OCTOBER 12, 2015
Who killed American strategy? Discussion about American security and defense today often resembles TV shows likeCrime Scene Investigation and its numerous spinoffs. There’s a dead body, a list of suspects, and a convoluted plotline that somehow has to be resolved in one hour of screen time and commercial breaks. Like detectives on CSI, defense writers are at the scene of the proverbial crime, collecting evidence and speculating about the culprit. The dead body belongs to American strategy, horrifically murdered by an unknown assailant. Who — or what — is responsible?
The shocking twist on tonight’s episode of CSI: Pentagon is that we — the defense analytical community — killed American strategy. While American strategy certainly lived a troubled life and the list of “usual suspects” is fairly long, it was nonetheless a victim of our own unrealistic expectations and inability to deal with the messy reality of what strategy is and what it can do. Whoever killed strategy, our inability to make choices and recognize tradeoffs surely made us an accessory to the crime. And unless we come to grips with the inherent flaws, difficulties, and problems of making strategy, the killer in this crime — our adherence to a romantic, unrealistic, and empirically dubious view of strategy — will surely claim more victims.
American strategy’s troubled life
TV crime procedurals often begin with the premise that the victim had a perfect life, only to reveal later on that the victim is hiding sordid secrets that figure into the circumstances leading up to the murder. For example, the victim had a drug addiction or was behind on paying a debt to a local mobster. Sometimes the victim led a double life; countless murder mysteries often reveal that the victim was cheating on his wife and thus was being blackmailed by a prostitute or mistress. Of course, these failings and imperfections do not necessarily explain who killed the victim, but they often yield valuable clues.
Certainly American strategy had no shortage of admirers. Every government agency in DC and public policy think tank attaches the word “strategy” or “strategic” to what it does, and countless op-eds are penned saying that we need strategy. There are numerous civilian and military educational institutions where it is taught or referenced as a core subject. American strategy’s respectability and accomplishments, however, was an elaborate façade that concealed serious underlying problems.
Even its friends were unaware of its history of failures, such as its haphazard management of low-intensity conflictsand frequently flawed attempts to measure its adversaries’ military capabilities. A psychologist examining the victim also noted that the victim suffered from a number of psychological problems and issues, such as a tendency to mirror-image its opponents and commit to losing battles out of an emotional concern for its reputation and the blood and treasure it had already committed to the fight. Others familiar with the victim’s life observed that American strategy had an unhealthy obsession with technology and a tendency to conflate technology with the political aims that ought to have guided its use. Finally, American strategy has always been indifferent to the local politics and institutions of the foreigners that it interacts with, despite the critical nature of such forces for success and failure in its wars.
But this only scratches the surface of the problems that plagued American strategy during its tragic life. Understanding American strategy isn’t just a matter of understanding the military and its tactics and techniques. To truly understand American strategy one also needs to understand the political elites who helped make it and their incentives, tendencies, and motivations. This shady crowd was motivated largely by their own self-interest, and hadalways been in some shape or form. Why did American strategy associate with such a dangerous and unreliable crowd? Couldn’t it just put politics aside and focus on achieving the national interest? Unfortunately, one cannot have strategy without politics.
A Prussian general familiar with the victim’s life observed that war is always the outgrowth of politics. While American strategy’s friends believed that it made decisions based purely on what would further the national interest, historians familiar with the victim argue that the victim’s decision-making had always been influenced by domestic politics and other related factors. Politics pervades strategy and national security and cannot be avoided. There will be politics: the tortured bureaucratic politics that prevents military services from achieving common aims; the politics of civil-military relations and the direction of strategy; the convoluted domestic politics surrounding the use of military force; and the deadly politics of local war zones and the international system as a whole.
Both ideological differences and the struggle for power and influence among politicians complicated strategy because politicians’ interests and strategic goals did not always match up perfectly. Indeed, sometimes strategy was little more than the result of an internal struggle for power, competition among policy elites, an effort to appease aninfluential domestic interest group, or a shaky compromise between different bureaucratic factions. Finally, politicians avoid hard defense choices when they would be politically unpopular (such as the financing of America’s wars), fix intelligence when the results of spycraft are politically inconvenient, consistently disregard the warnings ofacademic researchers, intelligence and military specialists, and often lie routinely to the American people about basic facts of war and peace.
How we killed American strategy
There are certainly many suspects in American strategy’s murder, and Joshua Foust does a decent job of listing who and what falls into the list of usual suspects. But the shocking plot twist in tonight’s episode of CSI: Pentagon is that we — the community of people that talk, debate, write about, and work in the making of strategy — were nonetheless accessories to the crime. How? We failed at the most critical task of all — understanding the nature of the problem and proposing solutions. Without a realistic idea of what to expect out of strategy, it is difficult if not impossible to diagnose problems and suggest improvements and alternatives.
It was expected that American strategy could be formulated through rational bureaucratic planning, with all needs and problems anticipated upfront, competing goals and behaviors de-conflicted, and structural ambiguities resolved. American strategy’s cousins in the business world had long since abandoned such expectations, but American strategy was unfortunately stuck with the burden of unrealistic expectations despite the fact that it had little chance of ever living up to them. At best, American strategy could never fully reconcile desired ends, ways, and means in the manner that many believed and expected it could. At best, it could achieve a “good enough” level of coherence in how it translated political aims into the use of military power. At worst, the very assumption that making good strategy is possible is in doubt.
Instead of grappling with the structural uncertainties as to whether or not such high standards could ever be met, we were content to wallow in tired clichés and vague platitudes. We called for “grand” strategy without understandinghow difficult and messy it was for a superpower with global commitments to make anything approximating it. Because of our unrealistic expectations about how American strategy ought to work, we had no way of dealing with the imperfect and often highly messy way it is made in real life. We expected a mythical “master strategist” to solve all of our problems, and then reacted with shock and distress when no such individual materialized to fix our strategic woes. We said that America “doesn’t have a strategy” even if it actually did (a bad one, admittedly) because the messy real-world process of producing it did not match our beliefs about how strategy ought to be made.
Finally, we compounded the problem by ridiculing the very people — political scientists — who specialized in the politics surrounding strategy, calling their work overly arcane and irrelevant to policy out of a silly dislike of their often highly quantitative methods and specialized research. Much of the mystery surrounding why the U.S. government has such difficulty making strategy is a mundane matter to the political scientist. However, not only has it been fashionable to ignore such matters in declaring what they do irrelevant, analysts also more or less ignored research concerning even the most basic policies and tools relevant to defense and national security. In short, we made an unrealistic fetish out of how strategy is made; and on top of that, we deliberately chose to ignore information that might have disabused us of such fantastical notions.
Eulogy
American strategy lived a troubled life, and there are certainly many people that a detective could plausibly suspect as having a hand in its murder. However, it was not really any of the usual suspects that killed American strategy. We — the community that analyzes and formulates it — did. We killed American strategy because we simply weren’t willing to deal with the intellectual challenge of strategy as it really is, not what we wanted it to be. Unless we come to grips with the flaws, risks, and dangers inevitable in the very expectation that we can use violence to accomplish political objectives, we will be stuck forever watching re-runs of this particular episode. Can we learn from our mistakes and do better? Unfortunately, that’s the cliffhanger we’ll have to wait until the next episode to find out.
Adam Elkus is a PhD student in Computational Social Science at George Mason University and a columnist at War on the Rocks. He has published articles on defense, international security, and technology at CTOVision, The Atlantic, the West Point Combating Terrorism Center’s Sentinel, and Foreign Policy.
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