United States has progressively morphed from dominant international leader to disorganized entity. Robert Gates argues that this transformation is the result of the failure of political leaders to understand the complexity of American power, its expansiveness and its limitations. He makes clear that the successful exercise of power is not limited to the ability to coerce or demand submission, but must also encompass diplomacy, strategic communications, development assistance, intelligence, technology, and ideology. With forthright judgments of the performance of past presidents and their senior-most advisers, insightful ­firsthand knowledge, and compelling insider stories, Gates’s candid, sweeping examination of power in all its manifestations argues that U.S. national security in the future will require abiding by the lessons of the past, reimagining our approach, and revitalizing nonmilitary instruments of power essential to success and security.