ABSTRACT
During the Cold War, US analyses of Soviet military power suffered from the over-emphasis on armaments.2 Hence this literature tended to paint a fairly dire picture – one in which Soviet military power was steadily growing, and United States strategic interests were constantly under threat. The fact that the Soviet Union never utilized its apparent military superiority over the United States in a direct military fashion – the fact that conventional war never broke out along the central European front at any time during the Cold War – seems to have escaped the attention of this literature. These problems point to a fundamental flaw in the discipline of Strategic Studies, which stems from the almost unquestioned preference for empiricism – a tendency to over-emphasize capability at the expense of will.3 The standard argument then made was that intentions were difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, measure, and assess; hence the focus on such quantifiable variables as armaments. Ironically, most analyses of Chinese military power appear to suffer from the reverse – too much attention being paid to the issue of will, and insufficient in-depth analysis of armaments and actual Chinese military capabilities per se.4
