When America Fights: The Uses of U.S. Military Force

Rating:
Summary: Warfare or Welfare?
Review: When America Fights, The uses of U.S. Military Force, by Donald M. Snow (CQ Press, Congressional Quarterly, 2000) is a timely overview of today's political-military situation. Mr. Snow' outline of the post-cold war environment provides a useful framework for analyzing the world's political situation with 1st tier and 2nd tier country categories replacing the old 1st, 2nd and 3rd world system. He neatly polarizes the realist view of the world with the idealist and the isolationist with the interventionist, providing pro's and con's to each viewpoint. Building on this outline Mr. Snow analyzes likely future "patterns of violence" in the world, concluding they will most likely occur at the lower end of the violence scale and more often then not in "2nd tier" nations. His most frequent test case is Kosovo - at the time of writing only a year old. In Mr. Snow's analysis we had the wrong military and the wrong plan to deal with that low-end conflict. Without a major military threat, he argues that humanitarian concerns will cause us to lean more and more towards an idealist position and as the U.S. is the only nation with gobal reach and power we are the only ones capable of intervienening throughout the world. Mr. Snow argues that we must act in many case to provide peacekeeping and state-building in order to deal with world conflict. He concludes with the proposal that the U.S. mlitary be retooled to support the likely low-end conflict since the traditioal make-up of building the military around the less likely high-end threat. Regretably Mr. Snow spends little time discussing just what that military might look like (and thus what it might cost...). Although I found Mr. Snow's book very useful with regards to outlining terms and definition's for viewing and discussing the "post cold-war" world, his heavy interventonalist leanings andadvocacy if using our military as the world's social servics were - I can only hope - fantasy.

Rating:
Summary: Warfare or Welfare?
Review: When America Fights, The uses of U.S. Military Force, by Donald M. Snow (CQ Press, Congressional Quarterly, 2000) is a timely overview of today's political-military situation. Mr. Snow' outline of the post-cold war environment provides a useful framework for analyzing the world's political situation with 1st tier and 2nd tier country categories replacing the old 1st, 2nd and 3rd world system. He neatly polarizes the realist view of the world with the idealist and the isolationist with the interventionist, providing pro's and con's to each viewpoint. Building on this outline Mr. Snow analyzes likely future "patterns of violence" in the world, concluding they will most likely occur at the lower end of the violence scale and more often then not in "2nd tier" nations. His most frequent test case is Kosovo - at the time of writing only a year old. In Mr. Snow's analysis we had the wrong military and the wrong plan to deal with that low-end conflict. Without a major military threat, he argues that humanitarian concerns will cause us to lean more and more towards an idealist position and as the U.S. is the only nation with gobal reach and power we are the only ones capable of intervienening throughout the world. Mr. Snow argues that we must act in many case to provide peacekeeping and state-building in order to deal with world conflict. He concludes with the proposal that the U.S. mlitary be retooled to support the likely low-end conflict since the traditioal make-up of building the military around the less likely high-end threat. Regretably Mr. Snow spends little time discussing just what that military might look like (and thus what it might cost...). Although I found Mr. Snow's book very useful with regards to outlining terms and definition's for viewing and discussing the "post cold-war" world, his heavy interventonalist leanings andadvocacy if using our military as the world's social servics were - I can only hope - fantasy.