Suchergebnisse

Dramatic changes in conventional military capabilities coupled with nuclear parity should greatly increase the importance of conventional military power as well as raise new opportunities & problems for arms control. There is a lack of analytic tools by which to appraise these changes, their implications & their importance. As an initial step to systematic analysis of the desirability & feasibility of conventional arms control agreements, current trends are described in weapons development & alternative interpretations of the implications of those trends are evaluated. The requirements of effective & reliable arms control agreements are enumerated, & a general assessment is made of the difficulties in meeting those requirements. Available evidence suggests the imminent emergence of significantly greater incentives for larger conventional forces, larger logistics & support bases, surprise attack, & campaign strategies that emphasize speed & high attrition on all sides. These factors would increase pressures for larger military budgets while also increasing instabilities in arms competitions. They also should increase interest in arms control measures though the characteristics of new weapons technology may make designing such measures even more difficult than in the past. Modified HA.

While the causes & conduct of wars have attracted a great deal of attention, their termination has largely been ignored. War initiation often takes place without clear definition of war objectives, as a product of bureaucratic decision-making patterns. This allows military officers to conduct the war according to purely military criteria, seeking total defeat of the enemy. Peace planning in fact should begin at the start of a war or before. A key problem lies in the inapplicability of conventional warfare concepts to nuclear warfare, which takes place on a radically different time scale. Nuclear war might easily disrupt communications to the point where those leaders with authority to end war had no control over their own forces. Peace planning will require considerable research, especially into the motives & objectives of potential opponents. Modified HA.