The importance of managing such perceptions lies in the fact that nations judge potential adversaries in terms of political and military responsiveness, reliability, consistency, and, most of all, unity: unity of purpose, unity of effort, and unity of action. In this media age, unity, or the perception of unity, will be a key determinant of international standing in the global pecking order. Those who can act as one-who demonstrate unifying social cohesion and national will-- will- have a decided advantage over those who are preoccupied and immobilized by balkanization from within.

An image of national will is essential because unity of purpose is so fundamental for effectively wielding power in the international arena. During the Cold War, when national power was defined almost exclusively by its military component, the United States sought to build its capabilities for purposes of tacit threat-making so as to deter any serious military conflict. The strength and credibility yielded a balance of power insofar as the perceptions of each nation's military capability deterred the threatening maneuvers by others. Today, confronted by foes that are more and more unlike the United States and by situations that are inherently ambiguous in their origins and consequences, bolstering national will is the key to diplomatic success. For a nation that has adopted diversity and chosen pluralism as a way of social and political life, such will comes at a premium. In contrast to the practiced military inaction of the Cold War, there is now an imperative for taking decisive military action abroad on a more regular basis. Undertaking and sustaining such action depend on the convergence of national will and the projection of that unity and determination to potential adversaries.

At another level, the perceptual dimension of strategic effectiveness reflects the fact that the military not only possesses capabilities and performs functions but also projects a certain image of itself. Could we alter such imagery if we wanted to, and should we want to if we could? The answer is "yes" on both counts. It is time to disabuse ourselves of the shibboleth that the best, if not the only, path to peace is through the practice of war. If peace is what we seek as an ultimate strategic end, and if demilitarization is the necessary precondition for such peace, it seems only logical that reorienting the behavior and uses of the military, and thus transforming its image, is the only way to make progress in that direction.

Supporting Strategic Aims

The most telling basis for judging the military's strategic effectiveness is the extent to which military operations and practices contribute to the attainment of larger strategic aims. The first of these grand strategic aims is the promotion and protection of a comprehensive conception of human well-being that embodies all the precepts enumerated in the preamble to the US Constitution. Thus, military spending, force structure, doctrine, technology, manpower, training, and operational employment must not only provide for the common defense but also contribute to a more perfect union. When the military diverts mammoth resources from other critical national needs; when its obsessive secrecy provides a rationale for injustice and unaccountability; when its actions abroad undermine US credibility, its security is diminished rather than strengthened.

The second overarching aim that should guide the United States strategically is the prevention of crisis. A crisis occurs when the traditional strategy has failed. Once a crisis begins, resources, time, energy, and personnel must be diverted from their intended purposes, and deliberative decisionmaking must be cast aside, just to defuse the situation. Moreover, the magnifying and time-compressing effects of contemporary media have so lowered the threshold of what counts as a crisis that situations previously considered more or less routine or insignificant now are inflated to crisis proportions.

A military that reinforces the war-making stereotype of militaries everywhere, that provokes by its presence rather than reassures, that is too blunt and lethal an instrument of statecraft to be used for anything other than reacting destructively to "crisis" situations, only reinforces the prospect of this strategically debilitating state of offairs. The antidote would be a reoriented, reconfigured military capable of being employed in a less provocative, more discriminating, and even constructive manner to treat and remove the root causes of unrest, violence, and instability before they perpetuate a crisis.

The third strategic aim, unique to democracy, is the preservation of civil society-acting in a manner that strengthens, or at least does not weaken, the interlocking web of public and private institutions that imbues democracy with meaning and enables society to function with civility. This calls for a military that is demographically, experientially, and ethically representative of society, and that reinforces public trust and confidence in government by being not only operationally competent but also socially responsible.

During the Cold War, the military, along with the other institutions that constitute the national-security establishment, adopted practices that may well have undermined civil society. Today, much of the intellectual residue of the Cold War remains: the ingrained penchant for secrecy, the conviction that pervasive evil must be defeated on its own terms, and the belief that extraordinary ends require and permit extraordinary means. Moreover, although opinion polls suggest that the public holds the military in relatively high esteem compared to other public institutions, there is mounting evidence that the military has become progressively more alienated from society. While incidents of socially irresponsible behavior by armed-- services personnel-sexual misconduct, abuses of authority, intolerance, and fraud-have occurred with alarming frequency in recent years, uniformed professionals still regularly express attitudes of moral superiority. Such behaviors and attitudes reveal much that is troubling about the military's selfaggrandizing sense of its mission and itself.

Four Strategic Imperatives

The above strategic aims suggest four imperatives that should guide the structure and use of a strategically effective military. First, if the United States is to achieve lasting peace and security, it must have the capability to target, deal effectively with, and ultimately eliminate the underlying causes of unrest, violence, and instability abroad. To have the capability only to react after the fact, and then to do so only when the symptoms of the moment have become sufficiently urgent and threatening, is to heighten the probability of crisis misjudgment and failure. The dilemma, of course, is that treating causes-intolerance, injustice, repression, deprivation, environmental degradation-means dealing with conditions before they are deemed threatening, when they fall within the accepted sovereign purview of another country, or when they thereby seem to demand a strictly nonmilitary response.