4 , SOCIAL SCIENTIST an inertia of its own which is hard to control once the defence apparatus has been set in motion. When the Pentagon acts as if certain events are likely, it has a tendency to make such contingencies inevitable. Current US planning for a confrontation in the Middle East thus raises a very real danger that we will in fact be dragged into such a conflict. By studying defence planning, therefore, we can plot some of the dangers ahead and begin to alert the public to the danger of future interventions. The American war machine was badly mauled in Vietnam : not only was a modern 500,000-man US expeditionary army fought to a standstill by less than half as many peasant soldiers, but public support for the military reached an all-time low as millions of people at home joined the anti-war movement and many others began to question the basic assumptions of US foreign policy. Most battle wounds heal in time, but the invisible scars of reduced morale and public antipathy are not overcome so easily. As we enter the post-Vietnam era, it is clear that the defence establishment will have to accommodate itself to the following restraints : a) the American public will not remain docile and allow the United States to be dragged into another protracted counter-guerrilla war in Asia; b) the growing concern with domestic issues—the environment, racism, inflation, etc—coupled with widespread scepticism concerning the Pentagon's bookkeeping, suggests that less Federal money (on a proportional basis) will be available for defence programmes in the years ahead; c) the spread of anti-war sentiment to the Armed Services, and growing GI resistance to racism and repression, have substantially reduced the combat-worthiness of many units and have forced the Pentagon to abandon many manpower-intensive strategic plans. Most serious, however, is the collapse of the ideological consensus which assured popular support for all Cold War measures based on uncompromising opposition to Communist expansion. It is no longer sufficient—as in the heyday of Berlin and Korea—to prophesy the spread of Communism in order to secure public backing (and Congressional appropriations) for the deployment of US forces abroad. In a major essay on the military's present predicament, Admiral Stansfield Turner of the Navy War College commented : The American people appear to be desirous of reducing the worldwide roles we have been filling for the past 25 years. . . . Thus, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pay for all the forces needed to support the strategy of containment of Communism that has remained largely unchanged over the past quarter-century.1 The turbulent domestic reaction to America's involvement in the Indochina conflict has dulled public awareness of changes taking place elsewhere in the world. Only now, with US disengagement from Vietnam nearly complete, can we begin to appreciate the magnitude of power