ABSTRACT
Military and strategic analysts as distinguished as Liddell Hart, Adam Roberts and Thomas Schelling have all had good words about civilian-based, unarmed, non-territorial defence. Each of them has also seen important limitations to it as a strategy for defence. Whatever may happen at the borders or beyond, the main defence and the main body of defenders are within. The society, then, defends itself. An invader can overcome border defences. One of the casualties of post-war military strategy has been a clear notion of the objects of defence. It may indeed be better to defend America in Saigon or El Salvador than in San Francisco. Nuclear-era strategy is very slow to come to terms with the necessity of the grounding defence in the objects of defence. The complexity of contemporary weaponry removes defence from the experiential world of the average man.
