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Focusing on the two most significant deployments of U.S. military force in the ‘global war on terror,’ this article examines U.S. military strategy after September 11, 2001. The main thesis is that the post-9/11 U.S. military strategy is a product of a revised ‘way of war’ that was developed by U.S. armed forces after Vietnam and the first Gulf War, rather than by significant aspects of the post-9/11 environment. The article highlights the influence of the U.S. Army on American strategic culture and the subsequent reliance of the army on technology and conventional warfare—a strategy that eschews the broader social and political implications of warfare. Military outcomes in both Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as reflective of the shortcomings inherent within the model of military strategy that the U.S. Army, in particular, has developed over the last 30 years. The article explains the particular emphases in U.S. grand strategy and recurrent weaknesses in the U.S. response to 9/11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How, in the absence of any link between Iraq and the events of September 11, 2001, was the Bush administration able to go to war against Iraq with widespread political support? Well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, the public was concerned about terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq. In the immediate months after the attacks, the public was supportive, at least hypothetically, of military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nonetheless, the Bush administration concluded that such support would be difficult to sustain without an aggressive domestic mobilization campaign. This article examines the influence of four critical factors that enabled the administration to frame the case for war in Iraq: (1) executive-branch information and propaganda advantages, (2) executive cohesion, (3) oppositional fragmentation, and (4) the nature and history of the Iraqi regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]