therefore be able to defeat or destroy an adversary more effectively,
with fewer losses to ourselves and with a range of capabilities from
long-range precision strike to more effective close-in weapons.

Before proceeding further, an example is useful to focus some of the
as yet unknowable consequences of these broader realities, changes,
and trends. The deployment of American forces to Bosnia is a reaction
to and representation of major shifts occurring in the post-Cold War
world. With these shifts, this deployment is suggestive of what may
lie ahead for the use, relevance, and design of military force. The
legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then, the start of the Cold War,
caused the West to adopt policies for containing and deterring the
broad threat posed by the Soviet Union and its ideology. Thermonuclear
weapons, complemented over time by strong conventional forces,
threatened societal damage to Russia. Conventional forces backed by
tactical nuclear weapons were later required, in part, to halt a
massive Soviet ground attack in Europe and, in part, to provide an
alternative to (immediate) use of nuclear weapons.

Today, the First Armored Division, the principal American unit serving
in Bosnia is, in essence, the same force that fought so well in
_Desert Storm_ and, for the bulk of the Cold War along with our other
units, had been designed to defend NATO against and then defeat a
numerically superior, armored and mechanized Soviet adversary
advancing across the plains of Germany. Now these troops, as well as
others from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, are engaged in OOTW
for which special training, rules of engagement, command arrangements,
and other support structures have been put in place at short notice,
few of which were even envisaged a few years ago. These are also
operations that, because of intense, instantaneous media coverage, can