Let’s try a defensive strategy in America’s wars, and win.

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Summary: So many posts here describe how we are losing. Since we’ve forgotten, I’m reposting explanations of why and how we are losing — and how we can win in the age when 4th generation warfare (4GW) is the dominant mode of war. Step one: adopt a rational grand strategy. The original version was posted in June 2008. Since we have learned nothing since then, it is as true now as then.

“We should cultivate a reluctance “to travel a long distance to kill foreigners at great expense” unless we have great need.”

Contents 

Can America do a grand strategy? 

First, lose the baggage in our minds. 

Second, some simple recommendations. 

Make more friends and fewer enemies. 

Don’t gamble. Adopt slow but sure tactics. 

Survive until we win. 

More about a defensive strategy for America. 

For more information. 

(1) Can America do a grand strategy?

“The {Athenian} masses voted …to kill every adult male citizen of Mytilene… to spare every adult male citizen of Mytilene… to put Alkibiades in charge of the Sicilian expedition… to put Nikias in charge of the Sicilian expedition. The Athenian demos voted for *everybody* at different times.”

— “History as Tragedy: The Peloponnesian War“. Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at Berkeley.

Perhaps American cannot successfully implement large and complex geopolitical strategies, as discussed in The Myth of Grand Strategy. Perhaps this is a weakness inherent to democracies. Athens also had difficulty executing complex long-term plans, even when facing the risk of catastrophic defeat.

Athens’ leaders rose through a small number of career paths, none of which selected for strategic skills. Just like America’s elected leaders. 

We elect leaders who successfully market themselves using mass media. This requires a combination of pretty faces, excellent speaking skills, celebrity status, wealth, and ability to manage simple messages. 

Politicos often appoint workers in their campaigns to high offices, rewarding skillful fundraising and marketing (e.g., creating slogans, assembling a crowd at a suburban mall on a Saturday morning). 

Politicos often appoint professionals (i.e., experts) to high office following careers of good networking and avoiding mistakes. Or they appoint academics with good networking with no history of making decisions (who therefore made no mistakes). 

Governments built with such people often find rational planning and competent execution to be beyond its abilities. This political structures that worked for American during the 19th century era, an era of small government, have not worked as well for us during the 20th century. The challenges of the 21st century might be even greater, hence the need to either reform our government or change our approach to geopolitics. Since the former is so difficult, let’s try the latter.

(2) First, lose the baggage in our minds

Perhaps our failures in the War on Terror (WoT) result not from our foes’ genius but our confusion. We believe in universal human rights. This Western philosophy makes it difficult to respect other cultures, whose people who oddly believe that theirs are highest values. This reduces our ability to work with them and often makes conflict more likely.

Most Americans also believe in multiculturalism (i.e., all cultures are equally high). Cognitive dissonance between these incompatible beliefs explains much of America’s inability to successfully play geopolitics. We used George Orwell’s Animal Farm to create a synthesis of these clashing ideals: “all cultures are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

One of these things is not like the others

(3) Second, let’s try a simple strategy

“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

— From Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War.

Perhaps we should rely on simple plans, especially ones that require little subtly and understanding of other societies. Here are four simple recommendations for a Grand Strategy. 

Make many friends. 

Don’t make new enemies or increase their cohesion. 

Don’t gamble. Adopt slow but sure tactics. 

Survive until we win. 

(4) Make more friends and fewer enemies.

We should strengthen our friends and weaken our enemies.

With respect to others … we should: 

Respect their culture and achievements, show them we bear them no harm and help them adjust to an unfolding world, as well as provide additional benefits and more favorable treatment for those who support our philosophy and way of doing things, yet 

Demonstrate that we neither tolerate nor support those ideas and interactions that undermine or work against our culture and our philosophy hence our interests and fitness to cope with a changing world. 

— From chart 57 of “The Strategic Game of ? and ?” by John Boyd (Colonel, USAF), 1987.

Great regional powers are emerging, or re-emerging. We lack the strength to breat them all, like a cop eying new gangs entering the neighborhood. Let’s embrace them as part of the human pageant rather than disdainfully judging them by our ideas — and picking fights if they don’t bow.

Multiculturalism might work well in this new world (even if it is disastrous as a domestic policy). Certainly better than our meddling in the affairs of others. The people of the Middle East see us as foreign infidels sending drones to kill insurgents and civilians. This get the same response as Skynet’s flying drones in The Terminator: hatred, creating more and highly motivated foes. It’s a formula for disaster.

Instead America could focus on building alliances and minimizing conflicts with our enemies. We need not applaud aspects of other societies that we consider wrong or evil, but should not presume that Americans stride the planet as gods. Leave it to the non-governmental organizations to carry the human rights gospel (literally translated as “good news”) across the world. Let’s mind our own business, and help others when asked.

“Interaction permits vitality and growth while isolation leads to decay and disintegration.”

— From chart 29 of “The Strategic Game of ? and ?” by John Boyd (Colonel, USAF), 1987.

(5) Don’t gamble. Adopt slow but sure tactics

For as long as he {Pericles} was at the head of the state during the peace, he pursued a moderate and conservative policy; and in his time its greatness was at its height. When the war broke out, here also he seems to have rightly gauged the power of his country. He outlived its commencement two years and six months, and the correctness of his previsions respecting it became better known by his death. He told them to wait quietly, to pay attention to their marine, to attempt no new conquests, and to expose the city to no hazards during the war, and doing this, promised them a favourable result. …

What they did was the very contrary, allowing private ambitions and private interests, in matters apparently quite foreign to the war, to lead them into projects unjust both to themselves and to their allies — projects whose success would only conduce to the honour and advantage of private persons, and whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country in the war.

— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book Two.

We can help the people of other states through research, free trade, and charity. We can give them military aid and training. We can respond when attacked, but leave nation-building to others. Wars are gambles. Today we take these risks unnecessarily, even recklessly. Perhaps it is time to return to the geopolitical strategy of our Founders. The following is as true today as it was when written:

I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that every one had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves; and that if this country could, consistent with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration.

— George Washington in a letter to James Monroe, 25 August 1796.

(6) Survive until we win

“My vision of the course of the Arab war was still purblind. I had not seen that the preaching was victory and the fighting a delusion.”

— From T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter 30.

How to survive — even prosper — in the 21st century? Let’s work to build the best possible America. That does not mean autarky. We can help others with advice and charity, or help others with their wars.

The home court advantage is decisive in 4GW. The next posts describe how defense can win for us at lower cost in money and blood than our endless foreign wars. That means having a strong homeland security apparatus, excellent global intelligence about our potential enemies, and an offensive capability (used when needed). Time is our greatest ally, which is why you should bet on the West to win the clash of civilizations.

What to do with rogue nations? Developing global diplomatic mechanisms to punish them should be our primary foreign policy goal in the 21st century. Containment won the Cold War but more proactive methods are needed our ever-shrinking world.

What about non-state actors, perhaps the most serious 4GW threat in this century. Our failures in the WoT show that conventional warfare is ineffective against them. Let’s deal with insurgents as criminals, as the Founders provided for in Article One Section 8 of the Constitution. That’s how pirates were legally hung high when caught.

“One or two of them, perhaps, it would be wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for there are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be left unchained and unmuzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have other men’s lives wasted in the work of watching them.”

— From George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman” (1903).