Policy Analysis in National Security Affairs: New Methods for a New Era, Weapons, Strategies, Nuclear and Conventional Roles, Alliance Leadership, Stability in a Dangerous World, Promoting Democracy

Professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction, this unique book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It illuminates how key methods of analysis can be employed, by experts and nonexperts, to focus widely, address small details, or do both at the same time.

This book responds to the growing need for multidisciplinary talent in national security affairs. While it does not cover all analytical methodologies worth addressing, it does cover a robust spectrum of those that are relevant and potent. It is written for a professional audience, but its contents are intended to be understood by graduate students, undergraduates, and the interested citizen.

The next chapter provides a brief overview of policy analysis and its methods. The main part of the book is then organized into three major sections. The first examines how strategic evaluation methods can be used to analyze issues and options facing U.S. national security policy and strategy. The second addresses how the methods of systems analysis can be used to address defense plans and programs. The third and final main section examines the methods of operations research and how they can be used to address defense resource allocation issues. Each section has some chapters that explain the relevant method as a stand-alone technique, while others are decidedly multidisciplinary, showing how all three methods can be blended and used to illuminate the issues and options. The book concludes with a chapter that sketches ideas for how the teaching and practice of policy analysis can be strengthened within the academic community and the U.S. Government.

Together, the book's chapters address both foreign policy and defense strategy, showing how analytical methods can be used in both domains. Some chapters examine the theory of the three analytical methods under discussion, and others show how these methods can be applied to examine key trends, issues, and options in multiple arenas of contemporary U.S. national security policy. Some chapters contain ideas for new policies, strategies, and programs; these appear not as an exercise in advocacy, but rather to help illuminate the choices, priorities, and uses of analysis ahead.

A dominant theme underlies and animates all of this book's pages. Although many analytical methods from the past will remain relevant, the winds of change are blowing over this profession as well as over U.S. national security policy as a whole. If the United States is to remain secure in a future of great dangers and opportunities, knowledge and wisdom are required because physical resources alone will not be enough. New forms of analysis and new methods are needed. The analytical profession must rise to this challenge. Without pretending to exhaust the subject, this book tries to outline both old and new methods. In calling for new methods, it does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. In many cases, the basic foundations of old methods should be preserved, but in order to update them, they should be configured with new superstructures of concepts, thought-tools, and measuring sticks. To the extent this book succeeds in articulating an agenda of change while educating readers, it will have served its purpose.

Dettagli