Essay on "Strategy for Peace"

Essay 4 pages (1315 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Peace Strategy

A Strategy for Peace

America's global strategy for security, defense and diplomatic interaction is highly complex and today, increasingly contingent upon the implications of globalization. With the deconstruction of commercial and trade barriers, the U.S. has sought to increasingly counterbalance its use of full-fledged military tactics with a combination of more targeted strategic operations and the use of economic pressures such as sanctions to achieve diplomatic goals. While recent patterns relating to the dispatching of major fighting forces to Iraq and Afghanistan have marked something of a departure from this trend, the greater long-term thrust of post Cold War decision-makers has been toward a 'strategy of peace.' And in fact, many of the philosophical concepts unveiled in Melvin Laird's strategy seem prescient in their applicability to the current global landscape. That said, some aspects of Laird's strategy will differ considerably from those recommendable today, largely as a product of their being constructed at the height of the Vietnam War and our prolonged ideological and military conflict with the Soviet Union. While the ambitions provided in Laird's memorandum to then President Nixon are admirable, their orientation is steeped in Cold War thinking. As the discussion hereafter will show, while many of the ideas put forth in Laird's memorandum are pertinent to decisions that the Obama administration must currently face, the peace strategy of the present administration must divorce its reading of this policy recommendation from its Cold War context.

Laird's Strategy:

First, we consider that a number of recommendations in Laird's text are not simply advisable today, but in fact are directly indicative of what would eventually be adopted as post Cold War military policy. Thus, the first aspect of Laird's text that we consider is one which calls for a reduced emphasis on the tactics of military invasion and a heightened reliance on specialized partnership is conflicted regions. According to Laird, one of the major planning goals of his strategic recommendation called for "a larger share of free world security burden to be taken by those free world nations which have enjoyed major U.S. support since World War II, rapid economic growth and a relatively low defense contribution." (Laird, p. 5)

Here, Laird begins to lay out a plan for strategic coordination with a greater proportion of friends, partners and allies, as well as with defense forces comprised of local inhabitants of conflicted regions. This proposes a way of reducing the number of standing military personnel for the United States while simultaneously reducing the number of American soldiers which must be in harm's way. At a time when the United States relied on the draft in order to man its military operations in Vietnam and those prior in the 20th century, this would represent a progressive step for U.S. Defense policy. To this end, it has proven of particular relevance in the face of 21st century military challenges which are more commonly defined by the need to contain local insurgencies or loosely affiliated armed fundamentalist groups. Accordingly, Nagl (2007) indicates that "the new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual notes 'key to all these tasks is developing an effective host-nation (HN) security force.' Indeed, it has been argued that foreign forces cannot defeat an insurgency; the best they can hope for is to create the conditions that will enable local forces to win for them." (Nagl, p. 1)

This denotes that in at least one critical aspect, the Laird memorandum has been instructive to military policy-makers working to revise failed invasion policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially in the use of training tactics designed to shift the burden from U.S. military personnel to local defense forces, the strategy of drawing down the American presence in these theatres owes a debt to Laird's proposal.

By contrast, we must note that there is a considerable departure in military orientation from Cold War thinking to present day where nuclear armament is concerned. This second area of consideration is of… READ MORE

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