The purpose of this book is to reconceptualize national security in light of the new strategic challenges posed by the end of the Cold War. The study downplays many important security topics -- the history of national security, defense strategy and tactics, weapons and force structures, and the nature of defense bureaucracies. Instead, the focus here is a probing theoretical analysis of how the recent dramatic transformation in the global context has fundamentally altered the nature of security. The changes in this new era are significant and sweeping enough to create an acute need for assessing the emerging patterns and generating new thinking conducive to managing an increasingly complex, anarchic world. Traditional modes of defense analysis have decidedly not become obsolete, but they need substantial reexamination and revision to cope with this transformation. Although this work is conceptual, the hope is that both scholars and policy makers will find its analytical frameworks and insights useful, as it explicitly attempts to consider implications not only for recasting existing theory but also for reassessing existing policy.

This task is certainly a tall order, as much security theorizing during the Cold War now seems irrelevant, little broad defense . . .