CIAO DATE: 12/2011
October 2011
Project on Defense Alternatives
The essential challenge in the art of strategy is how to achieve objectives within the demanding reality of resource constraints. Agile strategists must always be prepared for changing resource conditions and quickly adapt accordingly. In most times this remark about strategy would be noncontroversial. Strategic planners who have seen the budgets they work with rise 30% in one decade should not be surprised, or even particularly concerned, to find their budgets declining 15% the following decade.1 Indeed, as Lawrence Korb, Laura Conley, and Alex Rothman have chronicled, the defense budget has gone through several periods of major retrenchment in the last fifty years.
Resource link: Strategic Adjustment to Sustain the Force: A survey of current proposals. [PDF] - 308K