Always Strategic: Jointly Essential Landpower
Dr Colin S Gray
Monograph by the US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College Press
"American Landpower is a strategic instrument of state policy and needs to be considered as such. The purpose of this monograph is to explore and explain the nature of Landpower, both in general terms and also with particular regard to the American case. Five themes drive through this work. Specifically, it is argued that: (1) Landpower is unique in the character of the quality it brings to the American joint team for national security; (2) the United States has a permanent need for the human quality in Landpower that this element provides inherently; (3) Landpower is always and indeed necessarily strategic in its meaning and implications—it is a quintessentially strategic instrument of state policy and politics; (4) strategic Landpower is unavoidably and beneficially joint in its functioning, and this simply is so much the contemporary character of American strategic Landpower that we should consider jointness integral to its permanent nature; and, (5) notwithstanding the nuclear context since 1945, Landpower retained, indeed retains, most of the strategic utility it has possessed through all of history: this is a prudent judgment resting empirically on the evidence of 70 years’ experience. "