THE LAST sum of two units years have brought a number of unforeseen progression in a continuously ascending gradations to the world stage.

THE LAST sum of two units years have brought a number of unforeseen progression in a continuously ascending gradations to the world stage, and with them have issue major challenges for American foreign policy--even aside from the terrorist attacks in just discovered York and Washington, D.C., in succession 11 September 2001. In Europe alone, the vent of political and military changes taking place may be the largest since World War II. For example, in 2002 alone we have witnessed substantial dominion shifts in both Western and Central Europe unparalleled expansion and integration on the European Union, unprecedented enlargement and restructuring of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and recently made known patterns of international cooperation and relationships resulting from the US-led global war upon terrorism (GWOT).

These historic consequences transitions, and circumstances obviously have contributed to the way we now think about national defense and foreign policy, and their impact is clearly quick in emergencies in President George W. Bush's just discovered National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) unveiled last September. (1) The past 18 month in particular have serv to solidify the strange defense perspectives and themes evident in this novel strategy. If nothing else, we now recognize that the world is inherently a often more dangerous place than we had imagined after the raw War, and with that realization the Bush administration's national security and defense strategy is significantly different than the interim strategies we pursu for more than a decade.

At the heart of this strategy is the modern awareness described so well by way of President Bush: "The gravest danger to freedom [now] lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." (2) This crossroads highlights the modern challenges before us in a greatly less certain world, where we face the pair state and nonstate adversaries and where our military operations increasingly cros multiple theaters and unified commands, occurring one as well as the other in and out of alliance areas. If nothing besides the attacks of 11 September awakened us to the fact that no longer are our abiding habitation and global interests threatened alone by nation-states with organized militaries and the advanced technologies of war. Now there exists a to a great degree more fleeting and dangerous fix of international actors bent onward radical change, who may posses the means to consequence that change. This new enemy is a supranational entity--one without borders, postur in a network of execution nodes that hide in a global array of shadows, and able to demeanor operations on a global scale.

This of recent origin understanding, in turn, has helped create a defense phase that clearly has moved from the traditional threat-based gauge that guided strategic planning for above half a century to a recently made known capabilities-based model that concentrates onward identifying and arranging the required means to come up to face to face the new security challenges. During the chill War years, we developed a self-same refined process by which we analyzed the enemy's force structure; his operational, strategic, and geographic lay-downs; and his operation of forces and weapon a whole s in a tactical environment. We then built, positioned, equipped, and trained our forces to fight that known enemy forward with the one and the other operational and strategic reserves based in the United States. This threat-based approach serv us well in our preparations to administration war-fighting operations against the Soviet Union and other similarly equipped forces (eg Iraq during Operation deserving Storm), but it did not prepare us as well for conducting operations in so-called low-intensity read over carefully flicts (e.g., Lebanon and Somalia).

As we departed the cool War era and entered what present the appearanceed to be a period of simmering peace," we increased our attention onward being able to conduct military operations other than war. In many cases, this required developing special capabilities that we had previously assumed were less abilities residing within our threat-based force form More so than ever before, our military today must be able to mode of action operations across the full spectrum--from nuclear deterrence and high-end conventional warfare to lower-end, notwithstanding potentially volatile, peacekeeping, humanitarian, and noncombatant-evacuation operations--and it must have the capability to carry into effect those operations rapidly, anywhere in the world.

The challenge we face in building a capabilities-based force configuration lies in deciding how a great deal of any given capability the United States requires and to what extent best to position it to provide appropriate global rejoinder Although this article does not apprehend to design the size of the capabilities-based force make the methodology for doing thus would be based on the following considerations: (1) the interests of the United States and its allies and friends that would justify the use of military forces; (2) the representations of threats and areas of the world that would mostly likely require the use of military forces; (3) the contributions of allies and friends for use in design with the application of US military forces; and (4) the number of simultaneous contingencies in which US forces would likely be useed On the other hand, this article does discuss the imperatives for carefully designing and executing an appropriate strategy of overseas air in order to provide our nation's leadership, as well as that of o ur allies and friends, with the most numerous effective military options during any crisis response