The Next War - Hardcover

Caspar Weinberger; Peter Schweizer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0895264471 ISBN 13: 9780895264473

Publisher: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998

Synopsis

You can read The Next War as a military novel and find it riveting.-- Business Week

About this title

About the Author

Peter Schweizer is a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University.

Reviews

Weinberger, secretary of defense for most of the Reagan years, collaborates with Schweizer, president of the James Madison Institute, to present five possible near-future scenarios in which the U.S. goes to war. Scenario one is based on a North Korean invasion of South Korea that ends in stalemate after a limited nuclear exchange. Number two casts Iran as a rogue state using ballistic missiles to alter the Middle East's balance of power. The third scenario postulates a radical Mexican government scapegoating the U.S. as the source of its country's woes. A fourth describes the conquest of Europe by a resurgent Russia?again with the aid of nuclear weapons. In scenario five, the U.S. and Japan reignite the Pacific War of 1941-1945, this time using "cyberstrikes" against information systems, chemical warfare and a nuclear exchange. The authors tell their stories through the eyes of fictional participants. This format, familiar to readers of techno-thrillers, is an effective framework for dramatizing a set of pessimistic conclusions. Because of America's reduction of its conventional armed forces and its failure to build a missile defense system, none of the scenarios have outcomes more positive than stalemate achieved at high cost. The authors' lament for such a missile system and for the armed forces of the past won't convince those who believe that the dominant modes of future conflict will be terrorism and guerrilla war, however. Weinberger and Schweizer nevertheless make a case deserving serious consideration by citizens and policy-makers alike.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An imaginative and impassioned appeal from a former secretary of defense to reverse, or at least halt, ongoing cutbacks in US military budgets. With assistance from Schweizer (president of the James Madison Institute), Weinberger (who had a seven-year tour of duty in Ronald Reagan's cabinet) offers five engrossing, vivid (albeit fictive) accounts of the sort of wars America may be obliged to fight in the years ahead. His first pre-millennial belligerency pits the US against a reunification-minded North Korea in league with Communist China (which has an acquisition agenda of its own) during the spring of 1998. The next conflict brings America to deadly blows with an Iran bent on becoming the Middle East's dominant power via preemptive military strikes against its neighbors. Mexico, governed in 2003 by a radical regime that makes a hemisphere-threatening shambles of the domestic economy, becomes an opponent. Also on the enemies list is a revivified Russia whose ultranationalist president decides 2006 would be a very good year to start extending Slavic supremacy throughout Western Europe. Last but not least, America squares off against a Japan determined to recoup its flagging trade fortunes by reestablishing a Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere. Weinberger's worst-case scenarios afford crude but effective object lessons on the many ways in which US forces could be caught short (in terms of forward bases, manpower, missile defenses, intelligence resources, transport) in close encounters of the combative kind. And if not quite in a class with Tom Clancy or David Hagberg, his cautionary set pieces do pack a narrative punch. A savvy, stirring call to arms by an elder statesman who wants nothing more than to ensure that his country is prepared for whatever aggressions an uncertain future may hold. The text includes a hard-nosed foreword by Lady Margaret Thatcher. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this work, former Defense Secretary Weinberger and coauthor Schweizer (Victory, LJ 5/15/94) make two simple points: the world remains a dangerous place after the fall of the USSR, and the United States is poorly equipped to cope with such a world. To underscore their thesis, they use a unique, scenario-based approach modeled on Pentagon war-gaming. Though this is not a novel, each chapter uses fictional characters and events to chronicle a hypothetical "next war" against various potential adversaries. The authors emphasize that their intent is not to forecast future events but to outline possible threats and expose shortcomings in U.S. readiness. Significant issues highlighted in the fictionalized "wars" include the frightening proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; deficiencies in U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities; the dramatic decline in U.S. force structure; and the case for an American ballistic-missile defense system. Recommended for academic libraries.
James Holmes, Middletown, R.I.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Regnery Publishing, Inc.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0895264471
• ISBN 13: 9780895264473
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 470