Popis: |
This chapter sketches out the characteristics of today's global security environment in a broad brush by describing the US Department of Defense. It focuses on the science of war, a subdiscipline of defense analysis that, beginning with a foundation of basic facts and figures about military organizations and operations, uses analytical methods to tackle key questions in the national security field. With this context, the chapter illustrates the analytical methods including simple computational algorithms for assessing military effectiveness and predicting combat outcomes. It also includes the study of defense budgets and economics, as well as efforts to understand the physics and technology of military weapons and operations today. The chapter then discusses many of the ABCs of the US armed forces. It explains the evolution of American grand strategy — the theory of the case for how the nation should ensure its safety, prosperity, and survival — that these forces are designed to undergird. |