America's military security depends in part on its ability to respond quickly to unexpected challenges. As the TIME staffers assigned to this week's cover story on the U.S. military discovered, reporting on the vast and myriad dimensions of the nation's armed forces often called for the same sort of responses.

To get the striking photographs that accompany the story, Photographer Neil Leifer spent four days in basic training with a brigade at Fort Knox, Ky., while Photographer Mark Meyer visited a strategic Air Force base in the Northeast and joined a B-52 bomber crew on a simulated nuclear-alert mission. After getting a look at a Boeing air-launched cruise missile plant in Seattle, Meyer moved on to Eglin Air Force base in Florida, where he covered one of the largest peacetime parachute drops in U.S. history. Says he: "It's one thing to read about military hardware in the newspapers and quite another to stand on the runway as a B-52 flies overhead. Up close, it's all tremendously impressive."

Chicago Correspondent Patricia Delaney, who as a child visited uncles who were resident officers at Fort Sheridan and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, returned to both bases and found that for today's officers the quality of life has "deteriorated sharply." Bonn Correspondent Lee Griggs was also struck by the poor conditions he encountered as he traveled to U.S. bases across West Germany. Says Griggs: "There is a great deal of concern here that the situation could possibly undermine morale and thus military preparedness. It is an appalling story of decay and neglect."

To assess sophisticated modern weaponry, Correspondent Jerry Hannifin not only talked with Army generals, civilian experts, scientists and military aviators but also went up for a test ride in an F18, the latest U.S. combat plane. Correspondent Roberto Suro spent the past five months tracking Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, this week's cover subject, and interviewed academic experts and defense industry executives. He found that the language of war has also become more sophisticated. Says he: "One learns that the future is the 'outyears' and that battles no longer have front lines but instead have FEBAs--for Forward Edge Battle Areas." Correspondent Johanna McGeary got both Republican and Democratic views of the issue in Congress. She concluded that one thing can be said for certain about America's new defense buildup: it will cause many a war on Capitol Hill. "The American public may say they want bigger and better guns and armies, but they have no idea as yet what the social and economic cost will be," observes McGeary. "There are crucial choices to be made, and they will be hard indeed."

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