The offensive capability

The offensive capability would deal...had three objectives, pre-emption, preventive Rosetta Stone war and deterrence. These are words we're going to hear more about these days than we had for a long time. Preventive war, in the literature, as I understand it, means a war you launch not against a current threat but against a threat that may emerge at some point and become more difficult to deal with in the future. Therefore, your advantage is to attack it now and deal with it. That's a preventive war. The pre-emptive attack is something you do on the eve of the anticipation of being attacked by someone when you believe there's an advantage to going first. So, you pre-empt. And the third, deterrence, we are all familiar with.The problem after the Second World War with this strategy of pre-emption, preventive, and deterrence, was that the Soviet Union did the same thing we did and developed a big offense with a triad and pre-emption and preventive war didn't look so good because they went into a deterrent mode as well. So, we were in deterrent mode and so were the Soviets. And this was greeted with not a great deal of glee as a method of defending the United States against the Soviet Union. So, we have naturally tried to recapture the possibility of defense, and we have in the 60s an effort at an ABM system. But we discovered, again, in the language of the literature that the offense/defense cost/exchange ratio was not favorable. And, simply put, all that meant was that an increment of offense could be had more cheaply and easily to overcome an increment of defense.And so, deploying defenses just led to an offensive arms race. For this and other reasons, we had the ABM treaty and we had no defense. We also had no defense because we found out it was pretty hard to do. When Ronald Reagan became president, he Rosetta Stone Software once again found deterrence unacceptable and attempted to employ a defense, Star Wars, hoping that lasers had reversed the offense/defense ratio, discovered, I think, that that again was harder to do than anticipated and then, of course, the threat morphed significantly with the disappearance of the Soviet Union.George Bush, Sr. did little in national missile defense. Clinton did little in national missile defense in terms of deployment and then George Bush, I think, can be characterized as trying to recapture the day in which the United States not only had deterrence through overwhelming offensive capability but also had the capability to defend the United States by denial to prevent an attack from reaching the United States and by embracing a national missile defense which technologically, again, he hoped would work.But then, 911 happened. And 911 meant that national missile defense could not defend America because the threat was not going to come from missiles. It was not going to be a threat against which we could deny an enemy the access to the United States. It could come as we all know from all the studies of container ships and the 12 million containers that reach America. that's one way it could come. But it can come from 100 other ways as well. And we could not really expect to defend America against that. But also we were losing deterrence. And we were losing deterrence because we could not be sure if we were attacked by these terrorists that we would know Rosetta Stone Japanese from whence the attack came, and if we did, we couldn't be sure that if we went to respond that the attacker would still be there, and if we were lucky enough to find out who did it, and they were hanging around, we couldn't be sure that they'd really care very much that we retaliated, because they might be willing to die for their cause. So, deterrence did not look very good to us. We were then back in a situation in which we had no defense. By denial.