This essay is a product of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) 2001 Working Group, a project of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the working group is an independent, honest-broker effort intended to build intellectual capital for the upcoming QDR. More specifically, it aims to frame issues, develop options, and provide insights for the Chairman, the services, and the next administration in three areas: defense strategy, criteria for sizing conventional forces, and force structure for 2005-2010. One of the group's initial tasks was to assess the future security environment to the year 2025. This was pursued by surveying the available literature to identify areas of consensus and debate and by deepening knowledge of asymmetric threats to the United States both at home and abroad, given their potential appeal to likely adversaries in view of America's conventional military superiority. The essay that follows grew out of that latter effort and reflects a growing consensus that the issues posed by asymmetric threats should occupy a more prominent place in defense strategy and force planning. This essay makes a unique contribution to the growing literature on asymmetric threats by providing a conceptual framework for thinking about such threats, offering an approach to determining which threats should receive the greatest attention from defense planners, and suggesting concrete steps that the Nation should take to address them.

This essay is a product of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) 2001 Working Group, a project of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the working group is an independent, honest-broker effort intended to build intellectual capital for the upcoming QDR. More specifically, it aims to frame issues, develop options, and provide insights for the Chairman, the services, and the next administration in three areas: defense strategy, criteria for sizing conventional forces, and force structure for 2005-2010. One of the group's initial tasks was to assess the future security environment to the year 2025. This was pursued by surveying the available literature to identify areas of consensus and debate and by deepening knowledge of asymmetric threats to the United States both at home and abroad, given their potential appeal to likely adversaries in view of America's conventional military superiority. The essay that follows grew out of that latter effort and reflects a growing consensus that the issues posed by asymmetric threats should occupy a more prominent place in defense strategy and force planning. This essay makes a unique contribution to the growing literature on asymmetric threats by providing a conceptual framework for thinking about such threats, offering an approach to determining which threats should receive the greatest attention from defense planners, and suggesting concrete steps that the Nation should take to address them.

This essay aims to frame issues, develop oppositions, and provide insights for the Chairman, the services, and the next administrations in three areas: defense strategy, criteria for sizing conventional forces, and force structure for 2005-2010.

Philosophers have wrestled over the morality and ethics of war for nearly as long as human beings have been waging it. The death and destruction that unmanned warfare entails magnifies the moral and ethical challenges we face in conventional warfare and everyday society. Intrinsically linked are questions and perennial problems concerning what justifies the initial resort to war, who may be legitimately targeted in warfare, who should be permitted to serve the military, the collateral effects of military weaponry and the methods of determining and dealing with violations of the laws of war. This book provides a comprehensive and unifying analysis of the moral, political and social questions concerning the rise of drone warfare.