Kennedy+1961-63

Missile Gap It was Kennedy who primarily criticized Eisenhower for allowing a "missile gap" to develop; however, when he became President, he soon found out that the "missile gap" did not exist. Despite this fact, he continued Eisenhower's policy of continually building missiles to keep up the strategic superiority. After all, America believed that any war could be won by military superiority, thus it was drawn to always be stronger by having stronger and more efficient weapons and military tactics.

Deterrence theory of Flexible response The Policy of Flexible Response was in theory, as its name states, to be more flexible concerning the ways the USA would approach situations and issues.
 * Hence, the ,main objective was to make it so the USA would have more options to choose from, where different levels of actions can be used inorder to tackle the differnet levels of issues;
 * As Edward argues, the USA wanted the capacity to fight both a limited war in Europe and Asia and to retaliate against nuclear threqts from the USSR;
 * Wanted to achieve this by increasing the amount of conventional weapons, nuclear weapons, as well as economic aid and efforts to negotiate with the USSR.
 * Believed an all or nothing policy such as Eisenhower^s massive retaliation would either bring humiliation if there was a situation where action was needed but no action was taken; or the start of World War 3 if the nuclear weapons were actually used ( especially in a situation where perhaps the use of nuclear weapons wasnt needed).
 * Flexible response was a more realistic and efficient policy as it can be adapted to any scale of a problem.

Vietnam Strategic environment