No readiness impact---other factors check rogue states.

Over the course of the last several decades, alarmists have often focused on potential dangers presented by rogue states, as they came to be called in the 1990s. These were led by such devils du jour as Nasser, Sukarno, Castro, Gaddafi, Khomeini, Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein, Milosˇevic´, and Ahmadinijad, all of whom have since faded into history’s dustbin.66 Today the alarm has been directed at Iran as discussed in Chapter 6 and also at North Korea as discussed in this one. However, neither country really threatens to commit major direct military aggression. Iran, in fact, has eschewed the practice for several centuries.

Nonetheless, it might make some sense to maintain a capacity to institute containment and deterrence efforts carried out in formal or informal coalition with concerned neighboring countries – and there are quite a few of these in each case. However, the military requirements for effective containment by their neighbors, by the United States, and by the broader world community are far from monumental and do not necessarily require the United States to maintain large forces-in-being for the remote eventuality.

This is suggested by the experience with the Gulf War of 1991 when military force was successfully applied to deal with a rogue venture – the conquest by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of neighboring Kuwait. As noted earlier, Iraq’s invasion was rare to the point of being unique: it was the only case since World War II in which one United Nations country has invaded another with the intention of incorporating it into its own territory. It scarcely appears, as laid out in Chapter 3, that Iraq’s pathetic forces required a large force to be thrown at them to decide to withdraw: over a period of half a year, they did not erect anything resembling an effective defensive system and, when the chips were down, they proved to lack not only defenses, but strategy, tactics, leadership, and morale as well.

Countries opposed to provocative rogue behavior do not need to have a large force-in-being because there would be plenty of time to build one up (should it come to that) if other measures such as economic sanctions and diplomatic forays (including appeasement) fail to persuade.