Publication

This report confirms that the US military’s force structure and modernization plans have historically been the result of programming choices made by Department of Defense (DoD) and service leaders. In other words, the size and shape of America’s military are not simply the ill-fitting byproducts of external budgetary and political pressures, as has long been assumed. Instead, the policies described in this text largely reflect the tradeoffs made by senior US defense leaders alone, and the decisions they made left the country with smaller and older forces than was necessary.