Developing the NMS while the Office of the Secretary of Defense was still writing the National Defense Strategy (NDS) presented its own friction-like challenges. How could we work with our “higher headquarters” in parallel, without lagging far behind? We had conducted an NMS speaker series for almost a year (fall 2020 to summer 2021) prior to our official kick-off in August 2021. We had guidance that at times seemed to contradict what we saw developing in the NDS. We handled these friction points by having a representative on the NDS team; a robust, prior, ongoing, and trusted set of relationships between our staff and the team from the Office of the Secretary of Defense; periodic sharing of drafts; attending each other’s working groups, Operational Deputies, Tanks, and Deputy Management Action Group (DMAG) meetings; and by deferring to NDS language in some cases. In other cases, as with other friction points, we arbitrated between arguments by returning to the organizing principle of strategic discipline and the chairman’s guidance. 

Trying to finalize the NMS during the ongoing war in Ukraine presented a final friction point as well as important questions that the team needed to address. Would the commander-in-chief send the U.S. military to intervene with boots on the ground? Even if not, how much had the war changed the security environment as defined in the NMS? Had defense priorities changed in order of relative importance? Did major lethal aid contributions from the United States demonstrate or contradict strategic discipline? We handled this friction point by asking the hard questions of the strategy, even if it would require major changes. We also showed Milley how we had updated the draft NMS based on the war in Ukraine and prioritized or aligned it with the then Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the NDS, and his own guidance.

Concluding Outcomes

The National Military Strategy anticipates a great power conflict while pursuing ways to deter it. It attempts to remedy past failures to improve future readiness. It points us toward an approach that prioritizes warfighting preparedness and provides a risk management framework across both time and space. By prioritizing a single organizing principle, we avoided a least common denominator strategy. In other words, we avoided seeking a comfortable consensus in favor of strategic coherence. And by iterating with stakeholders throughout, we learned that contradictory input not only makes strategy development difficult, but it also provides opportunities “to run to the sound of the guns” and refine those ideas, ultimately producing a better strategy.

Colonel Bryan Groves is the Commanders’ Initiatives Group (CIG) Chief at U.S. Army Forces Command. Previously, during the development of the 2022 NMS, Bryan was the Strategy Development Division Chief on the Joint Staff (J-5). His team was responsible for stewarding its development, with primary input from the Services and Combatant Commands, on behalf of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.

Image: DVIDS.