United States Defense Planning

Superior defense plans fuse political, economic, military, technological, and sociological power in ways that cover state interests, while conserving resources to the greatest prudent extent. Poor products can increase costs without reducing risks, because forces and funds that support slipshod schemes often fail to furnish security. This critical appraisal of the U.5. defense planning system seeks to serve a five-fold purpose: set assessment standards, appraise U.S. planning in principle, appraise U.5. planning in practice, identify U.S. planning problems and present optional courses of corrective action. The study shows how domestic and foreign policy inputs from the White House, National 5ecurity Council, and State Department affect defense planning.

Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force. The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies – that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention. As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.

This report reviews recent longer-term U.S. defense planning attempts, focusing especially on the NDP. The NDP was established as an independent effort to provide guidance to the Secretary of Defense and the Congress on matters pertaining to the long-term national security of the United States. This report reviews the motivations for creating the NDP, the NDP's relationship to the QDR, the NDP's administrative and logistical experience, and the substantive results the NDP published in its final report. We conclude by discussing in depth some of the lessons learned from the first NDP experience and distilling recommendations for the Congress, the administration, the Department of Defense (DoD), and future NDP management teams. The substantive recommendations of the NDP report were initially overshadowed by other events that dominated the news headlines in late 1997 and early 1998, most notably the crisis with Iraq. Nevertheless, the report was sufficiently pointed to generate considerable interest-and not a little controversy-within the defense and national security communities. Of particular interest was the report's focus on the need for the DoD to accelerate its reform efforts (the NDP called this a "transformation strategy") to better position itself to meet the numerous new and unpredictable challenges of the next 20 years.

This report describes the current defense planning process used by the U.S. Department of Defense, with a focus on how scenarios are developed and employed to support defense planning.

This title explores and examines why and how security communities prepare purposefully for their future defence. Professor Gray argues that our understanding of human nature, of politics, and of strategic history, does allow us to make prudent choices in defence planning.