Politics and the American Way of War (and Strategy)
Politics and the American Way of War (and Strategy) by Frank Hoffman, War on the Rocks.
… American strategic culture, including its form of government, makes strategy particularly complicated. Our policymaking community must “craft and implement national strategy within a political system in which power is shared, authority is fragmented, and strategic consensus only rarely achieved.” This two-decade old assessment from David Jablonsky is especially poignant given recent events in our nation’s capital.
This is a complication, but it should not be an excuse for artificially trying to isolate politics from policy and strategy development. No true Clausewitzian would or should accept that. Yet as General David H. Petraeus wrote in his Princeton dissertation, “Though most military officers quote flawlessly Clausewitz’ dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, many do not appear to accept fully the implications of his logic.”…
Actually, a lot of that is exactly backwards.
The problem is that the “collective” doesn’t know how to do ends-ways-means in any kind of practical fashion. Instead, we civilians are treated to lectures on our weak will, managed via a complex journalistic-military axis of fawning articles, treated to barely-there theories of the most dubious intellectual value (“why, how can we talk about the lessons of COIN when so much data hasn’t been analyazed to date” is the Tweet of one such savant. True, but also beside the point at the level of strategy and policy) and told that only maximalist solutions to fairly limited problems are feasible. And all the while, some are making a mint off of our genuine civilian confusion and deference.
I had a problem with the Echevarria piece because it was written in a strange musing way. Normally, I love strange musing ways, yet, how am I to read the piece? Is there a problem with strategy or isn’t there? Why be so intellectually coy in such serious matters?
http://zenpundit.com/?p=274
The main issue is that galactic chunks of the American and Western security collective are, effectively, ignorant of the matters that matter. It’s not because people within in it are stupid, it must be some larger factor because even the sensible people become insensible after a time within the “collective”, the Borg, you name it. No, that’s not right. But what am I to think of you?
But why the heck can’t you all just state the obvious? You got gamed and you made bad choices and you are intellectually indulgent? Happens sometimes. We are only human. I gamed myself on Iraq. I sort of never can forgive myself, so don’t think it’s you I am being difficult about. Sometimes, these things are an emotional proxy.
Ends-ways-means are meant to be creative because each situation is unique. One does not preclude the other.
For instance, was it “doing physics” and “lacking creativity” that made you put a huge logistic footprint through troubled territory governed by a sometime ally without the same goals, or was it the fact that many of you were frankly ignorant or naive about the situation, or was it that the institution had a fantasy land version of ends-way-means where money and troops and time is endless?
When are you all going to buckle down and be intellectually serious, intellectuals?
I’m not trying to be mean. I’m on your–our-side. But it’s like you all leave me no choice or something 🙂
I found Hoffman’s article to have been quite insightful in addressing a real problem – the lack of recognition by American strategists of the role of politics. Hoffman, however, misses an important consideration which is that strategy is not constructed in an international vacuum. As the common wisdom puts it, “The enemy has a vote.” At the strategic level, this is international politics in summary form.
The other bone I have to pick with Hoffman is his assertion that we did not consider the political conditions in Panama and what we would need to do to replace Noriega with a legitimate government after we toppled him. I was the chief planner for Operation Promote Liberty (OPORD Blind Logic) and we not only considered those issues, we wrote plans to deal with them. Although we were somewhat stymied by a system that did not permit effective interagency coordination, we adjusted pretty well and integrated the political decision to inaugurate the leaders who had won the May 89 elections as the new government. We adapted our plan effectively and Panama has been a U.S. policy success in Latin America.
A commenter at War on the Rocks writes, “beat Germany” is a good strategy and this is better than ends-ways-means.
Isn’t beat Germany an end or endstate? And planners surely spent a lot of time thinking about ways and means.
I’ll be nicer this time but only so much. The problem isn’t the formula. The problem are the very ideas of the world and the US place within it.
Regime change to radically engineer regions and nation-building via third party. Dumb ends.
Using COIN to achieve dreamy and illusory goals. Dumb ways.
Means, either too many or too little depending on how you look at it. Goldilocks is pretty unhappy, all the bowls of porridge stink, too many troops into a land locked nation and not enough to keep order post regime change in another.
Yeah, the problem is ends, ways, means. Sure. You know what I think? People don’t want to do this boring but necessary stuff; intellectually, military intellectuals prefer the airy fairy stuff because it’s easier and grand theories pay. You can’t get someone to pay you for brilliant ideas if what the Army really needs is to have some say and its say should be the boring stuff of how much money, how many troops, and how they get there.
There. I was nice. I was.
Perhaps part of the reason for failing to develop effective strategy is a result of a failure to accurately described the realities of the Operational Environment. A key part of strategy development is identifying current conditions so that ways and means can be aligned to achieve desired conditions. The national security enterprise, including the National Security Council, have failed on numerous occasions to realise that since at least 1946 the OE has been defined by a trend of declining conflict and declining war deaths. If you accept Steven Pinker’s Civilizing Process then this trend since 1950 has actually been a defining aspect of the OE for centuries.
Keeping the scope of the argument within the post-Cold War era it is important to note that since the 1990’s inter-state conflicts have continued to decline, intra-state conflict has remained constant, and battle deaths have declined across the board. The Human Security Report Project has noted that the trends associated with these declines (proactive UN post-Cold War, impact of common global economic interests amongst states, increased peace-keeping and peace-making, FDI and HA) have served as pillars for this decline. Because the decline is not solely reliant on any one of these trends the likelihood that the decline in global violence and conflict will reverse is unlikely (contrary to what the NIC reported in their Global Trends 2030 report).
I point this out because national strategy continues to focus heavily on the military instrument of national power when global trends in conflict and violence suggest that conflict is in fact less likely in the future, especially inter-state conflict, and intra-state conflict while having remained constant produces significantly less battle deaths than inter-state conflict.
Why does our nation continue to invest so heavily in the DoD when the trends lending momentum to the decline in violence and conflict reside primarily within the area of influence of the other elements of national power?
Has anyone read the Mr Y article? Therein lies the answer IMO.
Turning back to Pinker’s Civilizing Process. Part of this process is the changing of norms related to the legitimacy of violent action. A strong argument can be made that the post-OIF/OEF OE has seen a shift in accepted international norms related to the use of violence; especially the acceptance of the US as providing a global security umbrella. The U.S. tendency to rely heavily on military force is no longer viewed as a legitimate means of resolving conflicts – see exhibit 1: Syria.
Once the US accepts these changes in the OE the national security enterprise can then begin to develop sound policy that effectively develops Ends/Ways/Means to bridge the current and desired conditions via the legitimate use of national power. My analysis, seemingly advocated by some within the Pentagon based on their public comments (especially former DEF SEC Gates) is that more investment needs to be made in the DoS.
When the government invests so heavily in the DoD it is no wonder that they want to see a return on their investment. Unfortunately this has biased the U.S. government towards the use of the military instruments of national power as a first response to crisis. diMe needs to become DImE.