We must finally move beyond containment to sustainment. Sustainment promotes freedom and justice at the intersection of culture and the rule of law, sensitive to the former, consistent with the latter.  The accomplishment of the last century was that the house responsible for the most blood-letting in history -- Europe -- is now free and whole. Sustainment seeks the carefully courageous expansion of this accomplishment in full partnership with the people and leaders of the world's less-than-free regions. For example, one US goal for its grand strategy this century should be the re-envisioning of NATO as it expands, in tandem with WTO, to become the North-Atlantic-Asian-Treaty Organization (including Russia, then the South Caucasus, then Central Asia).   This century-long, grand strategy will vary locally and depend on how we understand, then answer, three imperative questions: - Can we understand the promotion of our values as the protection of our interests? - Doe this global hegemon finally understand that it must listen to and respect other countries and cultures, state and non-state actors, as we build communities of the willing to address the complex challenges our planet faces? (I first wrote about the need for such multi-partner responses in the April 1999 edition of The Marine Corps Gazette) - Will we accept religion as a legitimate component of realpolitik, the missing link in policy development and analysis?   The key to each of these questions is the development of a common operating picture among the various US government agencies. And there is only one way to do that: Congress must mandate "joint" education throughout the interagency system for entry-, mid-, and top-level officials from the intelligence community, Capitol Hill staffers, State Department, the Pentagon, the military services, the Department of Justice, etc. (We might even include those NGOs with a proven track record.) Irreconcilable differences -- political and philosophical -- will remain throughout the education process, but stereotypes will be reduced among agencies and people even as a common understanding of the world as it actually exists emerges. More importantly, a new network of relationships will be established that can work together to solve problems.   [My only request is that we stop using such stupid language as "kinetic" and "asymmetrical warfare." We kill people before they kill us, and 'asymmetrical warfare' is a redundant statement.]   These issues come to a practical head in Afghanistan. We have "provincial reconstruction teams" (PRTs) that essentially act as a coalition of the US elements of national power at the local level in support of the provincial government. Unfortunately, we do nothing to equip these folks to act as a team before they arrive in country, let alone understand the importance of culture and religion. Meanwhile, the military assumes de facto and now actual leadership of them. (As I understand it, there is only one civilian-lead PRT in the American sector, in a province where there is no threat.) This result is because we don't have an operational interagency as the military becomes the piggy-back and piggy-bank. It sends the wrong signal to the Afghan people and government, and it's not good for our republic over the long term.   Put differently, we have to once-and-for-all demilitarize our national security, get our military back to its comparative advantage of breaking things, and operationalize the rest of the interagency to build things...because they have been educated together to have a common operating picture, because they have networks of relationships across Washington, D.C., and the world to solve problems right now, and because we have a grand strategy that seeks to understand and listen first, before working transparently with government and grassroots leaders to sustain and expand freedom and justice.

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I agree with Mr. West. In a column published earlier this month, I noted:

In line with his view of counterinsurgency doctrine, McChrystal proposes to concentrate on protecting Afghanistan's populated areas rather than chasing after insurgents in the hinterlands. As he commented in a recent Los Angeles Times interview, "What I don't think you will see as much of is big unit sweeps or operations where you sweep them, then come out. Historically it doesn't work, but almost every counterinsurgency tries it and relearns the lesson."

Actually, he's only half right. He's right to conclude that insulating the Afghan population from insurgent intimidation and support is essential. He's wrong if he believes that it can be accomplished in any enduring way without offensive operations. On the contrary, even were NATO forces sufficiently reinforced to position troops wherever civilians are at risk - no small chore in itself - adopting such a purely defensive posture effectively would concede the initiative to the insurgents.

Nothing could be more dangerous, and in the long run less likely to succeed, especially against an enemy that already has demonstrated quite convincingly its ability to reconstitute after every local defeat.

 

After Doug Macgregor’s posting, Sydney asked if I would add a few words re: Is Afghanistan a proper priority for the US or is American hegemony a costly dead end (at least in that poor country)?

I came back from my latest month (July) in the field in Afghanistan disquieted about our basic military mission. Is the militarymission to engage, push back and dismantle the Talbian networks, with population protection being a tactic to gain tips and local militia, or is the military mission to build a nation based on US soldiers protecting the widespread population, with engagements against the Taliban as a byproduct?

It appears the overall strategy of the Obama administration is increased aid and encouragement to the rulers of Pakistan, plus fulsome nation-building in Afghanistan, with fighting and dismantling of the Taliban a secondary consideration. Thus, the number of enemy killed will not be counted, let alone used as a metric. This non-kinetic theory of counterinsurgency has persuaded (thus far) the liberal community in America to support or at least not to vociferously oppose the war. As Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune has put it, we have to balance between messages that gain domestic support and messages that direct battlefield operations.

We must understand what our riflemen do in Afghanistan every day. The answer is they conduct combat patrols. That underlies all their other activities. They go out with rifles to engage and kill the enemy. That is how they protect the population. For our generals to stress that the war is 80% non-kinetic discounts the basic activity of our soldiers. Although crime isn’t eradicated by locking up criminals, we expect our police to make arrests to keep the streets safe. Similarly, our riflemen are trained to engage the enemy. That’s how they protect the population. If we’re not out in the countryside night and day – and we’re not – then the Taliban can move around as they please and intimidate or persuade the population.

I’m not arguing that we Americans can ever dominate the Taliban gangs. I have grave reservations about nation-building. There’s a level of understanding and accommodation among Afghans that culturally surpasses our understanding. During the May poppy harvest, for instance, the shooting stops on both sides and men from far and wide head to the fields to participate in the harvest. That’s an Afghan thing. Only the Afghans can figure out what sort of society and leaders they want.

That said, we should strive to do a better job of what we are doing for as long as we are there. Only doing defense doesn’t work mathematically.  I was with our squads in Kunar at the outposts that Doug Macgregor cited, and also in Helmand, where the fighting is even more constant. I condensed several hours of combat video into this 30-second clip.

Fighting the Taliban is like fighting the Apaches in the 1800s. Simply put, our ground forces are not inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. Unless and until the Taliban are crippled, the population is not protected; it is at best only sheltered.  Unless we go after the Taliban, they retain the initiative to fight where and when they choose. That isn’t a winning strategy.

The annual bill for the US military in Afghanistan exceeds $70 billion, with another four to six billion for development. We’ve already spent $38 billion on Afghan reconstruction. Congress may eventually balk at spending such sums. The problem is we’re liable to be gradually pulled out while the Taliban is intact. Nation-building alone is not sufficient; the Taliban must be disrupted. As Doug said, they are not an existential threat. But they are so integrated with Al Qaeda in Pakistan that if we withdraw precipitously, the threat to American lives will increase significantly. We cannot leave Afghanistan under conditions that favor the global perception of an American defeat, with the high likelihood of follow-on attacks against Americans.

Our soldiers only get a small number of chances to engage the enemy. Our battalions average one arrest every two months, and one platoon-sized patrol per day per company that infrequently makes solid contact. On average, a US rifleman will glimpse a Taliban once a month. The Taliban initiate the fights because they know they can escape. Our patrols have firepower but lack mobility. Our soldiers are carrying 70 pounds; a Taliban is carrying ten pounds. The Taliban have the distinct edge in mobility. Because the Taliban are well-concealed and scoot away, our superior firepower does not yield precision aim points to do severe damage.

More senior-level attention must be paid to inflicting severe enemy losses in firefights and to arresting the Taliban, so that their morale and networks are broken. A recent directive forbids applying indirect fires against compounds where civilians might be hiding. That directive upholds human decency and may reduce enemy propaganda. But indirect fires – helicopter gunships and jets – used to be called “precision fires” and gave the US its enormous advantage in combat. Now that such fires are restricted, what provides our advantage when the enemy sensibly fights from compounds? Don’t expect Afghan soldiers to do it for us. We have equipped and trained the Afghans in our image. They are as heavy and slow-moving on the ground as we are, and rely upon our advisors to call in the firepower.

This is my third war. It has the highest level of military scholars. Those scholars who emphasized the concepts of non-kinetic counterinsurgency need also to design concepts that bring more lethality to the ground battle. We’re pumping billions into UAVs. Surely we can find technologies and techniques for the grunt. We’ve become too theoretical.

Afghanistan is an operational challenge that must be met. Obama has called it “the war that must be won.” Training Afghan soldiers at an accelerated pace is the proper exit strategy. Even then, thousands of US advisers plus intelligence and firepower support will be there for at least another five years, and the bill will be in the tens of billions of dollars. This is a hard fight, but not a major war. 

 

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I know of no better response to the problem of constructing a coherent national strategy than a piece written by retired Air Force colonel Chet Richards.  It appeared in Defense News last December; it is at http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3844074.  As Col. Richards says far better than I can, we need to do a lot better than to find a politic way out of the mess left on the table by the neo-conservatives and their mouthpieces at the top of the George W. Bush administration.

This piece by Col. Richards is a summary of his chapter in the new anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress."

From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, and even now, after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has not had a consistent national security strategy that enjoyed the support of the American people and our allies. This situation is markedly different from the Cold War era, when our nation had a clear, coherent, widely supported strategy that focused on containing and deterring Soviet communist expansion. The tragic events of September 11, the increase in terrorism, threats from countries such as North Korea and Iraq, and the advent of a new administration create an imperative once again to fashion and implement a coherent national security strategy that will safeguard our national interests.

It is always something of a challenge to reduce major policy directions into stark, concise options without distorting the arguments and without losing the flavor of real choices that inherently overlap to some degree. But there are genuinely different thrusts to the national security strategies being discussed within and outside the administration. These choices call for leveraging American dominance with preventive military action, creating stability by using American military superiority for deterrence and containment, and working toward a more cooperative rule-based international system backed by American power that is used in genuine concert with our friends and allies.

The first of these policy thrusts was advocated by the Bush administration and many of its neoconservative supporters. Their argument holds that the most serious threats to American security come from the combination of terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The temptation to try using these weapons against Americans is high for several reasons, including the fact that clearly identifying and punishing the attacker is inherently difficult. The United States is not going to be able to talk others out of developing these weapons and is also unlikely to be able to build an international coalition to help get rid of them. This country must therefore have both the capability and the will to use force preemptively, if necessary, against those states and groups that represent the most serious threats to U.S. security and the American way of life. Furthermore, the Untied States should be prepared to do this essentially on its own, unbound by the need for allies or United Nations (UN) approval. In the longer term, the United States must undercut any potential adversaries by ensuring the spread of free-market democracy throughout the world. The first test of this policy was the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The second thrust is associated with those generally called realists. This approach holds that terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction represent the most serious threats to U.S. security and the American way of life, but that these threats cannot be dealt with effectively in all places and every time through the unilateral use of American military force. The best way, if not the only way, to manage and eventually defeat these threats is by using American power in conjunction with international support. Although the United States alone can inflict military defeat on just about any state in the world, it will not have the capacity to turn military victory into a stable peace or to fully remove threats without ongoing international cooperation. To gain that international support will require the United States to take the views of others into account and to make serious efforts to contain and deter the threats before actually employing military force.

The third thrust is advocated primarily by people who identify themselves as idealists. Supporters of this policy point out that, although the short-term threats to U.S. security and the American way of life come from terrorists, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction, the United States is also threatened by the longer-term effects of global poverty, growing lawlessness, and the increasing isolation of the country from like-minded states. Resort to force as the centerpiece of a national strategy, either by means of preventive war or through a dominant kind of deterrence, will not by itself be able to address either the near- or long-term threats. The United States must therefore change its emphasis from military force to diplomatic and economic cooperation. The United States needs to remain the strongest military power on earth, but it should also be an organizer of international coalitions aimed at solving major international problems and building world order.

While the new administration has not yet formally issued its new National Security Strategy, it is clear that it has rejected the Bush strategy of preventive war. Moreover, based on the President’s campaign statements, as well as his speeches and actions since coming into office, it is clear that his strategy will be a combination of the second and third approaches.

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See this link.

To me this short clip sums up the utter foolishness of our current military commitment. If Afghanistan really mattered, we would use fuel air explosive to annihilate the opposition in the hard to reach areas. But we know it’s not. There is no existential threat to us in Afghanistan any more than there was in Iraq.

So, we put good Americans like Sergeant McHugh in harm’s way for absolutely nothing. As a light infantryman, the only thing he can do is dig in, sit under fire and call for air and artillery support. This is precisely the sort of positional warfare the United States should avoid at all cost and it is the sort of thing the Army and Marine infantry generals love - no maneuver, and for them, no risk of having to do more than manage static bases and outposts. Though it's war for Sergeant McHugh, it is not a war for anyone else as he implies.

As for mentoring Afghan soldiers, it’s a waste of time just as mentoring Iraq’s Arab troops is a waste of time. As for the Pathan tribesman shooting at the marines, his ancestors probably shot at my ancestors in the British Army. Why did the Pathans fight my ancestors? Because my ancestors were there. Period.

So, who are the “bad guys” ??? Are we back to characterizing everyone who shoots at us as a terrorist???? This is Iraq all over again, only worse.

Unfortunately, we cannot buy off the Pathans and put them on the Army payroll as we did with the Sunni rebels in Anbar and the rest of Sunni Iraq. The Iranian-backed forces are not present as they were in Iraq to pressure the Pathans into a deal with us. The AQ Arabs are not liked by the Pathans and it is a mistake to lump them together.  The Pathans are simply fighting the regimes in Kabul and Islamabad. In fact, if I were a Pathan, I would probably fight these corrupt regimes too, but why are we involved for????

What we in the West have done in Iraq and Afghanistan is unknowingly illuminate the clash not between civilizations, but between modernity and antiquity. We revel in moral principle when justifying our actions but in actuality we wreak nothing but havoc and destruction on anachronistic cultures we do not understand and have come to hate.

Our soldiers and Marines learn to detest and look down upon the Arab and Afghan populations as inferior. We intervene to remove a threat to our interests, then, stay to impose our will in terms of government and laws in the hope of educating the ignorant and caring for the sick. In reality our efforts are always compromised by the resistance to our impositions, as well as our instinctive hatred for their backwardness. Just look at the enormous gratitude in Iraq for our intervention there.

What then is our great military triumph? In Iraq, we've helped to bankrupt ourselves, cultivating more hatred along the way while deforming the social, political and economic forces that in time will inevitably sweep away the traditional, anachronistic social structures and ineffective cultures in favor of modern ones. In the end, nations and states are built from within, not from without.

Meanwhile, we've established a Shiite Islamist Arab dictatorship tied to Iran in Baghdad and set the conditions for future conflict involving Kurds, Arabs, and Turks. Great. Now, what's our goal in Afghanistan????? Establish Pashtunistan????

Cheers, Doug Macgregor

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Steve Metz argues that "Rome, China, England, and so forth" enjoyed imperium without sovereignty because they "dominated the rule making and enforcement even in places where they did not exercise sovereignty." In reality, of course, they did so only as far as the writ of their armies ran. And even that occasionally proved problematic, as our own independence confirms. Those aren't models we should want to emulate.

Speaking of America’s strategic position after 1945, Henry Kissinger noted that "During the Cold War, the unique American approach to foreign policy was remarkably appropriate to the challenge at hand. There was a deep ideological conflict, and only one country, the United States, possessed the full panoply of means—political, economic, and military—to organize the defense of the noncommunist world. A nation in such a position is able to insist on its views and can often avoid the problem facing the statesmen of less favored societies: that their means oblige them to pursue goals less ambitious than their hopes, and that their circumstances require them to approach even those goals in stages."

Whether or not what we confront today is the functional equivalent of the Cold War’s ideological conflict can be debated. That we no longer possess in anything like the same measure Kissinger’s "full panoply of means" can’t be. We’re a debtor nation, our military however dedicated is stretched to over-capacity by two prolonged struggles, neither of which involves a peer adversary, and whatever political clout we once enjoyed even among our closest allies has been badly if perhaps not irreparably damaged by our own excesses.

Those conditions can be remedied, but only if we begin by acknowledging them. Just as was true in the late 1960s, the prerequisite of any effective strategy today is recovery of some diplomatic freedom of action. Currently we have little or none, a fact only too evident in our recent dealings with other major powers. Until we clean up our eonomic and military acts and thereby regain some political maneuverability, any declaratory strategy will remain a pious hope. And hope, as one former Army chief of staff rightly pointed out, is not a method.

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I am not going to say what America’s strategy should be, nor interpret history. But how our strategy is formulated concerns me. 

First, it would help to define what we are talking about. By “national strategy” I think we mean a national security strategy. What have passed as national security strategies since Congress mandated them in 1986 are largely lists of objectives with little indication of priorities, resources, or comparative advantages between the United States and its adversaries. Discussions of opportunities rarely figure in the mix. Arguably, containment was not so much a strategy as a policy—that is, a principle intended to guide actions on a particular threat.

Although there are as many definitions of strategy as theories on raising children, we might say that it is a general plan of action to achieve policy goals in a competitive global environment, using instruments of national power, taking advantage of opportunities and using available resources to maximum effect. Given that scope, it is up to the President to decide what policies will guide a strategy and approve a plan that most effectively addresses the considerations mentioned above.  

Then, it is up to his advisers and career policy planners in departments and agencies to best inform that strategy. Up to now, there has been no consistent, institutional way for a president to get such advice. There have been efforts to remedy this, but none took root, since presidents organize their councils to match personal preferences. No surprise then, that our national security strategies lack priorities and fail to mediate the annual budgetary piñata grab that goes on among departments and agencies. 

Years ago, it didn’t matter because national security fell mostly to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Not any more. With threats such as cyber attacks, pandemics, terrorism, transnational crime, and natural disasters, the Pentagon can’t handle it all. Depending on how you count, up to 29 federal departments and agencies now have some national security mission. 

The best place to inject some coherence is at the National Security Council. First, a directorate dedicated to strategy formulation should become a permanent part of the Council’s staff structure, like the Executive Secretariat. Given the rising complexity of threats and vulnerabilities, now is the time for change. What’s more, such a directorate should have an Office of Management and Budget liaison to keep strategies realistic and encourage prioritization. 

Second, agencies beyond the Department of Defense must improve their planning capacity to be able to work hand-in-hand on national security challenges. Up to now, the Pentagon has been pinch-hitting for civilian counterparts. The establishment of a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review at the Department of State is an encouraging sign that others are picking up the national security ball. 

I agree with some of my colleagues that dogged adherence to doctrines and simplistic paradigms to explain the world won’t keep us agile enough to meet emerging threats. But not thinking about challenges, not re-examining assumptions, nor taking stock of our capacity in a systematic manner is a recipe for disaster when trouble knocks on our door.  

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I'm afraid Jay has constructed and demolished a caricature of an imperial power. An imperial power is the one which dominates the making of and enforces the rules in a given system, be it a regional one or a global one--not a power that exercises sovereignty over everything. Rome, China, England, and so forth dominated the rule making and enforcement even in places where they did not exercise sovereignty.

 But because the word "imperial" is so emotionally loaded, I am certainly open to any other that captures the idea that the United States dominates the making of the rules of statecraft and their enforcement.

 

I am struck by two features of the collective response to the battery of questions posed to us. The first is that we have not made much progress toward outlining the terms of a conscientious debate about the country’s grand strategy. Admittedly, that is not an undertaking that lends itself to an essay of a few hundred words.  Still, it does not seem unreasonable to have gone further in offering broad stroke sketches of the lines along which we ought to be thinking.

 The other noteworthy feature is the preponderant view that the past three presidents have gotten it just about right in setting aims and purposes. The judgment is that execution has varied and that there is room for criticism about the manner of execution. The ‘war on terror’ a la Bush and now Obama is taken as pretty much given, as are its derivates in what we are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. Patrick Lang, Andrew Bacevich and I (along with Edward Luttwak in his idiosyncratic way) are in a distinct minority. What is disappointing is that the skeptical questions we pose at the strategic level are not engaged. The reaction seems to be equal parts tolerance for dissenting views and an implicit message that you guys really have to do better than this to warrant a direct response.  This is also the way it is playing out in the national forum.  (Of course, there is the possibility that the whole exercise of a blog discussion in the summer doldrums is not taken that seriously).

 Objectively speaking, the shoe should be on the other foot. The prevailing strategy manifest in military interventions and, let’s not forget, political meddling, has registered serial failure: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Islamabad, in Somalia, in Israel’s war on Hezbollah which we encouraged, in Israel’s assault on Gaza which we encouraged, etc. To my mind, recitation of these self defeating and counter-productive enterprises reveals two stunning truths about the state of American foreign policy.  The country has invested enormously in unfruitful projects relieved only by the modest success of dislodging the Taliban – temporarily.  Yet, the global struggle goes on against enemies real and imagined without any appreciable change in strategic thinking.  Its sole convincing victory has been mastery of the American public mind.

 Shouldn’t we feel obliged to raise at least, and try to answer some tough questions before plunging farther ahead? Questions as to end-points, of probabilities of success – according to multiple criteria, of benefit/costs (including what it means for a Treasury that is broke), of risks. If there are persuasive answers, if indeed there is a convincing case to be made that it is a vital national interest to pursue the ‘war on terror’ around the globe - now concentrated in AfPak, let that case be made clearly and dispassionately.  Let us make the elementary distinction between aspiring to everything we want to be and everything we can be. If the conclusion favors going forward, let us do so with eyes wide open. We owe nothing less to ourselves, to each other, and to posterity.

 Oh, let’s not forget the tens of millions of people who our actions impact directly – people of whose destiny we have taken custody without their permission. People who, frankly, are an afterthought for too many in official Washington.

 cheers

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Idiot’s Delight

All this talk about “global” hegemon and “imperial” strategy is absent reality.

First, to be an imperial power you have to have sovereignty. The US does not have sovereignty over the world. This was a problem for William Appleman Williams and largely led to his work being tossed into the dustbin of history along with all the other stuff in the dustbin. No one who has picked up that line of argument since has squared the circle any better. Other than torturing the word ”imperial” into submission there is no credible way to describe America as an empire. And if it is not an empire, it can’t have an imperial strategy.

Likewise declaring US strategy as hegemonic does not make it so. Can the US dictate policies to the world? Of course not. We have plenty of proof for that. Only an idiot would actually believe that the US could act as global dictator. So if we all know that’s idiotic, why do we blithely believe people when they claim the US actually has ever had such a strategy?   

I think this debate as it has unfolded speaks more of the “constructed” American culture of the post-Cold War world than providing a practical discourse on the exercise of American power in the 21st century.

A word from your moderator:

With U.S. casualties rising in Afghanistan and President Obama promising to win the war Bush started, perhaps I should not be so startled that most of our contributors so far argue that U.S. national strategy is marked much more by continuity than by change, and that the differences between administrations are over means more than ends: "The unspoken consensus is surprising but clear enough to me:  President Bush got the objectives more or less right, but he botched their pursuit," writes Daniel Serwer. Or, as Steven Metz puts it, "The strategies pursued by both Bushes, Clinton, and, so far, Obama have been variants of the imperial option. They have all been much more alike than distinct."

Within this loose consensus, however, there remain two areas of passionate disagreement on which I'm curious to see our contributors elaborate -- both those who've already posted this week and those yet to comment:

1) Are Afghanistan and Iraq proper priorities for the United States in its role as global hegemon, or are they dangerous distractions? Is it true, as guest commentator Edward Luttwak writes, that "nothing much can be achieved on a global scale if the priority attention of the Presidency and the entire national security apparatus, along with vast resources is devoted month after month, year after year, to such places as Diyala and al-Anbar or Paktia and Paktika"? Or is Joseph Collins right about the post-Cold War era when he writes that "There are great power problems, stemming from China and Russia, but our biggest threats come from terrorism and the proliferation of WMD"?

2) Is "the imperial option," as Metz calls it, the best path for the United States? Is there indeed "no question but that the United States should develop a strategy that maintains its international dominance," as Dov Zakheim states confidently? Or is hegemony a costly dead end, as Andrew Bacevich suggested in this week's very first post? "I pose these questions with the full knowledge that there is no chance -- none -- that they will receive any serious consideration," Bacevich wrote. "Too many institutions are too deeply invested in 'global leadership' to even consider the possibility that the nation might benefit from taking another course." As U.S. casualties and commitment escalate in Afghanistan, with this month on track to be the deadliest yet, I'd like to see our contributors try that "serious consideration."

 

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The unspoken consensus is surprising but clear enough to me:  President Bush got the objectives more or less right, but he botched their pursuit.  Does President Obama disagree that our objectives should include "champion aspirations for human dignity, strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends, work with others to defuse regional conflicts, prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies and our friends with weapons of mass destruction..."? While I imagine that the Obama White House, when it gets around to issuing a national security strategy, will move the words around a bit, tone down the emphasis on democracy and beef up the part about practicing what we preach, there is not much real debate even on issues like pre-emption, so long as the threat is a real one and action can be expected to reach the desired result without serious negative consequences.

More than anything else, the problem with the Bush national security strategy was its disastrous application, without appropriate means and on false premises.  A widely supported intervention against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan turned into a mess when the President failed to recognize the need to establish a continuing structure of law and order there.  A more controversial but still widely supported intervention in Iraq failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that were its only serious justification.  And once again the statebuilding enterprise Candidate Bush had denigrated became his comeuppance. 

It would be a mistake for President Obama to throw too much out with the bath water.  America needs to keep itself and its friends and allies safe, it needs to defend and enlarge the circle of economically and politically open societies and it needs to do what it does with as much cooperation from others as possible.  Doing these things will require a far stronger foreign affairs establishment than the one we've got today.  Dwarfed by military capabilities, our civilian capacity to meet national security objectives is not much improved from ten years ago.  I'd like to see less jabber about national security objectives, which I believe are broadly agreed, and much more discussion of how we are going to create the means their achievement requires.

This is especially important in an age when many (not all) threats come from non-state actors.  It is all too apparent that we lack appropriate responses not only to the Taliban but also to Hamas and Hizbollah, whose threat to US interests is nonetheless as real as that of Chavez and Ahmedinejad.  Military strength is vital but has its limits.  The Obama Administration appears to recognize that, but it has not yet moved decisively to fix the State Department and USAID or build up a serious statebuilding capacity in some other way.  Soft power is not soft--it requires people, money, training and doctrine.  And smart power is not dumb:  it requires a thorough rethinking of how we are organized and equipped to meet real (and some all too predictable) contingencies worldwide.  We need to hear from the Obama Administration not so much on the objectives of national security but on how it intends to make sure that those objectives can be reached with means that can be resourced and paid for within our current capabilities. 

 

 

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The question of national strategy is a good one, but the conventional wisdom associated with it needs clarification.  "Containment" was part of our strategy, but it was not a unifying principle, nor was it the whole story.  As the Cold War proceeded, our strategy toward our single principal adversary was more and more controversial.  Those that favored the engagement-detente track were often in bitter disputes with the competition-oriented, roll back crowd, best exemplified by Ronald Reagan.  Straddling the two camps was a band of prudent realists, best exemplified by Nixon and George H.W. Bush.  Another group focused on human rights and democracy promotion.  Scoop Jackson was the exemplar there.  Indeed, the Jackson-Vanik amendment is still on the books, mucking up US-Russian relation. 

Compared to today's situation, Containment appears to have been a successful "no brainer."   Its outcome, however, was not preordained.  Wise men and women all around --- and the accident of Mikhail Gorbachev --- made the Cold War disappear.  It could easily have lingered for another 20 years, especially if the likes of Yuri Andropov had lived.

Today, we are blessed with more macro-security but a much wider array of problems, opportunities, and challenges.  There are great power problems, stemming from China and Russia, but our biggest threats come from terrorism and the proliferation of WMD.  On top of this, absent the survival issues of the Cold War, we know must pay a greater attention issues of political economy.  We are a hegemon fighting to preserve its role, even as new powers, including India and Brazil, continue their rise.  Globalization and the information age are preconditions to each and every problem.

Is Grand Strategy impossible?  I hope not.  I make my living teaching strategy and strategic thinking and would like to think that I am in a growth industry.  Truth be told, however, future strategies will be complex and multidimensional.  Scholars and journalists will attempt to label these strategies with a single word.  The labelers will be even less accurate than those folks who attempt to de-complexify the past with labels like containment or preemption (which was only a part of the Bush 43 strategy).  Still, plowing this old ground will help us find useful techniques for developing future strategies.  Eisenhower's planning apparatus and the Solarium project were but two of the good ideas that may help future strategists.  Multi-scenario corporate efforts might also help our future Kennans.

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Whether or not one considers Dr. Luttwak’s comments to be a rant -- I don’t -- he certainly is correct in noting that America’s single-minded preoccupation during the past decade with combating global terrorism has had the effect of distorting both our diplomatic and military relations with the world’s other major powers, friendly and otherwise, and of diverting attention from strategic concerns potentially far more important in the long run to the nation’s security and prosperity.

Whatever else it did, the end of the Cold War effectively shattered the strategic framework that had governed those relationships and concerns for nearly half a century. President George H.W. Bush understood that, and while some may have faulted his articulation of the need for a new world order, he had the right idea, as his successful management of allies, adversaries, and the international community at large during the first Gulf War abundantly illustrated.

The principle of economy of force applies as much to foreign policy as to military strategy, and is one we repeatedly have ignored. Not the least of the reasons to revisit America’s strategic priorities is to restore some balance in the relative importance we assign to our overseas relationships and concerns, and Dr. Luttwak is absolutely right to remind us of it.

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Updated at 9:43 a.m. on Aug. 12.

Prof Edward Luttwack has always been provocative at the intellectual level.  He now has added crude polemic to his repertoire.  A pity - since it at once conceals the occasional valid point (neither core American interests nor the shape of world affairs is being determined in Anbar Province or in the Hindu Kush) and tempts a quite unhelpful response in kind.  Trying to avoid the latter, let me briefly note the gross errors in Luttwak's rant.

1.  Iraq.  Bush did not 'win the war' in Iraq. None of our objectives are close to being reached; the negative effects as to Islamic terrorism are immense.  The decline in violence since 2007 has nothing to do with the brilliant 'Surge' strategy.  The Awakenin Councils were a Sunni phenomenon that began in 2006; the drawdown of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was done under Iranian pressure as part of an intricate intra-Sunni deal that had all parties agreed on a plan to use the SOFA to get rid of the Americans.  These truths are accessible to anyone ready to take the bother to check the record.

2.  The U.S. profited from the collapse of the USSR at the strategic level to the maxilum possible.  It drew into the 'democratic/capitalist camp' nearly all of Europe, it took Russia to the cleaners on all manner of security matters, and it rode the wave of 'liberalism' around the world to foster the American idea of how political life should be organized.  The problem with the last is that it was a fundamentalist version of 'liberalism' that we promoted at enormous cost to us and the rest of the world.

3.  Racial insults do not make strategy.  The 'primitive' Iraqs had more women doctors, lawyers and jurists per capita than did the United States in 1980.  Racist fairy-tales about effete men strolling hand-in-hand instead of working plumb the depths of tendentious, wilful ignorance.  If we want to hear that sort of thing, we should tune in to Mr. Lieberman in Jerusalem rather than read it on the National Journal from a formerly distinguished scholar.

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Updated at 11:27 a.m. on Aug. 11

A note from your moderator: From time to time we at National Journal invite comment on the blog from a guest commentator with special expertise in the weekly topic under discussion. This week, we have the pleasure to share a post from Edward Luttwak, the influential and sometimes controversial author of such relevant works as Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third, and Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook. Dr. Luttwak’s comments follow below:

 Why did the United States gain so little from the collapse of the Soviet Union, that luckiest of lucky breaks, that most improbably peaceful demise of the greatest of military empires?

Only part of the answer is obvious. No longer needed to contain Soviet power, the United States was bound to lose some of its own power, as the support of allies and clients naturally diminished, while a suddenly uncontested primacy evoked resistance even from the least malevolent; not even a most benevolent foreign policy could have wholly avoided such reactions –and during the Clinton years, it was better than benevolent because American power was very effectively negated by passivity in the first term, and incoherent activism in the second.

But the greater reason for the American failure to gain much from the fall of the Soviet Union is simpler: nothing much can be achieved on a global scale if the priority attention of the Presidency and the entire national security apparatus, along with vast resources is devoted month after month, year after year, to such places as Diyala and al-Ambar or Paktia and Paktika. Nothing much goes on there other than habitual domestic oppression, intermittent artisanal violence between rival families, bands, clans, tribes, nations, sects, religions--and a phenomenal amount of leisure diminished only by frequent religious rituals prolonged by obscurantist or incendiary sermons. Even in places where there is famously fertile land, agriculture does not yield enough food for local feeding, because even hard field work is mostly left to the local women while the local men prefer to stroll holding hands, chat or simply loaf in long robes ill- suited for physical work. Indeed there is no production of anything very much -- neither bicycles nor socks, neither literature nor art, because the level of activity is no higher in the cultural sphere than in industry or agriculture.

Given this nullity, there was nothing that could possibly be gained in those places by way of contrived tranquility or imposed political advancement that could even begin to offset the resulting American inattention to the creative and productive world—of   Europe on its troubled path to integration, Japan on its uncertain course, the Russian Federation in its striving against decline, China in its continuing rise, India with all its hopeful contradictions, hard-working Brazil and the smaller countries that overcome scale with innovation. Had American diplomacy focused on influencing the complex and subtle processes underway in places that matter, instead of having to justify exotic wars and enlist troops from reluctant allies, had the presidency focused first of all on the macro-economic equilibrium of the United States itself,  which was not sustained as foolish columnists still assert but rather undermined by foreign buying of Treasury bonds that elevated the dollar and lowered interest rates, favoring imports and asset bubbles while depressing exports and industry, the crises of 2007,2008, 2009 and 2010 would have been averted.

Strategy –the real thing, or Grand Strategy if one prefers-- is stronger than tactics. Having picked the wrong allies and the wrong enemies in both world wars, Germany could not redeem strategic error with its many and splendid tactical victories—even the defeat of both the Red Army and the D-day landings in 1944 would only have ensured that the first fission bomb would have detonated in Berlin instead of Hiroshima. While a sound strategy requires only tactical adequacy, tactical success simply does not break through to the strategic level; indeed if one fights the wrong war, good tactics actually make things worse by encouraging persistence, while brilliant tactics are even worse, by inducing an ever greater waste of resources in hope-less places.

The situation in Iraq deteriorated so badly in 2004 and 2005, that there was a window of opportunity during which it seemed that the United States might be saved from the irremediable strategic error of being in Iraq at all, by sheer frustration. It is impossible to know whether a disengagement that would have left Iraqis to each other, and Iraq’s problems to its neighbors would have resulted in increased mayhem, or to the contrary in a new equilibrium, but it would certainly have given a chance to the United States to focus on places a thousand times more important than Diyala or al-Anbar , starting with the United States itself.

Alas it was not to be. Instead a group of intellectual soldiers came along to rediscover, edit and re-circulate the final counter-insurgency lesson of Vietnam. That was exactly the same very old lesson that even the Romans had both learned and forgotten more than once: because insurgents are ungentlemanly enough not to stand their ground in readily targetable massed formations, they cannot be usefully attacked and must instead be defeated by protecting and winning over the local population that sustains them. Then there was the second Roman lesson: the empire is one but its enemies are many, so with a little encouragement they can be set to kill each other, divide to impera. Simple enough, but in Iraq lesson number one could scarcely be applied by mechanized forces trained and equipped to fight other mechanized forces with little infantry for constabulary duties, while lesson number two took an awfully long time to penetrate the minds of the protagonists of the war from President Bush down, because their startling starting assumption was that Iraq was inhabited by Iraqis just as Norway is inhabited by Norwegians--and just as ready for democracy and peaceful ethno-religious pluralism as soon as the awful dictator was removed. They had heard much about the Kurds but not of the Shi’a extremists among them, they knew that Arab Shi’i had been repressed but not that they were divided by murderous priestly feuds, they did not even know that the Yazidis existed, and above all they did not realize that Iraqis are mostly primitives, and as such more tribal than national. Or sectarian, because the largest tribal confederations contain both Sunni and Shi’a –and this turned out to be crucial.  

By rediscovering both ancient lessons and applying them with increased troop levels (“the surge”), junior officers ably re-trained to hunt elusive enemies and protect civilians, special-operations’ units galore, so much money that it could not all be stolen or wasted, useful technical aids, resuscitated Vietnam-war practices, and a wholly new degree of sociological sophistication in exploiting inter-sectarian and intra-sectarian division as well as tribalism, the superbos of all kinds were very largely defeated. Ba’ath revanchists, disgruntled Sunnis in general, dissatisfied tribes, foreign Jihadis and hostile Sh’ia militiamen increasingly fought each rather than the Americans or the American-created regime, whose control over the situation has continued to increase. Thus Bush won his war and achieved the objective of establishing the Arab world’s best approximation to democratic governance. True, bombs continue to explode but sporadic acts of terrorism are as nothing compared to the territorial control of most parts of Iraq that assorted insurgents used to have.

That is bad, very bad indeed because success in Iraq ended any hope of rehabilitating American global strategy by disengaging from Iraq, and indeed paved the way for the even more hopeless attempt to gain something in the greater nullity of Afghanistan.

What about terrorism then? For that too there is a perfectly valid Roman lesson: worthless places that cannot be profitably occupied but which may contain dangerous enemies, should be kept under close surveillance, and raided whenever potential threats can be identified and extirpated. The United States is already practicing a raiding strategy in Somalia and in the more ungoverned parts of Pakistan, with UAVs. But even much larger raids with ground units would not pre-empt national strategy day after day as our current occupation strategy does.

 -- Edward N. Luttwak

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The US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan is only just beginning.   Having been given the command for which he lobbied, General McChrystal is now prepared and apparently eager to fight it out to the death with the Taliban confederation of; raggedy tribesmen, religious zealots, bandits and other assorted Pushtun rabble.  Some of them have a connection to Al-Qa'ida.  Some.  How many "Taliban" are there?  I keep seeing the number 20,000.  Does anyone actually know? I doubt it.  And how many part-timers and logistical supporters are there?  I am sure that no intelligence worthy of the name reveals those facts.  And how many "Taliban" are there in Pakistan?  Any idea?  Matthew Arnold's line about "ignorant armies (that) clash by night" comes to mind.  We are blundering around in the dark, making assumptions about the motivations and affiliations of strange folk far away, people that live and die by rules only dimly perceived (and often misunderstood) by us in the "progressive" West.  Yesterday I asked a well meaning friend  who is deeply involved in all this what it is that we want in AFPAK and especially in Afghanistan.  He replied that we want to see an end to the abaility of the takfiri jihadi groups to plan and train in the country.  Once we have that, then we will leave he said.  I replied that this goal is unattainable without a continuing American military presence and that this implies a long, long time.  He was no longer interested in the conversation.

Some will think that my rant is "off topic."  I think not.

In fact, we have not had the debate on basic national policy and strategy that this week's question implies.  There does not seem to be any dissent at all in the Obama Administration over the basic issue of whether or not we should commit ourselves to a "forward" posture in Afghanistan.

"Strategic Review?"  No.  What has gone by that title in both this and the last administration are mere exercizes in "group think,"  long and drawn out elaborations of "wish lists" written within the context of a general agreement that closely unified and "modern" nation states are the destiny of mankind and that US policy should seek to bring them into existence.  The costs involved in trying to do that are simply dismissed as "the price of doing business."  What a business!

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Theodore White, an excellent political reporter and author, once said that good reporters organize facts within stories.  But, good historians organize lives and episodes into arguments.  The problem is many historians have so mythologically organized our "victory" over the evils of communism that we have forgotten the rocky, ambiguous "strategy" roads we took to getting there.

Neither inevitable nor particularly clear in thought, the "victory" was premised on one simple idea -- that the United States and its representation of a way of life were superior to all others.  And, you know something, we were right.  And it is on that premise we need to continue our foreign policy in the 21st Century.

Americans do not like to think of themselves as having an evangelical foreign policy, but we do. Since World War II, as the world's largest power, we have cooperated, pressed, contained, cajoled, overthrown and hammered away on the ideas of democracy and freedom as best for all.  The so-called strategies have varied from real-politik to containment to varying forms of multi-lateralism. The premise remained the same -- democracy and freedom.

I think the end of the Cold War has thrown us.  It was a lot easier to promulgate this ideal of democracy and freedom against a sterile ideological enemy whose pursuit of world domination was almost comical, if not so tragic.  Myths quickly build and make the next steps harder to perform -- bound by "past success."

Some say the world today is more ambiguous than the Cold War.  A religious zealot is harder to fight than a political zealot. That the tactics must be more diverse, more "granular"  and more adaptable.  Arguably, that is the case and our response needs to be more complex both militarily and diplomatically.  We live in an asymmetric age of non-nation state players and porous nations.

All of it granted.   Each generation has its own challenges.  None are insurmountable.

 Whatever the vicissitudes of the day, America remains the strongest power in the world.  Our bottom line is that we must maintain the courage of our convictions.  We are the best model for the world.  Democracy and freedom are worthwhile goals to obtain.  Our mission is to pursue those ideals as our mission in the world.  The tactics to execute on that are as varied as the minds shaping them.  

 

 

 

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I am inclined to agree with Loren Thompson. We no longer are certain about our strategy for two reasons: First, we are not sure whether we are still the world's overwhelmingly dominant power. Second, we are not sure whether we want to be that power. We have refocused our defense program and resources primarily with a view to continuing a long-term battle against a relatively minor set of non-state actors in a relatively remote location. At the same time, recognizing short- and medium-term budget constraints, we are curtailing the modernization and development of those capabilities that are essential to maintaining our dominance against any future threat from whatever source.

This is not to say that it is inappropriate to allocate some resources for what is currently termed "irregular warfare", itself a euphemism for the politically discredited phrase "war on terror." Nevertheless, planning to fight such a war is hardly a strategy of any kind, whether grand or less than grand. Interestingly, recent press reports indicate that the Defense Department plans to have the capability to fight two wars simultaneously, one an "irregular conflict" the other, a more conventional war. This bifurcation is the legacy of the Second World War, during which our forces fought in two major theaters. We have, in one form or another, planned for two wars ever since; that we do so today, over six decades after the end of World War II, simply indicates how unimaginative about strategy we have become. That one of those wars is "irregular" further indicates how we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we can get by with fewer resources while maintaining a two-war capability.

There should be no question but that the United States should develop a strategy that maintains its international dominance. It still boasts the world's most powerful economy. Its dollar remains the world's reserve currency, if only by default. Its language, shared with its closest allies, is the lingua franca of this century (how many Third World elites study Chinese, Russian or Arabic?). And its military currently is still second to none.

How to preserve those advantages in the face of threats other than those posed by turbaned terrorists in Central Asia should be a major priority for the best and brightest of our defense thinkers. Should we move away from dependence on land bases to an increasingly greater maritime posture? (I think we should). Should we revisit and reconstruct our web of alliances? (Again, affirmative.) Should we launch a new national effort to stop the ersosion  of our superiority in the sciences, mathematics and engineering, which has long been the key to our military superiority (affirmative again)?  Should we reconsider the nature of military industrial base, and truly reform our acquisition culture to harnass the energies and imagination of our most producive commercial start-ups and venture capatialists (affirmative again)?

I am not sure we are seriously addressing  any of the above, much less weaving these disparate concerns into a cohesive strategy for this century. But it is time we did.

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Greetings again from New England, where I am visiting to celebrate my mother's 91st birthday.  This presents a better venue than you might think from which to comment on national security strategy, given the manner in which my mother's life has unfolded.  She was born in 1918, during a great war against imperialism.  Twenty years later, she joined the Army Air Corps to fight another big war, that one against fascism.  Ten years after that she met my father in Korea --while fighting a third war, against communism.  So she has been present for all the major military threats of the last hundred years, from the Kaiser to Al Qaeda.

For me, two things stand out about national security strategy during her lifetime.  The first thing is that we only found unity of purpose when our backs were to the wall -- in other words, when the threat was so urgent that no reasonable person could deny it.  That is not the kind of danger we face today, and so of course we struggle to find agreement in forging a strategy.  Today's threats are too modest and too diverse to provide the foundation for a consensus-based strategy that can drive our national security exertions.

But here is the second thing that stands out.  In all of its brushes with oblivion since the Civil War, our Republic could count on being the mightiest industrial power in the world.  The strength and resilience of our economy made possible whatever strategy was needed to defeat aggressors.  Today, that vital asset has begin to slip away.  Our share of global output has shrunk from 31% when the decade began to 27% today.  We have recently experienced the biggest merchandise trade deficits in history, and have lost an average of over over 40,000 manufacturing jobs every month in this decade.  The future financial obligations of federal entitlement programs now exceed the net worth of all U.S. households combined, and yet we keep adding new debt at the rate of $5 billion per day.

I would submit that the real danger to our future security today does not reside in what a handful of misanthropic terrorists or rogue states might do to the Republic.  The real danger is what we are doing to ourselves, and to an economy we once dubbed the "arsenal of democracy."  Any national security strategy that takes American economic strength as a given is an anachronism.  And any strategy that treats terrorism or proliferation as the gravest threats we face is out of touch with what truly ails us. 

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Describing American strategy from 1945 to 1991 as "containment" was always an over simplification. It was, more accurately, a time of system building as the United States engineered a range of new institutions and rules to replace those destroyed by the world wars. It was also a time of system building competition with the Soviet Union--a competition in which the United States succeeded.

After 1991, the United States faced two choices: what might be called the "imperial" option which placed America in the position of sustaining and protecting the global security system which it helped create, or the "national" option which would have returned to a more traditional and much narrower definition of security threats rather than the expansive concept of instability.

The strategies pursued by both Bushes, Clinton, and, so far, Obama have been variants of the imperial option. They have all been much more alike than distinct. As with all imperial maintenance strategies throughout history, they pivot on a handful of key questions, most importantly the degree of control the dominant power will exert and the extent of challenge it will tolerate, and the issue of which threats should be eradicated and which simply managed. The main difference between the Clinton and George W. Bush strategies was that the latter was less tolerant of challenges and used a more expansive notion of threat eradication, concluding that ultimately Islamic extremism could be eradicated.

We are, today, at the point of decision. There are three feasible options: 1) a strategy of aggressive imperial maintenance which tolerates only limited challenges and takes an expansive notion of the type of threats which must be eradicated rather than controlled: 2) a strategy of limited imperial maintenance which still seeks to limit or control "instability" but which tolerates a great degree of challenge and is more constrained in seeking to eradicate rather than manage it; or 3) a national strategy which limits the exercise of American power to regions and issues of direct effect on the United States (and deliberate seeks to lessen the number of such regions and issues).

Clearly option 1 is the most expensive and dangerous, but also has the greatest potential payoff. In my opinion, in lieu of the use of nuclear weapons against us by either terrorists or another state, we will continue to vacillate between option 1 and 2. Should this nightmare occur, we may devolve to option 3.

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Although grand strategy has its uses, U.S. foreign policy would be well served if thinking and debate about it got away from the perennial infatuation with doctrine and with attempts to explain the challenges of the world in terms of simple concepts characterizing a particular era. The infatuation persists because such explanations reassure us and appeal to our desire to understand the world without taxing our minds with too much complexity. It persists also because the ranks of strategists are filled with George Kennan wannabes hoping to offer the next great concept to catch on, even though Kennan himself never intended his own concept of containment to be applied as indiscriminately as it came to be applied.

Simple, overarching principles, which are intrinsic to any grand strategy, are inconsistent with the very large amount of unavoidable uncertainty that characterizes the outside world and the ways in which that world can affect U.S. interests. Guidance that claims to be generally applicable to U.S. foreign policy is likely to be misguidance in some specific cases, some of which—and we cannot know in advance which ones—turn out to be important. To a large extent, policymakers would do well to expect that history really is one damned thing after another.

The simplifying, overriding, doctrinally enshrined tenets of a grand strategy have another unfortunate effect: once enshrined, they discourage debate, dissent, and healthy skepticism. They become unquestioned, and often unstated, assumptions. They generate images of the outside world that, although possibly inaccurate, are taken for granted. And they encourage politicization, in which contrary information is either ignored or shaped to conform to the strategy.

I am not optimistic that advice such as mine ever will be followed. Simplifying, reassuring doctrine is what sells. What does not sell as well are reminders that we need to stay alert and nimble enough to cope with whatever is the next thing that history throws at us.

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As I noted in an earlier post, history reveals relatively few examples of preconceived grand strategies. Like a ship under sail, foreign policy is at the mercy of uncontrollable and often unpredictable winds and currents. Even given a clear destination -- itself by no means common -- strategic success requires constant course correction…together with a good deal of luck.

That said, absent some articulation of strategic intentions, other states have little choice but to draw their own conclusions however mistaken. A blog entry is no place to define those. But it does permit suggesting a few criteria that should apply to them. Of those, the most important are the ones governing our future use of military force. For my money, we have an indisputable right to deter or defeat armed aggression against ourselves and others to whom we are formally allied, to include depriving those who mount or sponsor such aggression of their continued ability to do so. We have the right to preserve unfettered access to and use of the global commons -- the high seas, the airspace over them, the exoatmosphere, and cyberspace -- by force if need be. We have the right to propound our political, social, and economic values peacefully, and to assist those seeking to adopt them. We don't have the right to impose them by force, however painful we may find their rejection by others.

Above all, required like other states to reconcile ends however appealing with limited means, we need to suppress the temptation to pursue strategic perfection. Over-ambition is the mortal enemy of strategic success, not least because it tends to breed antibodies. As Henry Kissinger has argued, in a shrinking world in which distance no longer guarantees immunity, "America, like other nations, must learn to navigate between necessity and choice." More than ever before, America's continued security and prosperity are likely to require both modesty in defining our aims and patience in achieving them, and reconciling missionary zeal with a limited attention span may be our toughest strategic challenge.

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In principle, there is a logical sequence in security planning that begins with the formulation of a grand design embracing a broad assessment of the nation’s position in the world, a prioritization of its interests, and an appraisal of policies for achieving them. The structure of military forces along with doctrines for guiding their possible deployments follows. It should be focused on threats derived from the overall foreign policy design. In practice, these sequenced connections were made with less than full rigor in process and with imperfect fit in substance. Still there usually were discernible intersections that reflected considered judgments at each phase.

In recent years, that coherence has been lost. Or, to be more accurate, a coterie of persons at the apex of the government did have a grand design but did not honestly present it to the country – much less entertain debate about its premises, ends, and means. The confluence of the neo-conservative and ultra nationalist world views amounted to a grand strategy with audacious goals. It was fear and dread post-9/11 that allowed the strategy to unfold as the ‘war on terror’ provided the ideal political cover. Hence, the premises were never publicly scrutinized.

The implicit Bush world view, I believe, has been absorbed by the Obama administration. Changes are ones of nuance in execution, rhetoric and imagery. Consider that Obama has no hesitation about committing the country to an open-ended campaign in Afghanistan/Pakistan with fuzzy measures of success and an unattainable end point. The much touted roundtable in the White House, as described in NYT and WP reports, focused on tactics and proximate objectives – representing about 90 degrees of a 360 degree circle of all policy possibilities. So complete, and unquestioned, were the premises that Obama never saw fit to address the American people so as to explain the escalation’s justification – even in the wake of the Iraq debacle.

There are three key premises to this strategic perspective:

1. Violent Islamic terrorism poses such a grave threat to the United States that its total elimination constitutes a categorical imperative. American threat tolerance on this front is zero.

2. That imperative means that we must remove all elements in Afghanistan – and elsewhere, e.g. Pakistan, Somalia – who are ‘hostile’ to the United States since their hostility could transmute into tangible threat. Thereby, the Taliban are the enemy as much as al-Qaeda is.

3. All other security considerations, apart from nuclear ones, are subordinate to dealing with the terrorist threat.

Given this understanding of the United States’ security needs, comprehensive strategic reviews become academic exercises. The requirements of the ‘war on terror’ are the priority item, all else either flows from it or is subordinated to it. This leads to the underlying approach of the Quadrennial Defense Review wherein we prepare for everything in order to avoid facing squarely the practical implications of the overriding, unstated priority. In other words, assume infinite resources and political capital at home and abroad.

These conditions do permit strategic planning for dealing with some other specific aspects of American foreign relations, China above all. What they do not allow is the forming of an integrated design that composes a broad stroke picture of how we visualize the world, within varied time-frames, and what we could do to affect what that picture will look like. A notation of the multiple external relations that have been shaped by the ‘war on terror’ as the controlling factor underscores the point, I believe. In no order of consequence: Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua in the Western Hemisphere; Russia; the despotic central Asian states where we seek basing and transit concessions; the interpretation of acceptable outcomes in Iraq; democratic norms (free elections) in the Greater Middle East from Palestine to Algeria to Egypt; the Horn of Africa; countries on three continents that have hosted ‘black sites’ and/or received extraordinary rendition captives; and Western Europe where the derivatives of the ‘war’ have considerably diminished our standing and, perhaps over time, our influence.

Finally, there are the multiple adverse effects from the financial crisis. There has been a system change associated with the drastic shift in the ratio of American economic strengths/vulnerabilities globally, especially in the monetary sphere. The implications for the terms of the Sino-American relationship in particular are profound. Yet the readiness of American foreign policy-makers to make a full assessment of these effects is weakened by both the preoccupations of the ‘war of terror’ and its derivatives, and the unsettling realization that the conclusions of such a reassessment will highlight a general decline in the nation’s ability to fulfill its self-declared, ambitious aims and purposes. The intellectual, political and emotional adjustments required would be daunting under the best of strategic planning circumstances. The terrorism preoccupation makes them impossible.

One last, more prosaic thought. This sort of serious, reflective mental work cannot be done at 37,000 feet while schmoozing with reporters or when racing to a T.V. studio to deliver a string of anodyne remarks to a credulous interviewer.

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Here is the root of the problem. We often fail to distinguish between "national strategy" and "grand strategy." National strategy is organizing and using (ways and means) the instruments of national power to achieve national goals (ends). Every president has their own strategy. Grand strategy is the collective set of norms of national behavior (ends, ways, and means) that transcends administrations and represents a nation's general approach to providing for its security.

Grand strategy changes infrequently, usually only after a major shift in the geo-strategic environment. The two most notable examples of American grand strategies were the 19th century Monroe Doctrine and containment during the Cold War.

The great debate we should have had after the fall of the Berlin Wall was not "what is our strategy?" but what should be America's grand strategy? That's debate we never really had.

Instead, we just kind of made it up as we went along.

Until 9/11.

September 11 actually started a national debate over grand strategy...but it didn't get very far. Attempts at a Bush Doctrine got hijacked by both the administration's friends and its enemies to describe post-9/11 strategy as "preventative war," or "kill them before they even think about killing us." That resulted in a politicization and polarization of the debate that killed any chance for rational discourse.

We didn't debate grand strategy...we just shouted past each other.

Beneath all the code-pink protests, Noam Chomsky diatribes and neo-conservative homilies, however, the administration did start to build the foundation of a post-Cold War grand strategy...and though few would admit it, there was and still is an emerging bipartisan consensus that the administration's instincts were correct.

The key to US security in the 21st century is to remain a competitive power, one that has both the capacity and the will to look after its interests. We need to keep the nation strong. That strength is necessary because we face many potential threats in the future from pandemics to wars. We don't know exactly the sequence and severity of these threats-and we shouldn't play Russian Roulette trying to guess which ones to ignore. The one thing that we know in every case, no matter what the threat is, is that we need to be a strong and resilient nation--and strength comes from strategies, policies, and programs that provide security, freedom, and prosperity--because these are the three essential and non-negotiable pillars of a free-competitive people. The trick is that the nation must address all three pillars equally well...to sacrifice one only undermines the others.

At the base of most of post-9/11 initiatives was an effort to craft strategies that did all three--much of the proof of that is that this administration uses many of the same justifications to defend its policies. Obama, for example, wants missile defense that is "proven and cost effective" and border security that's "smart and tough." Indeed, President Bush could well have delivered most of President Obama's National Archives speech and have been comfortable with almost every word.

We are in a quandary and a pickle now not because we don't have an post-9/11 grand strategy...but because we refuse to acknowledge that one is emerging, one that by large most mainstream leaders on both sides of the aisle can live with.

Instead, we continue to play political football with grand strategy rather than roll up our sleeves and have the real debates--the debates about whether what are doing in everything from solving the recession to fighting in Afghanistan really meets the test posed by the nation's new grand strategy.

The test is pretty simple. Does the strategy, policy, or program stop America's enemies? Does it protect the freedom of Americans and respect human rights for all? Does it allow the economy to grow and prosper?

If the answer to all three is not yes, then you have got it wrong...go back and start over.

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We cannot possibly have a useful debate about future strategy without a clear-eyed understanding of the past.

We need to stop kidding ourselves: Whatever utility "containment" may once have possessed as a descriptor of postwar US strategy, that utility has long since vanished. The sequence of events that landed us in today's Long War -- a sequence that began in 1945 when FDR's famously met with King Ibn Saud in the Great Bitter Lake -- cannot possibly be explained under the rubric of containment. Dealing with the threat posed by the Soviet Union was but one consideration among many that shaped US policy from the late 1940s through the 1980s -- and that have continued to inform US actions since the collapse of communism.

The real strategy was one that sought to secure a position of global primacy or hegemony (typically styled as "global leadership"), relying on American power, especially military power, to shape an international order conducive to American security, American prosperity, and (usually an afterthought) American values.

We emerged from World War II as the big winners. The aim of US strategy after 1945 was to capitalize on and perpetuate the advantages secured (in considerable measure thanks to the Red Army) during the war itself.

The questions that we ought to confront today are the following:

1). In retrospect, how well has that strategy served us? What have we gained? At what cost?

2). Looking forward, what are the implications of continuing our pursuit of hegemony? Where do the trend lines point? Is our present approach to strategy affordable and sustainable? What are the prospects of success?

3). Are there plausible alternatives? If so, what risks do they pose?

Mind you, I pose these questions with the full knowledge that there is no chance -- none -- that they will receive any serious consideration. Too many institutions are too deeply invested in "global leadership" to even consider the possibility that the nation might benefit from taking another course.

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