AEI is rereleasing some of its most prescient and groundbreaking works from its earliest thinkers and innovators. These books, part of a series called AEI Classics, are available for download as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.
In this important work, Kagan's focus is the post-Vietnam development of America's armed forces--not merely in policy contexts, as his book title modestly states, but also in structure and mentality. With unusual clarity and understanding, Kagan describes the individual and collective dynamics of the four armed services in the two decades after Vietnam, when the military saw a series of definable threats demanding specific responses. This period also ushered in a wider concept of military "transformation," as the nation sought a post-Soviet grand strategy and a number of senior leaders argued that the world was moving to an information age. To meet the challenge, they believed, militaries must implement a "revolution in military affairs." The balance of Kagan's work analyzes the result of this transformation: the development of technologically focused "network-centric warfare" (NCW). But with Afghanistan and Iraq standing grimly in the background, Kagan warns that, in practice, NCW reinforces the concept of war as "killing people and blowing things up" at the expense of the political objectives that separate war from murder.
In Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade, AEI resident fellow Roger Bate analyzes the burgeoning international trade in counterfeit drugs and recommends steps that governments and law enforcement agencies could take to stop it.
The promise of "healthy aging" offers significant opportunities for economic growth and development for Europe in the decades ahead--if governments and citizens are willing to grasp them.
