Our new military strategy documents often have the feel of a Madison Avenue marketing campaign. Instead, we must create strategic documents offering clear advice.
The thickness and quantity of our strategic documents, as well as the fanfare that often accompanies publication of any new military strategy, may lead readers to believe that this article is unnecessary. Regrettably, though, our strategies reflect the outlook and rely on the jargon of the marketing professional, while a clear-headed understanding of diplomatic and military history seems to have been injudiciously rationed.
Abstractions about types of threats adorn our strategic booklets, but otherwise they are bereft of worthy advice on how to advance or protect our permanent interests. Not a substantive word is said about what sort of peace our enemies and rivals hope to achieve. Instead of embodying clarity, our strategic documents betray an aversion to hard fact in much the same way a promotional campaign tries to establish a dubious connection between the wares for sale and happiness or wisdom.
Advertising strives to transfigure ordinary items into embodiments of consumer vanity. Drive this or wear that, and youth, romantic ardor, esteem—choose your fantasy—will be yours! Such humbug works well as a lubricant for commerce, but the mental framework of the marketing executive can be dangerous when it infects the way we prepare to interact with the world militarily.
Defining Strategy
A useful point of departure is to consider our official definition of "strategy"—a disheartening example of muddled thinking. According to the Department of Defense Dictionary (2006), strategy is a "prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives."
This definition cannot be reconciled with reason or experience. "Objective," for starters, is a tactical term that connotes a geographical point or a physical thing; it's not a synonym for "a better peace," which is the aim of all sound military strategy. A strategy yields objectives, not the other way around.
You don't begin with a set of objectives—seize Normandy, Paris, Antwerp; cross the Rhine so that you can invest the Ruhr Valley before driving on Berlin—and then, based on those objectives, decide to expel Nazism from Western Europe while conceding all territories east of the Elbe to Soviet Russia. Rather, you work from the strategic end—unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany—and then decide between alternative sets of objectives, e.g., should you attack across a broad front, as previously described, or make a stiletto strike at Berlin from the lower Rhine? What are the risks and advantages of each option, evaluated by the lights of the strategic end you are seeking to realize and the means available to you and your enemy?
Of much greater importance is that strategy should amount to more than merely an idea. Strategy is a closely argued plan to deal with the world as one finds it. The strategist takes a hard look at the facts and evaluates them by the lights of a nation's permanent interests—which, for us, center on free trade, national sovereignty, and U.S. strategic predominance. Our strategic documents more or less get the latter part right, but otherwise they say nothing substantial about threats to our strategic position, nor do they offer clear direction on how to parry them.
The National Defense Strategy, the National Military Strategy (NMS), and the Quadrennial Defense Review each serves a discrete end, but what they have in common is the feel of a marketing campaign. They bear little relation to traditional strategic thought. There are notable exceptions to this among our doctrinal publications, of course. "Warfighting" (Marine Corps Doctrinal Pamphlet No. 1) embodies more than 200 years of the best British, German, and American thought on the subject. Each paragraph speaks volumes.
But in our major strategic statements we don't even recognize war for what it is: a contest of wills settled by violence. It is the ultimate example of man's struggle with his environment as well as himself—his frailties, irrational ambitions, and the like. Rather, we see war as just another entrepreneurial act, a metaphor for a business transaction, and this will do us no end of harm. Arguably, it already has.
Advertising National Defense: The Fluff
The NMS, for example, resembles the leading edge of a promotional campaign, the object being to convince ourselves (certainly our enemies cannot have reason to lose much sleep over what's said here) that we are in charge of events and that we are capable of imposing our will on all menaces.
The cover page of the NMS epitomizes the intellectual flimsiness of the document. Here one finds the slogan "A Strategy for Today; A Vision for Tomorrow." This is a rhetorical nullity that makes sense only when viewed through the lens of marketing. The line falls under the promotion rule that you need to come up with a "phrase that pays."
The rest of the document can be described by the other four of the "five Ps of marketing":
- Product: In this case, that would be national defense. Suitable deference is paid to technology in the NMS.
- Position: How does your business identify itself? Protect, prevail, prevent, etc.
- People: Joint leader development.
- Price: The cost of the desired force design and size.
There is little worthwhile here for the military officer who wants to learn about the U.S. strategic position, and no factual material to spur thought on how it might be sustained or improved.
Now Add the Meat
On the matter of strategic domination, the NMS should focus on the ways and means by which we can transform Iraq into a democratic nation devoted to free markets and individual liberty. The United States would need to place Iraq under its tutelage for many years, much as we did Germany and Japan after World War II. This would require a comparable measure of military and diplomatic power, along with the necessary political will.
We would also need to secure Iraq's borders, take responsibility for its foreign policy and national defense, make sure its financial and civic systems functioned efficiently, and, most important, shape the political culture to a degree not seen since General Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan.
The first step toward these strategic ends would be to grant legitimacy to only two or three political parties, because such a system is the best way to establish political moderation. We would have to make sure that the parties were based on political ideas rather than sectarian or tribal loyalties. Cultures unfamiliar with ordered liberty tend to generate political groupings that dominate and suppress the opposition; elections determine which mob rules the streets and which is persecuted. Collaterally, a prudent military strategy would work from the assumption that Iraq will never stabilize unless the current Iranian government is replaced by leadership that finds no strategic benefit in a chaotic Iraq.
Our ham-handedness in trying to grasp the relation between culture and strategic circumstance is our most persistent and greatest weakness. We make all the right gestures—adding language courses to military college curriculums, for example—but the NMS and related documents illustrate our inability to think through strategic problems.
Understand Foreign Cultures
Properly understood, strategic thought begins with discerning the cultural currents that shape a country's political climate and that often adumbrate the military posture that supports it. A proper NMS, for example, would consider the demographic turbulence that has already beset much of Western Europe and continues to gather momentum because there is no concerted resistance to it, only official acquiescence on the far side of the Atlantic.
It appears that the jihadists are employing the indirect approach against the United States, or at the very least exploiting developments in ways that bring the concept to mind. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the persistent threat of terrorist attacks against our homeland, and diplomatic wrangling with Iran, North Korea, and Russia tax our military forces and absorb our political will. Meanwhile, unassimilated Muslim minorities are gaining influence over Europe's political machinery in ways that have encouraged EU statesmen to frustrate or loudly oppose American strategic initiatives. This leaves us diplomatically isolated and beleaguered. Politicians in representative democracies are going to answer to the clamors of their constituencies, which across Europe include a growing number of immigrants who have brought with them contempt for the modern West—a habit of mind abetted by multiculturalism in all of its practical manifestations.1
Indeed, we ought to pay keen attention to the growing estrangement between the United States and our oldest and most reliable ally, the United Kingdom. In February 2007, the British government announced plans to withdraw half of its 7,000 troops from Iraq. The spin put on this decision by some commentators was that the diminished British force represented progress in pacifying Iraq.
But southern Iraq was never the cauldron that other parts of the country proved to be. And if the troop redeployment did not signal a wilting of British resolve to support the United States, why were the troops not moved to Baghdad, where they were needed?
Scarcely a week after terrorist bombings rocked London and Glasgow in June 2007, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown instructed his Foreign Office to stop using the term "war on terror." Brown judged the term to be needlessly inflammatory. But semantic hygiene may have been less of a motive than Brown's politically astute aim to attenuate the strategic ties between the United States and the U.K., where anti-American feeling is disquietingly strong and promises to grow more virulent.2
The stoutest cultural and strategic ally of the United States is expiring, likely to be replaced by a nation that can offer us little in the way of military help and that might prove at times passively hostile to American strategic interests. Certainly we will no longer be able to assume, as we once did, that the United Kingdom looks at America as a force for good.
Relations between the United States and Britain have not always been genial—until World War I we were as often rivals—but such difficulties as we've faced have sprung largely from economic competition aggravated by chauvinistic patriotism on both sides. What is emerging today is far more worrisome, and perhaps irreversible.
The Shifting Balance of Power
A sound military strategy would consider the impact of what appears to be a genuine, if oblique, menace to America's permanent interests that is gestating between the Volga River and the Irish Sea. Henry Kissinger briefly discusses this possibility in his book, Diplomacy. Hegemony over Europe by a single power "remains a good definition of a strategic danger for America," Kissinger argues. "That danger would have to be resisted even were the dominant power apparently benevolent, for if the intentions ever changed, America would find itself with a grossly diminished capacity for effective resistance and a growing inability to shape events."3
Kissinger's book appeared in 1994. In the intervening years, the situation has grown more rather than less ominous. The rise of the European Union, with its supranational legislature that is congenitally antagonistic to U.S. permanent interests, along with the growing influence of militant Islam across Western Europe and the incipient belligerence of Russia, should figure largely in our military strategy.
For the first time in its short history as a dominant player in the international arena, the United States must adjust to a world in which balance-of-power calculations, similar to those that shaped European diplomacy during the 19th century, hold sway. The United States can be expected to bind with other nations to confront a specific strategic threat, and we will continue to work as a part of coalitions as long as our national interests coincide with those of other countries.
But it would be a mistake to assume that other nations will view every threat to U.S. permanent interests in precisely the same way, and therefore worth running comparable risks to liquidate. History shows that nations compete with each other far more often than they cooperate. A military strategy ought never to assume, as ours apparently does, that nations prefer to see themselves as gears in a machine designed to serve the strategic ends of the United States. An up-to-date NMS would work from the assumption that war for us is most likely to become a succession of solitary, expeditionary ventures. The size and structure of our armed forces should reflect this eventuality.
We Need a Bigger Military
If we are to protect our permanent interests, each of the military departments must be massively expanded—the Sea Services in particular, given that we are principally a maritime power. A military force, no matter how technologically advanced, is deprived of a vital measure of flexibility if it is too small to deal with crises across the globe, some of which may take years to resolve.
It is dispiriting to note that the one element of our military establishment that has expanded sharply over the past few years is headquarters staffs. And this at the same time as our manpower numbers and equipment inventories seem absurdly small when measured against the multiplying threats to our permanent interests. We are currently in the midst of standing up yet another combatant command in the wake of 9/11: Africa Command. But where are we to draw the forces to execute whatever missions might come its way?
Strategy Must Reflect Reality
One plausible explanation for our inadequate strategic documents is America's limited experience as a great rather than an hegemonic power. History can help us. An illuminating example of solid strategic thinking can be found in General Friedrich von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War.4 First published in 1912, Bernhardi's book is very much a creature of its time insofar as it reflects Germany's desire to dominate Europe. Putting aside the national arrogance and what is in retrospect the crackpot anthropology that underpins much of the argument, Germany and the Next War offers a clear-headed assessment of Germany's strategic situation—materially, demographically, geographically, politically.
The resources and strategic intentions of Germany's principal antagonist, France, are given due attention, as are those of Great Britain, Russia, the United States, and other strategically relevant nations. To read Bernhardi after surveying the current NMS and its predecessors is to glimpse the conceptual faultiness of our understanding of military strategy.
In writing a new national military strategy, we ought to view the world with an informed and mildly pessimistic eye. This is primarily the duty of military officers—whose first responsibility is to provide strategic advice to civilian authority. Increasingly, it seems that strategic ideas come from civilian sources: think tanks, journals of opinion, and the like. Perhaps this is because the intellectual character of traditional strategic thought is at odds with our contemporary military culture.
We worship firsthand experience without taking into account its limitations.5 Aggravating matters is our penchant for mimicking the business world, the result being that we emphasize efficiency at the expense of understanding the importance of a strategic reserve.
Indeed, the NMS presents readers with a parody of "economy of force." Its discussion of "Force Design and Size" emphasizes "optimizing" forces and seeking "innovative ways" to realize efficiencies. In the business world, one tries to provide just the right amount of product to meet market demand: big inventories are costly.
This works well if your aim is to keep the local auto dealer stocked in oil filters and timing belts. But it doesn't work in strategy, and it doesn't work in war. Overwhelming numbers of ships, planes, and troops pin the enemy by threatening him along several avenues of approach, thus keeping him off balance and giving commanders the option of picking an opportune moment to deliver a decisive blow.
Alternatively, strategic reserves provide commanders and their civilian chiefs with a force that can deter enemies and rivals who might try to achieve their own strategic ends while the United States is distracted by combat operations elsewhere.
That our national military strategy betrays a near-complete absence of sound thought is a dangerous development not without parallels to the circumstances that detonated World War I.
In 1914, military strategy—embodied in operational plans that pivoted on mobilization schedules—was out of sync with political and diplomatic conditions. Today the situation is reversed. Our various military strategies reflect America's lofty aspirations and our love of business idiom, but they have lost touch with contemporary geopolitical fact and a traditional understanding of strategy.
At a moment when U.S. influence is on the wane—we will never dominate the world the way we did between the Treaty of Versailles and the end of the Cold War—the vitality of our strategic thinking ought to wax. Our strategic documents, whatever their merits, err on the side of self-flattery and might easily be interpreted by our enemies, rivals, and allies as empty boasting.
The frothiness of these documents reflects a blinkered understanding of a world that remains brutal, dangerous, and beholden to unreason. More than ever before, the time has come for us to institute lucid strategic thinking.
Lieutenant Colonel Hanley has served in Saudi Arabia, Iceland, and various assignments in the United States. He is the author of Planning for Conflict in the 21st Century (Praeger, forthcoming) and a member of the U.S. Naval Institute's editorial board.
1. For a discussion of the rise of Islamic militancy in Europe see Mark Steyn's America Alone (Regnery Publishing, 2006) and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept (Broadway, 2007). back to article
2. Daily Express, 3 July 2007. http://www.express.co.uk/. back to article
3. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 811. back to article
4. Germany and the Next War, Allen H. Powles, trans. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1914). back to article
5. See Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1954), pp. 23–26. back to article