This is the first comprehensive discussion, from the defense planning point of view, of the problems of limited wars such as in Korea, and those which face us in Southeast Asia today. It deals with the military, technical and policy planning aspects of the key question: "If strategy dictates defensive limited war as part of our military policy, then how do we build and use armed forces to carry out that strategy effettively?" The author's unique background, first with the Institute for Defense Analyses, and currently as Special Assistant Counterinsurgency, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggests the importance of his contribution in the widening-public discussion of such wars.

"The author discusses the possibility of positive action in the world and brings up some difficulties in carrying it out . . . [these difficulties] are highly relevant to our daily international problems, and one therefore hopes that the leaders of our government will take time out to read the summary of them . . . . If they had done so earlier, perhaps we would not have heard such optimistic statements as this one of eighteen months ago: 'If you give us the time and money the war in South Vietnam will by over in two years'. Did this spokesman mean that we would give up in two years, or that we would be driven out before a two-year period expired? A colleague (Mr. H. A. Wheeler) has made a more realistic statement about the general cold war: 'We are in a war and we are not winning.'"
– Operations Research