Research for Global War on Terror

As a CNA Self-Initiated Project, the author has brought together a series of strands of national security that he had been working on: the American Way of War, globalization and the U.S. Navy, the Global War on Terror, fleet architectures, the responses of U.S. forces to situations around the world, capabilities-based planning, and a study in anticipation of QDR-06 for the Office of Force Transformation. Of particular prior importance was work on the changing nature of warfare for the National Intelligence Council, where techniques for looking out to 2020 were developed. This paper is in some ways a summary of all that previous work: the state of the world, the state of conflict in the world, U.S. foreign policy, especially after 9/11, the global war on terror, the future of U.S. forces after Iraq, and how the U.S. Navy relates to all this. The paper is set "after Iraq," but at the time of writing, it was not clear when Iraq would be "over," and what "over" would look like.