Toward a Strategy of Positive Ends

Defense planners and strategists have recently proposed a variety of alternatives for America's role in what many see as a dramatically different international situation. Most of those proposals, though, continue with a Cold War paradigm of trying to foresee what the next threat might be and how the United States might best prepare itself to respond to it. Consequently, the possibility of taking advantage of the intrinsic dynamism of the new security environment in order to create conditions that might promote positive ends-long-term peace, stability, and prosperity-has remained largely overlooked. In this monograph, the authors, Brigadier General (Retired) Huba Wass de Czege and Lieutenant Colonel Antulio J. Echevarria II, make a case for a strategy aimed at achieving positive, rather than neutral or negative, ends. They first discuss the dynamic conditions of the new strategic environment, then explore the options the United States has available for dealing with those conditions.