1988 C-SPAN Video on Ikle-Wohlstetter Panel’s Strategy Report

On January 12, 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, a high-level panel chaired by outgoing Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Dr. Fred C. Iklé and strategist Albert Wohlstetter, assembled to publicly unveil their final report, Discriminate Deterrence. The report outline a new military strategy for meeting the future security environment’s changing dangers, with the aim of increasing (in the report’s own words) American and allied ability “to bring force to bear effectively, with discrimination and in time, to thwart any of a wide range of plausible aggressions against their major common interest–and in that way to deter such aggression.” The Iklé-Wohlstetter panel’s other members were Ambassador Anne L. Armstrong, Counselor to Presidents Nixon and Ford; Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Carter; Judge William P. Clark, former Deputy Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Reagan; W. Graham Claytor, Jr., Deputy Secretary of Defense under the Carter Administration; General Andrew J. Goodpaster, Jr. (USA, ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and Commander of U.S. European Command; Admiral James L. Holloway, III (USN, Ret.), former Chief of Naval Operations; Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, an influential political scientist at Harvard University; Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to Presidents Ford and Nixon; Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist; General Bernard A. Schriever (USAF, Ret.), who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the 1950s and 1960s; and General John W. Vessey (USA, Ret.), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most of them were in attendance at the press conference that C-SPAN filmed.