Shaping U.S. Military Forces: Revolution or Relevance after the Cold War

This book grew out of the need to describe the culture and structure of the uniformed services to students studying defense policy in the context of a graduate program in American government at Johns Hopkins University. The need to transform U.S. military forces was readily apparent in the 1989-1991 time frame as the Cold War came to an abrupt end. The industrial-age force of the 1980s designed to fight the military forces of another great power needed to be transformed into a force designed to intervene into the affairs of lesser powers. Instead, expensive programs were pursued to transform the industrial-age force into an information-age force to fight an unknown great power threat at an unknown future date at an unknown place. The many interventions of the Clinton and Bush administrations have exposed the failure of leadership to provide the armed forces organized, trained, and equipped for the real wars of a period between eras of great power conflict.