In examining the influence of historical analogies on decisions to use--or not use--force, military strategist Jeffrey Record assesses every major application of U.S. force from the Korean War to the NATO war on Serbia. Specifically, he looks at the influence of two analogies: the democracies? appeasement of Hitler at Munich and America's defeat in the Vietnam War. His book judges the utility of these two analogies on presidential decision-making and finds considerable misuse of them in situations where force was optional. He points to the Johnson administration's application of the Munich analogy to the circumstances of Southeast Asia in 1965 as the most egregious example of their misuse, but also cites the faulty reasoning by historical analogy that prevailed among critics of Reagan's policy in Central America and in Clinton's use of force in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. The author's findings show generational experience to be a key influence on presidential decision-making: Munich persuaded mid-twentieth-century presidents that force should be used early and decisively while Vietnam cautioned later presidents against using force at all. Both analogies were at work for the Gulf War, with Munich urging a decision for war and Vietnam warning against a graduated and highly restricted use of force. Record also reminds us of the times when presidents have used analogies to mobilize public support for action they have already decided to take. Addressing both the process of presidential decision-making and the wisdom of decisions made, this well-reasoned book offers timely lessons to a broad audience that includes political scientists, military historians, defense analysts, and policy makers, as well as those simply curious about history's influence.

The author takes a fresh look at Japan's decision for war in 1941, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. He finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decisionmakers.

The United States Air Force's Center for Strategy and Technology was established at the Air War College in 1996. Its purpose is to engage in long-term strategic thinking about technology and its implications for United States national security. The Center (CSAT) focuses on education, research, and publications that support the integration of technology into national strategy and policy. This document is one of these publications.

The emergence of failed states as the principal source of international political instability and the appearance of mounting casualty phobia among U.S. political and military elites have significant force structure and technology implications. Overseas, intra-state and often irregular warfare is displacing large-scale inter-state conventional combat. At home, there has arisen a new generation of political and military leadership that displays an unprecedented timidity in using force."--Intro. The author proceeds to argue that in an era where the Air Force is being called on more than ever in an attempt to reduce casualties because they are viewed as "above the fight," the distribution of defense funding needs to be given a hard look.

Preface NATOs controversial decision to attack Serbia in March 1999 because of its behavior in Kosovo prompted considerable criticism in the United States. Some critics faulted the United States and its NATO allies for selecting military means incompatible with the political objective sought. Others contended that the alliance had misjudged Belgrades strength of interest in Kosovo, and therefore willingness to defy NATO. Still others asserted that the need to maintain political consensus within the alliance was crippling NATOs military effectiveness against Serbia.

Jeffrey Record has specialised in investigating the causes of war. In "The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler" (Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), he contended that Hitler could not have been deterred from going to war by any action the Allies could plausibly have taken. In "Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win" (Potomac Books, Inc., 2007), Record reviewed eleven insurgencies and evaluated the reasons for their success or failure, including the insurgents' stronger will to prevail. "Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq" (Potomac Books, Inc., 2009) includes one of Record's most cogent explanations of why an often uncritical belief in one's own victory is frequently (but not always) a critical component of the decision to make war. Record incorporates the lessons of these earlier books in his latest,"A War It Was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked America in 1941". The attack on Pearl Harbour is one of the most perplexing cases in living memory of a weaker power seeming to believe that it could vanquish a clearly superior force. On closer inspection, however, Record finds that Japan did not believe it could win; yet, the Japanese imperial command decided to attack the United States anyway. Record finds conventional explanations that Japan's leaders were criminally stupid, wildly deluded, or just plumb crazy don't fully answer all our questions. Instead, he argues, the Japanese were driven by an insatiable appetite for national glory and economic security via the conquest of East Asia. The scope of their ambitions and their fear of economic destruction overwhelmed their knowledge that the likelihood of winning was slim and propelled them into a war they were always going to lose.

"Beating Goliath" examines the phenomenon of victories by the weak over the strong more specifically, insurgencies that succeeded against great powers. Jeffrey Record reviews eleven insurgent wars from 1775 to the present and determines why the seemingly weaker side won. He concludes that external assistance correlates more consistently with insurgent success than any other explanation. He does not disparage the critical importance of will, strategy, and strong-side regime type or suggest that external assistance guarantees success. Indeed, in all cases, some combination of these factors is usually present. But Record finds few if any cases of unassisted insurgent victories except against the most decrepit regimes. Having identified the ingredients of insurgent success, Record examines the present insurgency in Iraq and whether the United States can win. In so doing, Record employs a comparative analysis of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. He also identifies and assesses the influence of distinctive features of the American way of war on the U.S. forces performance against the Iraqi insurgency. Make no mistake: insurgent victories are the exception, not the rule. But when David does beat Goliath, the consequences can be earth shattering and change the course of history. Jeffrey Record s persuasive logic and clear writing make this timely book a must read for scholars, policymakers, military strategists, and anyone interested in the Iraq War s outcome.

Japan's decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo's decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan's decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decisionmakers.

"Wanting War" is the first comprehensive analysis of the often contradictory reasons why President George W. Bush went to war in Iraq and of the war s impact on future U.S. armed intervention abroad. Though the White House sold the war as a necessity to eliminate an alleged Iraqi threat, other agendas were at play. Drawing on new assessments of George W. Bush s presidency, recent memoirs by key administration decision makers, and Jeffrey Record s own expertise on U.S. military interventions since World War II, "Wanting War" contends that Bush s invasion of Iraq was more about the arrogance of post Cold War American power than it was about Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, Iraq was selected not because it posed a convincing security threat but because Baghdad was militarily helpless. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a demonstration of American power, especially the will to use it.Ironically, as Record points out, a war launched to advertise American combativeness is likely to lead U.S. foreign policymakers and military leaders to be averse to using force in all but the most favorable circumstances. But this new respect for the limits of America s conventional military power, especially as an instrument of ffecting political change in foreign cultures, and for the inherent risks and uncertainties of war, may prove to be one of the Iraq War s few positive legacies. Record argues that the American experience in Iraq ought to be a cautionary tale for those who advocate for further U.S. military action.

Informed by the supposed grand lesson of Munich - namely, that capitulating to the demands of aggressive dictatorships invites further aggression and makes inevitable a larger war - American presidents from Harry Truman through George W. Bush have relied on the Munich analogy not only to interpret perceived security threats but also to mobilize public opinion for military action. Though today's global political, military, and economic environment differs considerably from that of the 1930s, the United States is making some of the same strategic mistakes in its war on terrorism that the British and French made in their attempts to protect themselves against Nazi Germany. In "The Specter of Munich", noted defense analyst Jeffrey Record takes an unconventional look at a disastrous chapter in Western diplomatic history.Though presidents can and have, knowingly and unwittingly, misused the Munich analogy to describe security threats and the consequences of failing to act against them, there is no gainsaying the power of that analogy to mobilize public opinion. This is so because of the catastrophic failure of the security policies Britain and France pursued vis-a-vis Germany in the 1930s.In retrospect, Anglo-French appeasement, driven by perceived military weakness and fear of war, did nothing but whet Hitler's insatiable territorial appetite (and his contempt for British and French political leadership) while simultaneously undermining the democracies' security. The result was the most destructive war in history and an enduring pejorative image of appeasement, which casts Nazi ideology as a self-evident blueprint of Germany's territorial aims; Neville Chamberlain as a coward and fool bent on peace at any price; Britain and France as betrayers of brave little Czechoslovakia; and Hitler as the great winner at the Munich Conference of September 1938.This is the image of appeasement that presidents have employed to justify military action over inaction in response to perceived security threats. The great strategic lesson of the 1930s, however, was drawn against a rising security threat that arguably has had no analog since the destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Security threats truly Hitlerian in scope are rare. What aggressor state since 1945 has possessed the combination of vast territorial ambitions, military power, and willingness to gamble strategically as did Nazi Germany in Europe in 1939? Certainly not North Vietnam or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, both targets of U.S. presidential invocation of the Munich analogy...The problem with the invocation of Munich is its suggestion that aggressor states are inherently insatiable and that failure to act against them automatically endangers U.S. security. In fact, most aggressor states have limited territorial objectives, and in some cases satisfaction of those objectives may be of little consequence to U.S. security. North Vietnam's objectives were confined to the former French Indochina, a place of little intrinsic strategic value to the United States. Yet the administration of Lyndon Johnson painted Ho Chi Minh as the spear point of a concerted Sino-Soviet imperialism and claimed that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would topple dominoes all over Southeast Asia.This book explores the reasons why Britain and France chose to appease Nazi Germany, assesses the causes of appeasement's failure, and identifies and explores strategic lessons of the 1930s relevant to the challenges U. S. foreign and military policies confront today. Those lessons include the importance of: correctly gauging enemy intentions and capabilities, public support for risky military action, consistency between diplomatic objectives and military force posture, reasonable quantitative balance of strategic ends and means, proper balancing between offensive and defensive capabilities, and above all predictability in threatening and using force.The study then proceeds to offer conclusions and recommendations on the role that Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany continues to play in the national security debate and on changes in U.S. force posture based on the lessons of the 1930s that remain relevant today.Before turning to the sources of Anglo-French appeasement during the 1930s, however, it is critical to understand the nature of both hindsight and appeasement. With respect to hindsight, it is indisputable that Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany was a horrendous mistake. However, decision-makers in London and Paris during the 1930s did not know they were making "pre-World War II" decisions. On the contrary, they were struggling mightily to avoid war. We must attempt to see the security choices they faced and the decisions they made as they saw them then, not as we see them today. With historical events, as with football games, it is far easier to be a Monday morning quarterback than an actual Sunday afternoon quarterback in the middle of a tough game. Nor does hindsight offer 20/20 vision; hindsight refracts past events through the lens of what followed.Thus we view Munich today through the prism of World War II and the Holocaust, a perspective not available in 1938. How differently would Munich now be seen had it not been followed by war and genocide? David Potter shrewdly observes that hindsight is "the historian's chief asset and his main liability." Or, as Robert J. Young notes in his examination of France and the origins of World War II, "the problem with hindsight is that it is illuminated more by the present than the past."

The United States is now in the third year of the global war on terrorism. That war began as a fight against the organization that perpetrated the heinous attacks of September 11, 2001, but soon became a much more ambitious enterprise, encompassing, among other things, an invasion and occupation of Iraq. As part of the war on terrorism, the United States has committed not only to ridding the world of terrorism as a means of violence but also to transforming Iraq into a prosperous democratic beacon for the rest of the autocratically ruled and economically stagnant Middle East to follow. Dr. Jeffrey Record examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration's postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war's political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He finds that the war on terrorism-as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda-lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for down-sizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power. The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph as a contribution to the national security debate over the aims and course of the war on terrorism. Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr. Director, Strategic Studies Institute

U.S. political and military difficulties in Iraq have prompted comparisons to the American war in Vietnam. How, in fact, do the two wars compare? What are the differences and similarities, and what insights can be gained from examining them? Does the Vietnam War have instructive lessons for those dealing with today's challenges in Iraq, or is that war simply irrelevant? In the pages that follow, two highly qualified analysts address these questions. Dr. Jeffrey Record, formerly a civilian pacification advisor in Vietnam and author of books on both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and W. Andrew Terrill, author and co-author of several SSI studies on Iraq, conclude that the military dimensions of the two conflicts bear little comparison. Among other things, the sheer scale of the Vietnam War in terms of forces committed and losses incurred dwarfs that of the Iraq War. They also conclude, however, that failed U. S. state-building in Vietnam and the impact of declining domestic political support for U. S. war aims in Vietnam are issues pertinent to current U. S. policy in Iraq. The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph as a contribution to the national security debate over Iraq. Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr. Director, Strategic Studies Institute

This landmark study of the Vietnamese conflict, examined through the lens of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements in the rural province of Long An up until American intervention in the area, offers a human, balanced, penetrating account of war. Two new forewords by Robert K. Brigham of Vassar College and Jeffrey Record of the Air War College explore the book's enduring influence. There is a new end chapter that offers previously unpublished scholarship on the conflict.