ABSTRACT
The US Army’s strategic thinking directly shaped American strategic culture from the end of the Vietnam War to the conclusion of the first Gulf War in 1991. The developments by TRADOC reformed the nature of the Army (its constitutive norms) as it allowed the development of the AirLand Battle doctrine. This doctrine and the strategic lessons from the Vietnam War produced the priorities or, in Alistair Johnson’s terms, a ‘ranked set of preferences’ for the use of force by the US. The ‘preferences’ shaped the strategic culture and became the criteria (the regulative norms) for the use of military force by the US. The position of the Army in relation to the culture was thus reversed because it was no longer the nation mobilised but an assertive agent within that very culture, setting the terms for its use. Whilst the Army focused on tactical and operationallevel planning, its requirement for national-level political co-ordination was enacted by the Congressional reforms and embodied in the Goldwater-Nichols Act.
