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It may seem odd to ask whether Clausewitzian strategy can explain the success of the rebellious colonies in the American Revolutionary War. After all, Clausewitz was almost entirely concerned with warfare on the European continent and, most particularly, with the changes brought about by Napoleon's military campaigns. On War barely mentions the American Revolutionary War. The question may seem even less appropriate if one narrows the focus, as I intend to do, to George Washington and his strategy. Washington is not best remembered as a military commander. His Revolutionary War record is often given scant attention or is criticized as lacking in major victories (except at Yorktown, with a great deal of French assistance). Sometimes, Washington is even taxed with military incompetence (as in the defeat and near capture of himself and his forces on Long Island and Manhattan). And yet, to focus on Washington the President or Washington the battlefield commander is to risk missing his significance as a strategist. On this level, Washington excelled -- and the particular way in which he did so shows how Clausewitz' theory of war can be used as a framework for evaluating conflicts quite different from those that were the focus of the Prussian theorist's attention.

The U.S.-led military intervention in Somalia, which began in 1992, had profound consequences for how the United States would view later humanitarian operations overseas and the use of military force, in general. The ultimate failure of the international community's intervention in Somalia, and especially the death of 18 Army Rangers in Mogadishu in October 1993, not only forced the end of the intervention, it caused the Clinton administration to be more cautious about future such interventions and less likely to risk American casualties in military operations. Moreover, lessons that were either questionable (such as the need to avoid adding ambitious political goals to humanitarian operations the so-called mission creep) or outright bogus (the need to prevent U.S. troops from serving under foreign commanders) came to color official U.S. thinking on military interventions. American reluctance to act during the genocide in Rwanda shortly after the end of the Somalia intervention can be attributed in part to the traumatic experience of Somalia, as can the U.S. refusal to take decisive action in Bosnia until 1995. Given the dramatic and tragic outcome of the Ranger raid in Mogadishu and the influence that the Somalia experience has had on U.S. foreign policy, it is not surprising that a great deal has been written about the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. Much of this analysis has focused on mission creep after the U.S. handed over authority for the operation to the UN, the hunt for Mogadishu warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed and, of course, the Ranger raid itself.

Space, as the newest theater of combat, is also the most rapidly developing. The nature and character of space warfare 50 years from now may be wholly unrecognizable to those of us alive today. It would be foolish to try to freeze the nature of space warfare today within the confines of any theory, let alone one a century old. Nevertheless, Julian Corbett's explication of the relationship between sea and land power does give us important insights into how space power relates to other military tools, at least for the coming years. Just as Corbett showed the potentials and limitations of naval power in what was to be a century dominated by great continental powers, his theory suggests both the contribution that space power can make to an overall military campaign and the new vulnerabilities it introduces in so doing. The task of space strategy will be to maximize the former while minimizing the latter.

Naval power has been closely associated with the protection of commercial shipping since before the time when warships protected the growth of Athens' trading empire. For four hundred years, the British empire expanded under the device "trade follows the flag." In the late nineteenth century, the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan finally codified the relationship between merchant shipping and naval power in a way that affected and encouraged the development of the war fleets of several nations, including that of the United States. The naval protection of commercial shipping has, in its turn, traditionally been associated with the assurance of free passage through important, narrow sea lanes - "choke-points." The ability to pass freely through these points, or to deny such passage to adversaries, has long been recognized to be an important element of national power. The founder of German geopolitics, Karl Haushofer - although an army general and a landlubber - gained through his travels a deep appreciation for the strategic leverage imperial Great Britain enjoyed through its control of choke-points around the world., The original document contains color images.

This essay is an attempt to return issues of national security strategy to the center of the debate over NMD deployment. After briefly reviewing the threat to the United States from ICBMs launched by so-called rogue-states and the technical characteristics of the NMD system intended for deployment if the President so decides, the author examines the broader strategic implications of NMD deployment for the United States. He argues that the expected benefits from NMD are outweighed by its strategic costs and that deploying it will be likely to diminish, rather than increase, American security. He proposes an alternative set of policies to NMD deployment, based on the military and diplomatic tools of statecraft. The proposed policies offer an acceptable level of security against the rogue-state ICBM while avoiding its strategic costs - and will, therefore, strengthen our overall national security strategy.