"Mark Twain reportedly quipped that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. For students of Cold War history, discussions of a "new offset strategy" certainly have a meter or cadence that resonates with a period of American defense strategy and military innovation that, until now, has been largely ignored. The history of American defense policy during the Cold War is often told by chronologically outlining the waxing and waning of defining ideas or concepts: containment, atoms for peace, open skies, massive retaliation, AirLand Battle, flexible response, détente, entente, various "doctrines" (e.g., Nixon, Carter, Reagan) and so on. Frequently, the idea or concept represents a complex strategy or policy that retains historic significance because of its influence on subordinate defense planning and force structure decisions. In a period replete with acronyms and nicknames, the relatively straightforward "offset strategy" concept has gone relatively unnoticed.
In his book, Lifting the Fog of War, Admiral Bill Owens (retired), former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, identifies the architects of the Cold War offset strategy as Harold Brown, Andrew Marshall, and William Perry. For Owens, the capabilities labeled "revolutionary" in the early 1990s were derived from operational approaches and systems "engineered and acquired in the late 1970s through the late 1980s" that made victory in the 1991 Gulf War "inevitable and our historically small loss of life probable." Writing on the future of military affairs and national strategy in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, former Secretary of Defense Perry argued that the offset strategy, which "sought to use technology as an equalizer or ‘force multiplier,'" was in fact "pursued consistently by five administrations during the 1970s and 1980s." Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter added that after the offset strategy's precepts were "dramatically demonstrated during Operation Desert Storm," they became "key to Washington's way of waging war."
The programs and capabilities that originated in the offset strategy, many of which were not fielded until the late 1980s and early 1990s, revolutionized conventional warfare, assured American dominance in large-scale ground combat, and eventually drove potential adversaries to "design around" American conventional superiority by employing asymmetric advantages. The offset strategy evolved concurrently with doctrine – which came to favor rapid, decisive operations to quickly defeat adversaries – but also largely ignored urban operations and counterinsurgency missions…"
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