Science Of War, The: Defense Budgeting, Military Technology

Description:
The U.S. military is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. How it spends its money, chooses tactics, and allocates its resources have enormous implications for national defense and the economy. 'The Science of War' is the only comprehensive textbook on how to analyze and understand these and other essential problems in modern defense policy. Michael O'Hanlon provides undergraduate and graduate students with an accessible yet rigorous introduction to the subject. Drawing on a broad range of sources and his own considerable expertise as a defense analyst and teacher, he describes the analytic techniques the military uses in every crucial area of military science. O'Hanlon explains how the military budget works, how the military assesses and deploys new technology, develops strategy and fights wars, handles the logistics of stationing and moving troops and equipment around the world, and models and evaluates battlefield outcomes. His modeling techniques have been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the methods he used to predict higher-than-anticipated troop fatalities in Iraq - controversial predictions that have since been vindicated. 'The Science of War' is the definitive resource on warfare in the twenty-first century. The book: gives the best introduction to defense analysis available; covers defense budgeting; shows how to model and predict outcomes in war; explains military logistics, including overseas basing; and, examines key issues in military technology, including missile defense, space warfare, and nuclear-weapons testing. It is based on the author's graduate-level courses at Princeton, Columbia, and Georgetown universities.

Review:
Although war is as much a matter of art as of science, military planning cannot succeed without an understanding of the technical issues that can make or break operations. O'Hanlon, one of the nation's top defense analysts, has performed a service by writing a book that introduces the complexities of budgeting, logistics, combat simulation, and military technologies. The strength of this work is the way it explains the reasoning behind commonly used models and analytic devices, links assumptions to results, and emphasizes the limitations inherent to the tools of defense analysis. -- Choice

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter I: Defense Budgeting and Resource Allocation 8 Chapter II: Modeling Combat and Sizing Forces 63 Chapter III: Logistics and Overseas Bases 141 Chapter IV: Technical Issues in Defense Analysis 169 Conclusion 243 Appendix: Figures and Tables 249 Index 263

Author Biography:
Michael E. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in national security policy. His many books include 'A War Like No Other: The Truth about China's Challenge to America' and 'Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security'.