Does Strategy Matter?
Walter B. Slocombe
Panel Presentation at the
“Meeting Key
Does Strategy Matter
"Strategy is the use of the
engagement [i.e., military operations] for the purpose of the war. …
"Strategic theory ... deals with planning; or rather it attempts to shed
light on the components of war and their interrelationships." [1]
-- Clausewitz
Strategy is, in Clausewitz’ definition quoted above, the method employed for application of “engagement,” i.e., military force, to achieve a desired goal. Accordingly, strategy always “matters,” and, moreover, “strategy” always exists, because strategy is, by definition, the relationship between desired ends and available means. Even though it is common (and appropriate) to speak of “having a strategy” as meaning having an effective and workable plan to achieve an objective, there is always some strategy embedded in any action toward a goal. Ideally, strategy will be rational and efficient, but that is not always the case – and it is no less “strategy” for being a poor choice. That strategy, that relationship between ends and means, may be planned or haphazard, realistic or delusional, confident or desperate, long or short term, but any action applying means toward an objective has embedded in it a strategy.
Importantly, strategy is not the
statement of objectives – like “defeat global terrorism” or “prevent
proliferation” – however important clear objectives are to an effective
strategy and however true it may be that some strategies imply certain
objectives. Nor is “strategy” simply the
prescription of a capability – though a strategy may well imply the need, given
time, to develop a capability, whether that capability is a new weapons system
or simply the movement of assets.[2] And, of course, it is a commonplace that at
some point “strategy” shades into tactics and logistics – the detailed means of
executing a strategy at the operational level.
It is a critical element of a strategy that – if it is to be both conscious and rational – it must be such as to serve as a guideline for choices and the allocation of priorities rather than leaving such choices and allocations to random chance or the shifting demands of the moment. Just as the core concept of economics is that wants are infinite but resources are limited, so the core concept of strategy is that – at least in any serious military matter – resources are limited relative to potential objectives and therefore they must be marshaled and allocated to objectives. Propositions like, “It is our plan to prevail decisively at minimal cost” or even “we shall fight on the beaches, etc.” are not expressions of strategy, but at best instruments of morale-building and at worst evasions of strategic decision, a form of cheerleading.
Real strategic decisions center on
this matter of making choices. For
example, in the Second World War, Roosevelt early on – even before Pearl Harbor
– made two fundamental strategic decisions about how to defeat the Axis that
were meant to guide the application of the greatest strength the United States
brought to the conflict – its ability to mobilize industrial resources. Those decisions were first, that priority
should go to defeating
There may, of course, be a
significant difference between declared strategies and those strategies
actually employed. Ultimately, a
nation’s real strategy is discovered only by study of what it does, not just
what it says it is doing. Even in the
World War II case, it is by no means clear in retrospect that the “Germany
First” strategy was in fact applied with any great rigor. For a variety of reasons, the actual
allocation of
This observation that what is said
publicly – and perhaps even what is promulgated in the most sensitive high
level channels – may not reflect the strategy a nation actually follows in
practice, is applicable to many of the documents that pass – in the public
discourse at least – for the contemporary “strategy” of the United States,
whether at the level of “national security,” “national defense,” or “national
military” strategy. To some degree, of
course, these public statements of strategy are limited in their candor and
real choice of priorities by the very fact of being public. Too much candor
about choices we make and the priorities we set risks giving valuable
information to potential enemies; it also can raise serious political problems
both domestically and with allies. [4] Moreover, any public statement of policy necessarily
and rightly has in it an element of aspiration, of setting goals, and seeking
to affect, as well as direct, resources.
However, there is more than just confidentiality or goal-post-moving at work in the tendency of contemporary American strategic documents to avoid hard choices. “Talk is cheap” is a principle that applies very strongly to the public articulation of national strategy. Almost invariably, such statements espouse “strategies” that take little account of limited resources. All too often, they descend to the level of self-parody, promising to “prevail” everywhere at minimum cost, and to maintain every conceivable capability, as well as induce allies and friends to bear their full share of the burden. This failing is by no means limited to recent documents; the 2000 Clinton National Security Strategy (NSS) includes its full share of overstatements.
It is not, however, a fully satisfactory answer to say, as the National Military Strategy (NMS) 2004 does, that the statement of strategy sets a standard against which to measure risk. Even a strategy that does make choices and set aspirational goals will involve some risks; indeed a critical part of any strategy is to define – as a part of the strategy, not merely as limitations on its accomplishment – what risks must be accepted as contrasted to those that must be reduced by changes in operations, plans, or resource commitments.
I do not mean to suggest that current strategic documents are exceptionally bad on this score. Quite the contrary, for the NSS published by what we must now get used to calling the first second Bush administration in September 2002 is, to its credit, distinctively “edgy” and decisive – by any standard and particularly by those of such documents. This is so not only in its controversial (and I would argue much misunderstood – even “misoverestimated”) espousal of pre-emption, but its explicit commitment to maintain overwhelming military superiority by leveraging American technological and industrial power, its all but absolute priority to the fight against the combination of terrorism and proliferation, its market-oriented approach to foreign aid, its wary but Realpolitik acceptance of Russia and China as “great power” partners, and its grand strategic vision of expanding democratic values and practices as the key to American security. One may agree or disagree with any or all of these strategic choices, but one can hardly dispute that they are choices, not pabulum.
However, as an exercise in considering the degree to which a current strategy document addresses current problems adequately, I have accepted the sponsors’ implied invitation to focus on the “National Military Strategy” approved in May 2004 by General Myers as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS). That focus is appropriate, not only because the 2004 NMS is the most recent of the strategic triad of National Security Strategy issued by the President, National Defense Strategy (NDS) issued by the Secretary of Defense, and NMS issued by CJCS, but because it is, in principle, the most categorical and specific – applying to the armed forces the general strategic guidance laid down in the other two documents.[5]
The NMS of course – properly and necessarily – reflects the priority set in the other two documents on the fight against global terrorism, the protection of the homeland and the transformation of the military forces to meet the new threats and challenges. It contains (as do the NSS and NDS) all the right buzz words about the importance of alliances and coalitions and of marshaling all the instruments of American power, not just the military ones.
But it also incorporates some innovative and significant themes that go beyond the NSS and NDS or, more precisely, applies them specifically to the tasks facing the American military:
·
Transformation is, of course, a key theme of the
NMS as a strategy for adapting the capabilities of the
·
The NMS goes beyond simply proclaiming the
importance of cooperation with allies and friends that are willing to assist us
in our military efforts. It lays out
some significant priorities for winning that cooperation – including finding new
ways to enhance their capabilities, build interoperability, and insure that a
technologically advanced US military can work meaningfully with other nations
who will not be at the same level.
·
The NMS follows the NDS in being highly specific
on one critical point – the issue of simultaneity of conflict. It notes, “The 2004 NDS directs a force sized
to defend the homeland, deter forward in from four regions [evidently, North
East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and “the Western Hemisphere” – the
inclusion of Africa is surprising], and conduct two, overlapping ‘swift defeat’
campaigns. Even when committed to a
limited number of lesser contingencies, the force must be able to ‘win
decisively’ in one of the two campaigns.”
(NMS, p. 18) Moreover, the NMS
warns, accurately, that there may well be situations in which the military must
engage in a new major conflict where it is “unlikely to disengage entirely”
from other, lesser engagements in which it is already involved. This guideline – nicknamed the “1-4-2-1
force-sizing construct” – eludes a good many difficult questions – like the
difference between ‘swift defeat’ and ‘win decisively’ – but it certainly does
not lack for specifics, nor for the potential to be used as a standard against
which to measure plans for procurement, budgets, manning tables, lift
requirements and the like.
·
Consistent with the strategy of very ambitious
world-wide simultaneous engagement, the NMS emphasizes the need not only for
improved intelligence, including ‘persistent surveillance,’ but maintaining
world-wide access and robust lift and communications capabilities. In a world in which neither we nor our allies
are fully comfortable with the deployment patterns of the Cold War, this will
be a major challenge – but it is to the credit of the NMS that it acknowledges
the problem.[7]
Reviewing the NMS does however reveal
some quite considerable – and mildly surprising – omissions and limitations on
what would seem critical points – when measured against the standard of either
the world situation, the NSS’ definition of US security concepts, or – what I
would argue is the real test of the degree to which a strategic document is
“real” or “rhetoric” – what we actually do with our military programs and
operations. These lacunae include:
·
Echoing the current jargon of the Pentagon,
there is a great deal about basing our military policy on “capabilities” of deliberately
unidentified generic adversaries, rather than on specific contingencies. As a planning strategy this concept is hard
to accept as the doctrinal innovation it is claimed to be, or even as a very
useful construct for planning. Of
course, it is as true now as it was during the Cold War – or for that matter
the Peloponnesian War – that a strategic planner must take account of the
enemy’s capabilities, which are objective facts, and not put excessive weight
on assessments of his intent.[8] But the measure of capabilities, no less than
intent, is case-specific – as the NMS implicitly acknowledges in pointing to
the importance of “the security environment” in assessing risks.
·
Apart from a few glances back to the Cold War
confrontation with the Soviet Union as an example of the degree to which the
international security environment has changed, there is no mention at all in
the NMS of either Russia or China – and indeed no explicit attention to the general
long term problem of what used to be called hedging against the re-emergence of
a “near-peer competitor.” It may be that
the NMS’s passing references to “traditional challenges” from nation-states –
or even the concept of “capabilities-based” planning – are meant to encompass
the “near-peer” problem without the embarrassing need to say openly whom we are
talking about – or the awkward acknowledgement that we cannot concentrate
entirely on the problems of terrorism, failed states, or proliferators because
we also have to prepare for the more familiar – but in some respects even more
grave – challenges from large nation-states possessing not only asymmetric
capabilities, but powerful conventional and nuclear ones as well. It may also be that it is thought impolitic (or
even unwise in a more profound sense) to mention publicly the possibility of
conflict with
·
Perhaps even more surprising – given the NMS’s
candid recognition of the need to balance current effectiveness with long term
transformation – the NMS barely mentions Iraq, much less Afghanistan, either as
current commitments that dominate immediate needs or as a source of lessons for
the future.[9] One would not know from reading this document
that the US has committed a huge fraction of its ground forces – virtually all
of them, when rotation requirements are taken into account – to these two
conflicts, and, perhaps more important, is fundamentally committed to success
in both – and has, unfortunately, found that ‘swift defeat’ of the enemy’s
organized conventional forces in both wars has not yet meant ‘decisive victory’
in either. For the next several years,
it seems likely that maintaining these two commitments – each of which has a
central place in our overall effort against terrorism, proliferation, and
regional instability -- will have a profound impact on our ability to execute many
of the strategic lines of action laid out in the NMS. Doing so will also impact heavily on such
priorities as force sizing. Maintaining access, and balancing between current
operations and long term transformation.
No doubt these issues are a major focus of practical planning in DOD,
and there are good reasons not to attempt to manage immediate problems in a
strategy document. Nonetheless, the all
but complete omission to address the need to commit very large parts of the
military to Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, limits the degree to which
the NMS will in fact serve its purpose of defining America’s military priorities
for the near and medium term, and serve as guide for force sizing, procurement
priorities, basic personnel policies, and the balance between current
operations and long term transformation.
Nevertheless, these strategic
documents do have an impact. At a
minimum they will set the terms of the debate over resource allocation and the
shaping of concrete military plans. For
example, the current priority to the global war on terror provides a context
for both advocates and critics in evaluating the relative urgency of other
tasks, including the war in
[1] C. von Clausewitz, On War, (M. Howard and P. Paret, Eds.) (Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 177.
[2] “Capabilities” are no more
immutable than “objectives” – at least over time. A wise ministry of defense or
general staff, just as it will modify objectives to reflect the strategies its
current capabilities make feasible, will have a strategy for allocating
resources to develop and maintain capabilities for the future, just as much as
it has a strategy for allocating forces in a war. In principle, such a strategy for the
commitment of resources to building
capabilities should be derived from, and consistent with, the overall strategy
for the application of military (and other) instruments to achieve security
goals. To give an example, if negating
missile attacks on the US is a critical objective, one strategy for doing so
may be to defeat such attacks directly, rather than, say, deterring them by
threat of retaliation, securing their dismantlement by negotiation, or
pre-empting against the enemy’s missile systems. That strategy implies a need to develop,
deploy, and operate, a missile defense system capable of intercepting a limited
ballistic missile attack on the
[3] Conversely, the controversial decision to seek “unconditional surrender” was a matter of definition of objectives, not choice of strategy (though it can certainly be argued that the objective was in part required by the strategy of fighting the war in coalition with the USSR).
[4] During the Cold War, for example, it was politically impossible to suggest that NATO’s strategy for the defense of the Central German front was anything other than a “no retreat” stand on the inner-
German border. Whether that abjuration of defense in depth reflected the actual military plan is an open question – but it is certainly true that the stated strategy was not matched by actual military preparations for its execution. Similarly, Secretary of Defense Aspin was savaged when, early in his unhappy tenure, he attempted to promulgate a strategy that faced the fact that if the United States ever again found itself engaged in two simultaneous major regional wars it might do worse than follow the stated (if not followed) strategy of World War II and give priority to victory in one while “holding” in the other.
[5] The NMS defines the relationship among the three “strategic” documents as follows: “The NSS and NDS provide a broad strategic context for employing military capabilities in concert with other instruments of national power. The NMS provides focus for military activities by defining a set of military objectives and joint operating concepts from which the Service chiefs and combatant commanders identify desired capabilities and against which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assesses risk.” NMS 2004, p. 2.
[6] The “Ten Year Rule” famously
directed by British military authorities beginning in 1919 to assume for budget
planning purposes that
[7] This brief listing is by no means a complete catalogue of areas in which the NMS is both candid and intellectually original: For example, there is a quite extensive discussion of the problems that “ungovernable areas” present for the war on terrorism (and, by implication, for post-conflict operations), and a remarkably forthright acknowledgement that the “on-going war on terrorism” will last a long time (NMS, p.19), an acknowledgement with considerable implications for force planning and procurement.
[8] The usual warning is that the danger lies in discounting capabilities by over-confidence in limited intent. Recent experience in Iraq shows, ironically, that measuring threats and imperatives by intent can sometimes overstate the urgency of the problem if it had been measured based on an accurate sense of his capabilities, rather than an (accurate) evaluation of the malevolence of his intent. We may be in danger of making a similar error about China – in the sense of reading more actual capability into its modernization plans than they are likely to deliver in relative improvement vis a vis the United States military.
[9] The latter omission is, to be sure, qualified: There is a passing reference to the need to draw lessons from these two conflicts (CITE) and a number of discrete observations about the importance and difficulty of post-conflict stability operations, and the guidance to combatant commanders does delicately remind them that they “must prepare to operate in regions where pockets of resistance remain and there exists the potential for continued combat operations amidst a large number of non-combatants.” (NMS, p. 5).