About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


8 Pol'y Stud. J. 7 (1979-1980)

handle is hein.journals/plyssjnl8 and id is 1 raw text is: SYMPOSIUM ON AMERICAN SECURITY POLICY AND POLICY-MAKING Introduction by the Symposium Coeditors Robert Harkavy, Pennsylvania State University Edward Kolodziej, University of Illinois This volume of essays responds to the invitation of Stuart Nagel, editor of the Policy Studies Journal, to develop a symposium on American security policy and policy making. The Journal seeks to present a balanced menu to its readers of symposia concerned with domestic policy problems--like education and race--and with new and emerging security and foreign policy issues. Following Nagel's suggestion, the editors wrote to specialists in security policy asking for ideas. We received replies from over 100 researchers who pro- posed a wide range of topics. From these we fashioned a group of contributions that met two general tests. First, we wanted articles that approached the question of the use and control of military force as different aspects of a single problem facing American policy makers. There has been a tendency to treat these questions as separate problems. There are even those who view solutions to the use ques- tion as an obstacle to that of control and vice versa--a kind of zero- sum game. Where a writer, like Clausewitz, would never have dreamt of separating the two questions, many moderns have trouble seeing them as parts of a larger whole, viz., the role that force and its control must play in assuring a nation's security, economic, and regime interests. This conceptual compartmentalization has also tended to be institutionalized in the security policy-making community. Within the government, the Pentagon is supposed to be concerned about the use or threat of force while the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is expected to deal with the problem of control. In academia. centers for the study of strategic policy become tarred with the brush of advocating the use of force because they focus, say, on the strategic balance between the superpowers or regional warfare in Europe or the Middle East. On the other hand, arms control and, especially disarmament questions have become the preserves of peace researchers and correspondingly named centers. So while some researchers study the causes of war, others worry about the conditions of peace. This same inclination to divide into parts what should be viewed as a whole also characterizes the research centers, think tanks, and special interest groups which populate the non-academic research community. They can be roughly categorized according to whether they concen- trate on the use or the control sides of the security dilemma. This volume would like to contribute to the lowering, even if it does not fully succeed in the dismantling, of these conceptual and institutional barriers. The editors have tried, therefore, to choose contributions that, taken together, address the use and control issues as different facets of a single American security problem. Our initial optimism about engaging authors who could treat these two questions simultaneously in their articles was partially frustrated by the difficulty of the task of cramming contributors into a framework of analysis that, however attractive, was not congenial to the habits of thinking of each participant. We decided to make our point through a blend of articles rather than through a certainly fatal attempt to