Thoughts on Grand StrategyFareed Zakaria
offers a plea for a new Grand Strategy from the Obama team but isn't very concrete about what it should look like. He also says that 'in order to form a grand strategy you need to know what the world actually looks like' which is *sort* of true, but I argue is looking at things in the wrong order.
As a
first step in the exercise, you need to clearly and accurately describe your goals.
This doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to
achieve them - but for the process of formulating a grand strategy to make any sense, you need to know where you're trying to go.
Fabius Maximumus has an
excellent set of posts on the subject of U.S. Grand Strategy, mostly indicating how the Bush Administration's notion of such a strategy was flawed - and, to the degree that the current administration retains Bush positions either explicitly or by default, our grand strategy remains so.
President GHW Bush (41), as mentioned in the Zakaria article, had to tone down the Cheney Pentagon version of a Grand Strategy based on (and designed to maintain) U.S. unipolarity and freedom of action.
The problem with the Cheney and Co. grand strategy was not that it saw the world inaccurately, but that it had unclear (or nonexistent) end goals. It didn't set forth end goals, it set forth conditional goals. It explicitly laid out a rosy vision of American power and opportunity as seen in the 1990s, and then stated that America should use this opportunity to
try to prolong the period of opportunity. Fundamentally, the Cheney crew did not see the unipolar moment as a window; they rather saw it as a dynamic equilibrium, one which could be maintained with the proper effort - and they saw that state as their 'grand goal.' They wanted freedom to act, and ability to act - but they never said what for, other than circularly to say 'to retain our freedom and ability to act as we see necessary.'
Happily for us (well, sort of) the DoD has offered us just recently the Quadrennial Roles and Missions review (available
here). In this report there is a hideous PowerPoint slide which nevertheless has some good information on it. I offer it below.
The DoD has given us, here, the goal set it is working with. Let's look at it.
-Homeland is Defended
-Long War is Won
-Security is Promoted
-Conflict is Deterred
-Nation's Wars are won
I'll be up front with you: I don't like this goal list. Not much, at least. I don't like it because it offers transitory accomplishments and vague conditions as what DoD has labeled 'Strategic End States.' To be fair, those end states do map 'upward' to the 'National Defense Strategy' and the 'National Military Strategy.' Apparently those are separate things. I'm not sure why. Neither, however, is a decent statement (to me) of a Grand Strategy.
Why does this matter? It matters because if you leave that anchor undone, it allows for vicious amounts of 'float' in the Strategic End States. Are those end states really what the U.S. wants and needs? Or are they the end states that the DoD has found 'fit nicely' between the 'DOD Core Mission Areas' and the higher-up strategies which they're passing along? I want to know that these Strategic End States are flowing from a coherent picture at a higher level of what the U.S. and its military are trying to do. Let's look at these in turn.
'Homeland Defended.' From what? How? With what level of success? 'Long War is Won.' What is 'winning the long war' and why is it important to us? 'Security is promoted.' Whose security? At whose expense? With what and how?
I could go on, but will stop there. It is somewhat revealing that immediately after this slide, rather than offering any vision into these strategic end states, the document immediately goes into 'DOD Core Mission Areas (JOCs)'. While this document and this authoring group were not tasked with coming up with the strategic end states or higher strategy, I'd like to know they read them and understood them. I have the strong impression, from this doc, that while they did that, even they had difficulty working the means-ends chain properly through from the top level to their JOCs/JCAs - and this is a bit of a handwave to get them past the difficult part. Essentially, while I don't take issue here with any of the document's contents, I do take issue with the fact that it seems to be disconnected from the strategic level by anything other than primitive word-matching.
Let me reel back in a moment. I don't want to sound like I'm attacking those who came up with this document. I believe (and will argue later) that the reason for this disconnect lies above the plane of this document, in the strategic concepts themselves.
What, then, is a strategic concept that works, and why don't we have one? Let's look at a past strategy - one that was coherent and definite.
NSC-68, to give a famous example, offered a concrete goal set. It saw a desired state - the continued survival and freedom of the United States. It saw a specific threat - the Soviet Union's rise in power militarily, economically, and politically. It saw a basic condition problem state - the Soviets' espoused ideology, which threatened the goal state. And then it proposed a desired enabling state - successful containment of the Soviet Union - and offered prescriptions on how to achieve that which encompassed concrete recommendations on military, diplomatic and economic initiatives.
I'm not interested in arguing the moral correctness of NSC-68. I want to point out that however you feel about it, NSC-68 succeeded. We can argue about whether it did so by accident, or by design; whether it was vital or irrelevant. But in the very small sample set of grand strategies proffered by the United States' policymaking community, its desired goals, both intermediate and final, were realized.
Bush 41's Cheney and Co, on the other hand, even if we grant them the 'survive and flourish' goal as a desired endstate, fail to connect their two conditions. Even if the United States manages to preserve its unipolar perch, how (CONCRETELY) does this lead to the survival and flourishing of the United States? There are any number of plausible scenarios where the U.S. maintains a leadership position, even a unipolar one, where it falls anyway - because as history teaches us, unipolar dominance is not a necessary condition (nor, I would argue, a sufficient one) for our survival and progress. The United States spent most of its existance not as a hegemonic power, nor even as a particularly important one on the world stage. It spent the years 1776 to roughly 1945 in various conditions ranging from insignificant to a global but not by any means hegemonic power. It survived, and flourished. Following 1945 and through 1990 or so, it continued to do so as a roughly hegemonic power - but certainly did not have nearly the freedom of action that it did in the 1990s. So Cheney and Co's fixation on freedom of action and power preponderance is a useless goal state. It is a TOOL, not a goal. And fixation on a particular tool rather than on the job isn't healthy.
In any case, the 'survive and flourish' goal is
a priori overdetermined (sorry, my Poli Sci background rears its head). Given the fact that the United States was, at the turn of the century, a nearly unipolar hegemon, it would take a significant shock to the world system to destroy it or render it unable to act to survive and flourish. While such events are certainly not impossible, the very assumption of the then-current state of the system means that we should by default, and in absence of disruption, simply expect the United States to go on as a powerful and flexible nation. As a result, the lack of specification of a credible threat(s) to that situation is even more problematic.
Next post: constructing a Grand Strategy.
Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group
