Date
7-15-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
D. Jonathan White
Keywords
Ronald Reagan, Cold War, Military, Defense, Federal budgets, 1980s
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Smith, Kevin D., "A Position of Strength: The Reagan Military Buildup and the Conventional Forces" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5803.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5803
Abstract
Ronald Reagan's military program, commonly known as the buildup, was one of the most high-profile and enduring aspects of his presidency. Often characterized as “the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. history,†the program remains ill-defined in the extant historiography except concerning the strategic nuclear forces and total cost. This study provides a more in-depth examination of the greater fiscal beneficiary, the non-nuclear conventional forces. Fundamental questions are addressed on the rationale, necessity and destination of expenditures in the primary budget areas of Procurement, Research, Personnel, and Operations. Funding is analyzed in terms of linkage to the administration and the armed forces' national security objectives. In retrospect, the buildup was neither an ill-conceived spending spree nor an exercise in stockpiling. To the contrary, it was shaped by events of the 1970s particularly emerging military technology, the post-Vietnam reforms and the evolving threat of the Soviet Union and its proxies. Under Reagan, the American military experienced a renaissance of character and capabilities that was dramatically revealed in the 1991 Gulf War. The spectacular results of that conflict are more remarkable when contrasted with the state of the armed forces in 1981. While the correlation remains historically unsettled, the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union collapsed just as the payoff emerged from the surge in American defense spending. Ronald Reagan's military buildup was primarily a bi-partisan investment to revitalize the American conventional forces under the framework of new military doctrines as part of his multi-faceted approach to successfully wage the Cold War.
