Two timely and well written items concerning US National Security Strategy - first up is Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Freier's op-ed The Strategy Deficit that was recently published by the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute.
An honest survey of post-Cold War national security policy exhibits a dangerous strategy deficit. The word "strategy" is overused. The concept, too, is poorly applied. It is many things to contemporary policymakers except, well—strategy. In the current environment, strategic communications and strategy have become synonymous. Strategic communications is the carefully crafted but overly general and widely consumable articulation of key political messages—"assure, deter, dissuade, defeat"; "as they stand up, we'll stand down"; "clear, hold, build"; "phased strategic redeployment"; etc, etc, etc. It is strategy by faí§ade versus strategy through effective, deliberate investment of intellectual, temporal, material, and human capital in pursuit of well-defined outcomes. Real strategy is the reasoned determination of specific, minimum essential objectives, rationalized with suitable ways to achieve them and the necessary means for success. No careful observer of executive decisionmaking since the end of the Cold War believes the latter high bar to be the norm...
The second item was recently published by the Center for a New American Security - Sustainable Security: Developing a Security Strategy for the Long Haul by Jim Thomas.
The inability of many states in the developing world to govern and police themselves effectively or to work collectively with their neighbors to secure their regions represents a global security capacity deficit that can threaten U.S. interests. Effectively addressing this security deficit will require a new approach, one that is more preventive and indirect in its nature, that seeks to husband American power, and that reconciles America's values, interests, and commitments with its finite resources over the long haul...
Both are well worth reading.