Coming in rapid succession, three recent events--last August's cruise missile attacks against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, the resumption in December 1998 of hostilities with Iraq, and the launching, after fits and starts, of this spring's air campaign against Yugoslavia--have cast in sharp relief the centrality of military power to present-day American policy. Offering the apparent prospect of clean, quick and affordable solutions to vexing problems, force has become the preferred instrument of American statecraft. The deployment of U.S. forces into harm's way, once thought to be fraught with hazard and certain to generate controversy, has become commonplace. The result has been the renewed, intensified--and perhaps irreversible--militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
For American military men and women, the ten years that have transpired since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been intensely busy. Notably, however, that decade has contained only a single incident that strictly qualifies as war. As that one brief conflict fades into memory, moreover, its own significance dwindles. Indeed, when the military history of the 1990s is written, the Persian Gulf War will appear as an oddity, not a harbinger of things to come but a grand martial convocation unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Today the prospect of major war appears increasingly remote. The very idea of armies clashing in battle has acquired a vaguely disreputable odor. These conditions have prompted the United States to seek new ways of exploiting its military preponderance.
