Research for Response Times

The issue is whether warning times for U.S. responses to situations are so short that the U.S. must maintain forces overseas -at land bases or at sea-in order to respond in a timely manner. We judged the length of warning time crudely: from the time a situation broke on the world scene until a U.S. operation began. As described herein, "breaking on the world scene" might be an incident or attack happening out of the blue ; but more often involves a precipitating incident in a local situation in which the U.S. government did not contemplate military intervention when the situation first appeared (e.g., Lebanon). How the U.S. government seizes the problem and begins deliberations at the NSC level is beyond the scope of this paper. A narrower, more technical definition would be from the time warning orders were sent from the President or Secretary of Defense through the Chairman, JCS, to the relevant Unified Commander. Those tend to be of a much shorter time; some cases are discussed in the annex to this paper, and extract from our 1997 study.