Richard Hart Sinnreich, Carrick Communications, Inc.
Biography provided by participant
Rick Sinnreich retired from the U.S. Army in 1990. A 1965 West Point graduate, he earned a master's degree in foreign affairs from Ohio State University and is a graduate of the Army's Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies, and the National War College. His active military service included commands from battery through brigade, combat service in Vietnam, teaching at West Point and Fort Leavenworth, and staff assignments on the Army, Joint, and National Security Council staffs, as Assistant Executive to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and as Army Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment prior to retirement was as chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Division (Motorized).
Since retiring from military service, Sinnreich has worked as an independent consultant and columnist. He continues to play an active role in Army and Joint futures studies and war games and has assisted other defense agencies including RAND, DARPA, and IDA. His defense-related opinion columns for The Lawton (OK) Constitution have been reprinted by the Washington Post, ARMY Magazine, and other journals. His most recent scholarly work is The Past As Prologue (with Williamson Murray et al, Cambridge University Press, 2006) and "Enhancing Battle Command: An Introduction," in Battle of Cognition (Praeger, 2008). Other recent historical essays, appearing in forthcoming edited collections, include "A Strategy By Accident: U.S. Pacific Policy in the Cold War" (2003), and "In Search of Military Repose: The Congress of Vienna and the Making of Peace" (2006).
Regarding Paul Starobin’s, “even though the Cold War ended more than fifteen years ago, there remains a vacuum, the absence of an ordering principle, in geopolitical life,” a very perceptive comment. But searching for an ordering principle may be the easier chore. Inducing or compelling obedience to it once found (and lets not kid ourselves: some degree of compulsion almost always is necessary) will be much harder than it has ever been.… Read more
That notion is a myth and always has been. Foreign policy has been an ingredient of domestic politics (and vice versa) at least since Hamilton's Federalists v. Jefferson's Republicans. And while the intemperance and incivility of the current partisan debate is disturbing, even that pales in comparison with some earlier historical episodes. Regarding missile defense specifically, the real problem always has been the gap, still not closed, between the aspirations of its advocates (among whom I include myself) and hardware performance reliability sufficient to justify a major investment. … Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
In foreign policy, careless language certainly can have consequences -- consider Kaiser Wilhelm II's infamous "Kruger Telegram," which helped to accelerate the deterioration in Anglo-German relations that eventually culminated in World War I -- but by and large, governments pay less attention to words than to behavior. As annoying as the Brits found them, Wilhelm's rantings were less important in the end than Germany's imprudent efforts to challenge Britain's naval supremacy. It's only when action begins to reinforce assertion that governments are apt to sit up and take notice. President George W. Bush's announcement of a "preemptive" strategy prompted… Read more
The short answer to the question is that I have no idea. Making confident predictions about how hostile states will react to U.S. efforts to rein them in is a sucker's game. One thing I am willing to assert is that framing Iran and North Korea as generically similar strategic problems is a mistake. Containment was grounded in a correct assessment that, prevented from expanding by conquest, the U.S.S.R. eventually would implode on its own. In Iran, as recent events suggest, it's quite possible that a similarly self-generated transformation may eventually take place. In contrast, there currently is no prospect… Read more
It may be twenty years or two hundred before we can judge with any confidence whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were successful even by subjective criteria, and even then some may question whether they were really "worth fighting," since no one ever will know how history would have evolved had we chosen not to fight them. But we need not wait twenty years, or even two, to conclude that the way we have fought them has done little or nothing to make them more defensible. The record of our political and military missteps in both contests, and their… Read more
Well, considering how successful our policy has been for the past half-century, I'm not sure I see the downside. The Castros aren't my favorite people, but we do business with a lot of governments that fit that description, including the ones on behalf of which we're currently fighting. However, if we want to keep things as they are, making "U.S. demands" certainly is good a way to do it. … Read more
If any commitment ever defined "mission creep," it’s Afghanistan. As I recall, we began by exploiting an existing civil conflict to punish the Taliban government for its refusal to surrender Bin Laden & Co. Having merely displaced the latter and their Taliban hosts to Pakistan by failing to commit enough ground forces from the outset to entrap and destroy them, we then cheerfully adopted Colin Powell’s "Pottery Barn" principle without troubling to consider whether "owning" an Afghanistan that was "broken" long before we showed up made any more sense for us than it had for the British and the… Read more
So far, most comments have focused on intelligence providers. But a case can be made that our most serious recent “intelligence failures” have had more to do with its consumers. Evidence isn’t hard to cite: after 9-11-01, the intelligence community was accused of insufficient imagination; two years later, when the justification for invading Iraq lay in shreds, the same community was pilloried for exhibiting too much imagination. Decision-makers get the intelligence they deserve. Years ago, one of my students at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth wrote a monograph entitled “Reading the Entrails of Goats,” a… Read more
I'm not sure I understand why we insist on treating this problem as a one-off. The essential fact of the 60-year war between Israel and one combination or another of its Arab neighbors is that, like other lingering struggles, neither side has been able to win it. In that problem, the outside world has been heavily complicit, supporting one side or the other (and sometimes both) just enough to encourage it to fight but not enough to enable it to win. There will be a solution, two-state or otherwise, only when at least one of the parties finally acknowledges that… Read more
Prescribing what defense secretaries (or even presidents) should do with respect to defense policy is a hazardous undertaking at any time, but especially in today’s economic and security conditions. Between worldwide recession and two continuing wars, America’s options are limited. A good deal of the defense budget already is committed and the prospects for any significant increase are poor. For my money, two efforts should top Mr. Gates’s agenda: first, he should follow through on his own very sensible calls to expand budgetary and personnel support of the nation’s diplomatic and development agencies. The military is a remarkably… Read more
I'm currently immersed in research about British grand strategy at the turn of the 20th century, and have found Zara Steiner and Keith Neilson's Britain and the Origins of the First World War (2nd Ed., Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) a wonderfully lucid -- and disturbingly pertinent -- account. Also highly recommend Daniel Walker Howe's What hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford U. Press, 2007), described by my young historian niece as a "whiggish" view of the period, but very enlightening and a pleasure to read. Happy holiday to all.… Read more
As I noted in a column not long after Sen. Biden's comment, Mr. Obama really doesn't need to anticipate another crisis. He has more than enough problems on his plate already. As Rep. Skelton pointed out in the list to which his post refers, what the nation most requires from its new president is a convincing strategic framework from which to address the current and potential foreign and defense policy challenges with which we already are confronted. America can't reasonably expect to lead if neither friends, nor enemies, nor the uncommitted can figure out where we're leading. Neither can we expect to… Read more
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