For years, the American military said it had to ready to fight two major wars at the same time. William Arkin, in the L.A. Times, reveals the Pentagon's new grand plan:
The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a "1-4-2-1 defense strategy," in which war planners prepare to fully defend one country (the United States), maintain forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia), maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and be able to "win decisively" up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing."
The new strategy embraces the administration's philosophy of preemptive strikes as well as the Rumsfeld vision of integrating special and covert operations and nuclear weapons into future conventional military planning. At a time when American military forces are already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for picking fights in new parts of the world.
