The Bush administration arrived in Washington in January 2001 contemplating dramatic changes in the U.S. national security strategy. During the campaign, candidate Bush had articulated the view that the existing security strategy lacked coherence and focus. In this view, a failure to prioritize had led the previous administration to excessive use of the military for nonwarfighting tasks while neglecting key areas of the world, such as Mexico and India. As a result, the U.S. military had become overstretched and under funded with no appreciable benefit for U.S. security. The administration intended therefore to shift the nation’s priorities toward dealing with new security threats, particularly the threat of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction while refocusing the military on war fighting tasks and restructuring it around new technologies to achieve a “revolution in the technology of war” (Bush, 1999).
Once in power, however, the administration found it difficult to advance this agenda in the face of effective political opposition and budgetary constraints. The September 11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York soon drew attention from longer-term issues of policy, but they simultaneously reinforced the need for a new approach to U.S. security and for a more effective military tool along the lines they had already envisioned.
The Bush administration issued The National Security
Strategy of the United States in fall 2002, a little more than a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks and as it was gathering an international coalition to disarm Iraq. As in past national security strategies, the document describes lofty goals and principles but is vague with regard to how these will be achieved. The strategy assigns a myriad of new and demanding tasks to the military while relieving it of precious few old ones. It offers little specific guidance, stipulating only the need to acquire capabilities for intelligence warning, remote sensing, and long-range precision strike and to emphasize expeditionary forces and joint operations..........
