Thinking About America's Defense: An Analytical Memoir

Abstract : Glenn Altran Kent was a uniquely acute player in American defense policy in the second half of the 20th century. From 1957, when he joined the Weapons Plans Division of the Air Staff in the Pentagon, until his retirement from active duty in 1974, he was among the most perceptive and influential officers in the United States Air Force. For the next two decades, from his perch at the RAND Corporation, he published analyses on a broad range of topics that both shaped and raised the level of debates regarding the nation's security. A selected list of the issues in which General Kent played a decisive role is sufficient to give a sense of the scope of his influence: the inception of the single integrated operational plan (SIOP) governing the wartime employment of U.S. strategic nuclear forces, the acknowledgement, in the early 1960s, of the dominance of strategic offensive nuclear forces and the subsequent abandonment by the mid-1960s of major efforts to field strategic defenses, the conception of strategic nuclear arms control treaties as a means not only of constraining the destructive potential of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals but also of enhancing strategic stability by strengthening the survivability of those forces, rigorous evaluations of the effects of deploying national missile defenses under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the development of military systems that have been central to the overwhelmingly successful U.S. military operations of the 1990s and beyond: the F-15 fighter, the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS),the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), a variety of precision-guided munitions, the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite early warning system.