How did armed forces reach their present force-structure position?

How did armed forces reach their present force-structure position?

Repeated narrow forecasts shaped the forces: first an expected NATO-Warsaw Pact war in Europe, then a post-Soviet belief that major powers would face only wars of choice.

A recurring question asks how successive planning decisions brought armed forces to their present position. Cold War planning expected the decisive conflict to occur in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, allowing other missions to fade from force design. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the related "end of history" argument treated major-power war as unlikely and reduced armed forces further. In that view, the remaining wars would be wars of choice for the major powers. Both approaches depended on a narrow forecast of where and why war could occur, summarized here as roughly eighty years of logical thinking built on restrictive assumptions.