ABSTRACT
People concerned with strategy in the context of military science, for example, tend to identify the strategic mode of thought with rationality in conflict situations. Mutual Assured Destruction was the name given to the strategic posture which supposedly deterred each superpower from attacking the other because the other had the capacity to kill the society of the attacker. Whether one welcomes or deplores the advances in military doctrine, the art of war, and strategic thought depends on commitments to one or another set of values. One would expect that ideological constraints on strategic thinking would be especially severe in the Soviet Union because of the intense indoctrination that pervades all Soviet educational institutions, especially the military. And indeed examination of Soviet strategic literature gives this impression. For the most part, however, strategists who theorize about war are themselves deeply committed to particular doctrines. The writings of American strategists are free of ritualized genuflections.
