"Rebuilding America's Defenses (RAD)" is a policy document published by a neoconservative Washington think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Its pages have been compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf in that they outline an aggressive military plan for U.S. world domination during the coming century. And just as Hitler's book was not taken seriously until after his catastrophic rise to power, so it seems that relatively few Americans are expressing alarm at this published document that is a blueprint for many of the present actions of the Bush administration, actions which have begun to destabilize the balance of power between the nations of the world.There is, indeed, much reason for alarm because PNAC is not an ordinary think tank and "RAD" is not an ordinary policy paper. Many PNAC members now hold key positions in the White House, Defense and State Departments, among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Lewis Libby, and John Bolton, along with others in lesser positions. William Kristol, writer for the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, is chairman of the group.
Some of these men have been advocating for a strong military posture since the ending of cold war hostilities with the Soviet Union. Wishing to capitalize on the fact that the US had emerged as the world's preeminent superpower, they have lobbied for increases in military spending in order to establish what they call a Pax Americana that will reap the rewards of complete military and commercial control of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. This, they said, would be accomplished by the waging of "multiple simultaneous large-scale wars" and one of their first orders of business was always the removal of Saddam Hussein, thereby giving the US a toehold in the oil-rich Middle East.