National security strategy is a vast subject involving a daunting array of interrelated sublements woven in intricate, sometimes vague, and ever-changing patterns. Its processes are often irregular and confusing and are always based on difficult decisions laden with serious risks. In short, it is, at the same time, a subject of overwhelming importance to the fate of the United States and civilization itself. The authors have done a considerable service by drawing together many of the diverse threads of national security into a coherent whole. They consider political and military strategy...

Americans have traditionally viewed war as an aberration in the normal course of events. Although paying lip service to the Clausewitzian dictum that war and politics are two parts of a tightly knit whole, we have traditionally waged wars as great crusades divorced from political realities. Thus we have been nonplussed in the last half of the twentieth century by our involvement in limited wars waged for limited objectives. America's responsibilities as a superpower with worldwide interests forced upon us the unpleasant notion of using our armed forces as practical instruments of political...