Stealth, Precision, and the Making of American Foreign Policy: Review of Interests and Conflicts, Korean War, Vietnam, Mayaguez, Iranian Hostages, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo

This important study has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. The end of the Cold War greatly reduced the risk that a limited, peripheral conflict would escalate to a major war between the great powers. It would seem, with this constraint removed, that the United States should be freer to intervene militarily in the affairs of other peoples. Indeed, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the United States intervened militarily as many times as it had during the full forty years of the Cold War. Alternatively, the decision to intervene had always been based on the best interest of America. With the fall of the Soviet Union, America's most vital national interest, its security, was assured. Logic would dictate a less-interventionist foreign policy, as the need to intervene was drastically reduced. This study examines the paradox by investigating the presidential decision making process that leads to military intervention, determining the relative weight for intervention before and after the Cold War, and assessing the importance of technology - in this case the maturity of the combination of stealth aircraft and precision guided weapons - that made the president's decision to intervene after 1990 easier. The president's decision is influenced by six domestic and international factors: national interest, domestic politics, potential for success, potential cost (in lives), public support, and coalition or alliance responsibilities. Tracking changes in the relative influence of each of these factors over time, the importance of promising technological capabilities emerges as much more significant than the shift in balance of power in explaining the increased intervention policies of the United States. Specifically, conclusions are drawn on the real impact of stealth and precision's ability to reduce not only American casualties, but also collateral casualties and damage as well. Given the impact of military technological developments on foreign policy, considerations for future policy makers are recommended as new capabilities near fielding.

Introduction * The Benefits Of Military Action: Interests * Domestic Politics: Congress And The Media * Will It Work? The Prospects For Success * The Cost Of Intervention: Casualties And Risk * The Foreign Factor: Coalitions And Alliances * Conclusion

Certainly, technology must be carefully integrated into policy, and allowance made for breakthrough or unanticipated revolutionary technologies, but technology itself should not be the arbiter of great power actions. National policy should be formed through the combination of principle and vision, forethought and wisdom, not as a reaction to chance and happenstance.
But study of the historical integration of technology into the policy making process leads to the inevitable conclusion that technology can and does drive policy, to a lesser or greater degree depending on a multitude of circumstances. There is a great difference between what does occur and what should happen, and this thesis grapples with precisely that dilemma. Knowing that technology can and often does drive strategy, and ultimately policy, and aware that the side that fails to acquire and adapt cutting edge technology may lose to the state that does so efficiently, the question became reversed. Why shouldn't technology drive policy?