America's victory in the Persian Gulf War seemed a resounding confirmation of conventional U.S. military thought. Yet to cope with a world in which terrorists and warlords pose as great a challenge as massed armies, a radical revision of military thinking is essential.
Every nation is caught in the moral paradox of refusing to go to war unless it can be proved that the national interest is imperiled, and of continuing in the war only by proving that some- thing much more than national interest is at stake.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
When the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote these words, the Cold War-a crisis in international politics touching virtually every aspect of American life-was at its height. Yet the source of the paradox that Niebuhr referred to was not so much political as military. It derived less from the East-West confrontation than from profound changes in the character of warfare, changes that predated by several decades the Cold War itself. The paradox in which the United States found itself caught in the 1950s was a product of what the historian Walter Millis labeled "the hypertrophy of war." A series of changes in warfare had plunged the military profession into a prolonged crisis. An understanding of that crisis-and the military's efforts to evade its implications-is an essential point of departure for understanding today's controversies surrounding the use of force.