Lost at the NSC

January 6, 2009 Topic: Security Regions: Americas Tags: Heads Of State

Lost at the NSC

Mini Teaser: People are starting to talk of Obama creating an Eisenhower-lite foreign-policy team. This is a very good thing, if only a start. America no longer knows how to make good strategy. From the Nazi defeat in World War II to America’s triumph in the c

by Author(s): Andrew F. KrepinevichBarry D. Watts
 

Indeed, even in June 1944, the Anglo-American invasion of northern France (Operation Overlord) was a close-run thing. David Eisenhower's meticulous 1986 review of the first few days of the Normandy landings suggests that despite Allied numerical superiority and complete control of the air, the Germans probably had the capability to throw the Allies back into the English Channel. In the event, however, Hitler's focus on the Pas-de-Calais rather than the actual landing site of Normandy-due to the Allies' successful deception campaign-combined with procrastination by both Hitler and the German high command averted the disaster that Brooke and Churchill feared. In hindsight, Overlord was a gamble that succeeded in large measure due to German errors, particularly in strategic decision making. Nevertheless, in Western Europe during World War II, Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall, Brooke and their supporting staffs collectively committed no major strategic blunders.

Adolf Hitler, however, was able to overrule his generals and impose ruinous strategic decisions time after time. His "no withdrawal" policies in Tunisia, Russia and Italy were, as the British historian Andrew Roberts explains in his new account of Allied grand strategy during the war,

not subjected to the kind of unsparing analysis that would undoubtedly have halted their adoption in a democracy. By complete contrast, the strategies of the Western Allies had to be exhaustively argued through the Planning Staff, General Staff, Chiefs of Staff and then Combined Chiefs of Staff levels, before they were even capable of being placed before the politicians, where they were debated in microscopic detail all over again.

Again, Germany's defeat in World War II despite its superior fighting power cannot be attributed entirely to the difference in strategic performance between the two sides. Nonetheless, Roberts certainly appears justified in concluding that the "lack of a collegiate Chiefs of Staff system was one of the major reasons Germany lost the Second World War."

 

WHY IS strategy so difficult to do well? One reason is that competent strategists tend to be few and far between. This is because strategy depends fundamentally on insight, and genuine insight-the ability to see more deeply into a situation than the opponent or to conceive it in an entirely new way-is a relatively rare talent in human groups and populations. In a 1973 book on grand strategy, defense specialist John Collins observed that while "strategy is a game that anyone can play, it is not a game that just anyone can play well. Only the most gifted participants have much chance to win a prize." As elitist as this may sound, recent work by neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios and others has identified the kind of preparatory mechanisms and the specific portions of the brain utilized during sudden "Aha!" moments of insight. Moreover, their research indicates that subjects who were unable to solve problems requiring insight in a sudden "Aha!" moment were unable to solve them at all.

Individuals either have the cognitive skills for strategy or they do not, and Collins's observation, based on years of experience with National War College graduates, is that most do not-not even among field-grade military officers with the potential for flag rank. There is scant evidence to date that professional education or training are at all successful in inculcating strategic insight into most individuals. Instead, the best we can do is to try to identify those individuals who appear to have this talent and then make sure that they are put in positions in which they can use it to good effect. Unfortunately, whereas the British military establishment uses its Higher Command and Staff Course (HCSC) to identify individuals who display such cognitive abilities, the U.S. military establishment lacks any similar mechanism for identifying potential strategists.2

Another barrier has been the unwillingness of the nation's senior-most national-security decision makers to accord strategy sufficient priority and persistent attention. During President Clinton's administration, this reluctance appears to have stemmed, at least in part, from a sense that strategy is an illusion. Clinton's national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, put little stock in strategy, declaring in a 1999 interview with the New York Times that he prefers to "worry about today today and tomorrow tomorrow."

This kind of skepticism is not limited to a particular individual, a particular administration or even a particular party. Take the case of Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University recruited by President George W. Bush's administration to lead a National Security Council (NSC) staff strategic-planning effort. Feaver soon realized that, when it came to this kind of activity, it was "impossible to get anything really done, to get much attention . . . there was no real interest" in strategy from President Bush or his senior national-security lieutenants.

Yet another persistent problem frustrating the crafting of good strategy is the government's tendency to equate strategy with a list of desirable outcomes. When this occurs, there is little or no discussion of what barriers stand in the way of achieving these goals, or how these barriers might be overcome given the limitations on available resources. Thus, rather than working out how scarce resources can best be employed to achieve a challenging security objective, the mere statement of a desire to meet the objective is deemed sufficient.

For example, consider the Clinton administration's 2000 National Security Strategy, which concludes by describing its "strategy" almost purely in terms of desired outcomes:

Our strategy for engagement is comprised of many different polices, the key elements of which include:
•Adapting our alliances
•Encouraging the reorientation of other states, including foreign adversaries
•Encouraging democratization, open markets, free trade, and sustainable development
•Preventing conflict
•Countering potential regional aggressors
•Confronting new threats
•Steering international peace and stability operations.

The same problem is also evident in the Bush administration's 2002 and 2006 national-security strategies.

Unfortunately, this issue is not limited to the past two administrations or to the civilian leadership. Take, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff document, Joint Vision 2010, published in 1996. Its intent is to show how the U.S. armed forces will operate to achieve the nation's security objectives in the 2010 timeframe. According to the document, this will be accomplished through "information superiority" that enables "dominant maneuver," "precision engagement," "focused logistics," and "full-dimensional protection." In other words, the U.S. military has the goal of being completely aware of what is happening in a theater of war ("information superiority"), being able to move its forces, which are to be completely protected ("full-dimensional protection"), wherever it desires ("dominant maneuver") and to engage with unprecedented effectiveness ("precision engagement") while always being fully supplied ("focused logistics").

Conspicuously absent is a discussion of how these subgoals are to be realized. Nor is any mention made of potential enemy actions or resource limitations that could frustrate the U.S. military's efforts. The same problem infects Joint Vision 2020, which adds "full spectrum dominance" to the list of goals to be accomplished. In both documents, since "strategy" is reduced to the assertion that the conditions desired will be achieved, the need for real strategy-identifying and exploiting asymmetric advantages-is assumed away.

There is another area in which lack of knowledge poses a serious barrier to formulating effective strategies. It involves a failure to understand the enemy. This severely limits a nation's ability to identify where its advantages lie and how best to exploit them. Consider an example from the Truman administration. After the Soviet Union detonated its atomic bomb, a revised U.S. strategy document-the famous NSC-68 of April 1950-moved away from the previous view that the threat posed by Soviet power could be contained primarily through political and economic means, and instead emphasized the need to contain overt Soviet military aggression. This change generated significant debate. Charles E. "Chip" Bohlen, one of the so-called "Wise Men," argued that the Soviet leadership's top priority was to preserve their regime, and that this fact was being ignored by American leaders.

Bohlen's point was that differing assessments of Soviet motives-whether the Soviet leadership prioritized its expansionist objectives over its survival-had profound implications for how the United States ought to pursue containment. He argued the leadership would not take reckless steps that jeopardized the state's existence. But still, debate in the West over whether Soviet leaders were willing to risk general war with the United States to gain control of Western Europe or expand elsewhere continued to the end of the cold war. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, this question had become whether Soviet leaders would risk thermonuclear war to expand their influence. In October 1962 at least, Nikita Khrushchev clearly was not willing to do so.

Nevertheless, given how the cold war ultimately turned out, Bohlen appears to have been right in opposing NSC-68's objective of containing Soviet power and in favoring a more cautious approach of accommodation, and he did so based on his knowledge of Russia and its language. Unfortunately, the United States does not currently enjoy the kind of expertise regarding how its rivals think and operate that it did during the early stages of the cold war. Therefore, an essential element of any serious strategy-formulation effort today is the development of a cadre of experts on militant Islamic groups, China and other key states of concern such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

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