Reorganizing U.S. Defense Planning to Deal with New Contingencies: U.S.-Soviet Conflict in the Third World,
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss how U.S. defense planning might be reorganized to contend with direct Soviet military intervention in regions that have fallen outside the scope of our major defense commitments in the past. To limit the analysis, this paper will address only those situations in which U.S. and Soviet forces are or may become involved in an armed confrontation. For my purposes here, third world excludes areas covered by existing U.S. defense arrangements (i.e., all of NATO and Northeast Asia), and the People's Republic of China. Finally, I will restrict this discussion to broad points and will not review important but more technical debates now percolating in public and official defense forums. The aim of this paper is to describe overall classes of threats and options to identify conceptual, unifying themes that can guide defense planning for a range of third world contingencies. This paper will ask, in other words, what the overarching determinants of a U.S. policy for countering Soviet aggression in the third world should be, and, given competing defense requirements, how we should decide which threats are the most important ones to hedge against.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1982
- Accession Number
- ADA137974
Entities
People
- K. N. Lewis
Organizations
- RAND Corporation