Critics often charge that the major revision of U.S. military strategy which took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union was budget-driven rather than strategydriven. Partially in response to this, the current strategic review, led by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, is intended to be "strategy-driven." Even so, the defense budget remains one of the central shaping features of U.S. national security and national military strategy. To understand what is possible in terms of defense transformation, one must first have a firm grasp of the budgetary context of strategic decisions. In the monograph that follows, Dr. Dennis Ippolito, one of the leading experts on the American defense budget, assesses this context. He shows that defense will continue to compete with domestic programs for that portion of the budget allocated to discretionary spending, and argues that this is a competition in which defense needs have not fared especially well in the past and may not in the future.