Практическое занятие №10. Changing the security environment and new threats.

Неделя 10. Тема:International Security

Практическое занятие №10

Содержание практического занятия:

2. Changing the security environment and new threats.

ONE OF THE POST-COLD WAR's world's greatest challenges is identifying and evaluating the old and new security dangers threatening US strategic goals. In describing national security issues facing his second administration, President Bill Clinton told his new national security team: "The challenges are many-terrorism; the threat of weapons of mass destruction; drug trafficking; environment[all degradation; ethnic, religious and racial conflicts; [and] dealing with the sea changes occurring in Asia and elsewhere throughout the globe."1

These challenges are now all too familiar to military planners. While traditional security problemsincluding the rise of regional hegemony and the threat of regional conflicts-remain central concerns, military planners must consider various ill-defined dangers. Individually and collectively, traditional and nontraditional security problems are shaping and defining security environments worldwide.

In 1996, former Secretary of Defense William Perry established a "policy for managing post-Cold War dangers" based on three elements: preventing new threats from emerging, deterring existing threats and defeating threats to US and allied interests "if prevention and deterrence fail."3 This three-tiered prevention, deterrence and use of military force approach places a premium on foreseeing and understanding future challenges to US interests.

This article addresses six issues that are influencing the evolving threats to US security interests and making strategic planning more complex. These include developments changing future war's nature; shifting regional alignments; development of security threats not limited by national boundaries or affiliations; the interagency character of assessing and responding to threats; weapon and military technology proliferation; and the rapid pace of change.

Considering Future War's Nature

A central task for military planners is to assess the impact of existing political, economic, military and technological trends on armed conflict.4 In the West-and other parts of the world-a dominant concern has been the revolution in automated command, control, intelligence and radio-electronic warfare systems-the revolution in military affairs (RMA). Responses to new RMA developments are influenced by the judgment that general nuclear war in the post-Cold War world is extremely unlikely, and regional conflicts based on ethnic, national, economic and social causes are more probable.

RMA warfighting technologies were first practiced by the US-led coalition during the Gulf War. The war represented the harbinger of changes that will transform warfare as profoundly as did mechanization and the introduction of nuclear weapons.5 Since Operation Desert Storm's close, however, RMA's significance for future war has become linked to force structure, doctrine and maintaining the technological initiative into the next century.

Quality forces will be equipped, organized and trained to use information, penetration and precision advantages against the enemy. Warfare is becoming a joint endeavor, where synergy is achieved through simultaneity. Forces will develop "a qualitatively different way of fighting-the ability not only to strike the enemy deep, but to see the enemy deep in real time."7

Since mid-decade, US Army force modernization has emphasized maintaining technological superiority in force projection, sustainment and protection; winning the information war; conducting precision strikes; and dominating the maneuver battle.8 As Army Chief of Staff General Dennis J. Reimer noted, an Army that masters these requirements will be able to handle "a wide spectrum of unpredictable dangers and threats." These include regional conflicts involving the use of advanced conventional weapons, ballistic missiles and chemical and biological weapons, as well as peacekeeping (PK) and peacemaking operations.

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