National Security Dilemmas: Challenges and Opportunities

A contemporary primer on the leading arguments about U.S. national security, National Security Dilemmas addresses the major challenges and opportunities that are live-issue areas for American policymakers and strategists today. Colin S. Gray provides an in-depth analysis of a policy and strategy for deterrence; the long-term U.S. bid to transform its armed forces' capabilities, with particular reference to strategic surprise, in the face of many great uncertainties; the difficulty of understanding and exploiting the challenge of revolutionary change in warfare; the problems posed by enemies who fight using irregular methods; and the awesome dilemmas for U.S. policy over the options to wage preventive and preemptive warfare.With forty years' experience as a strategist, within and outside of government, Gray uses a problem-solving motif throughout the book, suggesting solutions to the challenges he identifies. The book's master narrative is that the United States must take a more considered strategic approach to its security dilemmas. Too often, the country's leaders decide on a policy and then move to take action, all the while neglecting to devise a plan that would connect its political purposes to military means. While many of Gray's judgments here are critical of current ideas and behavior, he crafted them as helpful guides should planners adopt them when revising policies and approaches. Strategy is a practical matter; truly it is the zone wherein theory meets practice.This text can be used as an expert guide to the major national security challenges of today. It both explains the structure of these challenges and provides useful answers. With a foreword by Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), Bren Chair, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia.

Colin S. Gray is professor of international politics and strategic studies at the University of Reading, England. Over the course of forty years he has combined careers as scholar and government adviser. He taught at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and then at York University, Toronto, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He worked also at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Toronto. In the early 1970s he was assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. In 1976 he moved to the United States where he was director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute, New York, before founding the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia. He held a presidential appointment in the Reagan administration for five years. In 1993, Dr. Gray returned to England, where he has been teaching at universities (Hull and Reading) and advising government. He is the author of twenty-three books, most recently Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (2007).

At present he is writing a major book on strategic theory, The Strategy

Bridge. Dr. Gray has published extensively on such subjects as

nuclear strategy, maritime strategy, spacepower, special operations,

geopolitics, arms control, and strategic ideas. He is a dual UK/US

citizen and lives in England.