We took a common-sense approach to finding enemies to fight. We eliminated wars of conquest against unconquerable states such as Russia, Iran (we projected they would be nuclear capable in 2025), and China. We eliminated whole continents we then saw as barren of vital interests for the United States: the Americas, Africa, and South Asia. That left us with only a few options: wars on the periphery against great power surrogates or a war against a rouge state such as North Korea.
Do read it all. In 1996, Russia was still relatively quiet and China had yet to materially rise (remember in that year China couldn't even find our carriers operating off of Taiwan in a crisis let alone attack them).
Today the situation is different with more capable Russia and China as potential opponents. But the point of fighting on the peripheries is still valid even though now we must contemplate a war on the periphery of a China far more powerful than in 1996 and which will grow more capable in the foreseeable future.
Fighting on the periphery of China with campaign-level Army forces is what I argued for contemplating in the recent edition of Military Review.
Funny enough, earlier versions of the published story in Military Review that I failed to get published used the concepts discussed in the first cited article (Army After Next, Objective Force, and Force XXI) as jumping off points for the basic premise.
The very reasonable assumption still holds true. And we still need to figure it out.
UPDATE: And I suspect that rather than meaning America had no vital interests in the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, that the authors saw no threats that would require a major war to protect.
Or at least that's how I'd frame it.
