In many ways, President Boris Yeltsin would have made it easier for America's defense planners if he had announced a 40 percent increase in Russian military spending rather than a 40 percent decrease. U.S. planners can counter increases. Decreases and diminished threats are harder to plan for. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States faces no credible threat to its existence. Our largest military deployments overseas are either precautionary, as in South Korea, or peacekeeping.
Wars have a cruel way of making most military planning seem misguided or just plain wrong.
Since World War II, we had planned for a war that would be a series of set piece battles in Europe between massed armored and artillery formations, not a war in the jungles of Southeast Asia against a guerrilla foe. But weapons, with their long lead times, must be procured and the personnel trained to use them. Doctrines intended for one kind of conflict can be retooled for others. The difficulty military strategists face in scanning the horizon for threats they can plan against is in strong evidence in the newest report of the National Defense Panel, which was charged with examining security challenges from 2010 to 2020. The biggest buzzword in looking for potential threats is WMD, weapons of mass destruction.