The National Interest
Time for Strategic Learning
December
24, 2012 -- British Field Marshall Viscount Alanbrooke of
Brookeborough, one of World War II’s most accomplished and distinguished
generals, regularly complained about the lack of American strategic
thinking. In Alanbrooke’s view (and Churchill’s too), this lacuna, he
believed, was apparent in Washington’s zeal to open a second front on
the continent when its forces were
woefully unprepared for the superior Nazi army. Hence, the assault
against Festung Europa began at the peripheries in North Africa, Sicily
and Italy before Operation Overlord landed on the Normandy beaches
Normandy in June 1944.
This
absence of American strategic thinking was not limited to World War II.
During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur’s amphibious landing
at Inchon was a brilliant though reckless effort to outflank the North
Koreans and permit the breakout from the Pusan perimeter on the
peninsula’s southeast tip. The recklessness was in the operation’s
location. The allies could have avoided the huge and dangerous tidal
changes at Inchon by landing at a much safer
location thirty miles to the south. MacArthur later undermined his
victory by dismissing signals of a Chinese cross-border attack into
North Korea. By racing to the Yalu River, MacArthur triggered a Chinese
offensive that drove UN forces back to the 38th parallel and created a
military standoff that still divides Korea today.
In
Vietnam, “escalation,” “search and destroy” and the use of “body
counts” to measure success were sound bites, not strategies. In
Afghanistan and Iraq four decades later, tactical victory was lost by
strategic blindness in ignoring the question of “what next?” and then
failing to create a post-war strategy. Most
recently, the so-called “strategic pivot” to Asia allowed rhetoric to
overcome reason and alienate or frighten friends and allies in the
Pacific, as well as Europe and the Middle East. A
provocative question hovering over America’s war experiences is whether
Americans generally lack the strategic genome in their DNA. There
are exceptions. President Dwight Eisenhower clearly understood the
broader strategic issues. Other strategic minds since World War II
included President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser,
Henry Kissinger; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Adviser; and President George H.W. Bush and
his adviser, Brent Scowcroft.
But too
often their kind of strategic thinking gets trumped by the U.S.
political process, the lure of short-term, expedient solutions to
longer-term problems and the failure to institutionalize any kind of
strategic thought in Washington’s officialdom. Thus, both Republican and
Democratic administrations alike and White Houses and Congresses fall
into the trap of not asking or answering the most basic questions
regarding broader policy issues. The last presidential election offered
the most powerful evidence of this lamentable gap.
President
Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney agreed that, in the case of Iran,
“no option” was off the table, meaning that all options were open. But
in truth they weren’t, as both candidates had rejected any kind of
“containment” policy to deter Tehran in the event it actually got
nuclear weapons. The intent was to imply or signal the threat of
military force to help coerce the Iranian leadership to forego the
building of nuclear weapons. But words count, and “no option” being off
the table reflects strategic naiveté. Meanwhile,
American political discourse no longer is about governing. It has
deteriorated into a
perpetual campaign for election and re-election in which compromise has
become a profane. Negative ads and compression of ideas into simplistic
sound bites distort and substitute for political discourse. And the two
political parties have sadly gravitated to the more extreme poles of
left and right.
Short-term
thinking drives business also. Public companies are mesmerized by
quarterly reports and their impact on stock prices. The media follow
along. Compare, for example, so-called television evening news with
programs from several decades ago, sometimes an hour long, that favored
hard news over “human-interest stories” such as dolphins biting children
or the bad behavior of celebrities.
And, despite the billions of dollars the U.S. military invests in
education, its war colleges focus on “supporting the warfighter” instead
of developing senior leaders who can think strategically. Of
course, the absence of strategic thinking is not unique to the United
States, as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and many
others have learned to their regret. America can regain the strategic
edge by embracing three key remedial actions. First, the country must adopt a brains-based approach to strategy. No
longer can we simply spend our way clear of danger, as we have tried to
do in every war of the past century. In World War II, the arsenal of
democracy
overwhelmed the enemy. In Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq twice and
Afghanistan, trillions of dollars were spent. Some of the results were
brilliant, especially in terms of technology. But most were not. we need
to think our way clear of problems. That requires brains.
And
history matters. It is not difficult to conduct a review of the major
wars, conflicts and crises in which the United States has been engaged
since 1945 to determine what went right; what went wrong; and why. But
it does require some intellectual engagement. In
virtually every case study and conflict, success or failure
rested on the quality and veracity of the assumptions made at the time;
the setting of achievable or unachievable outcomes; the degree of
objectivity or truth involved; and how the “what next?” question was
answered (or not answered). Such a review should be mandatory reading
for national-security officials in every administration and Congress as a
way of introducing and institutionalizing a brains-based approach. Take, for example, the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Let’s think our way through this event.
Contemporary mythology maintains that this crisis was a great victory
for the Kennedy administration. The Soviets backed down and removed the
missiles from Cuba. That led to the coup two years later that felled
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Unfortunately, that characterization
is simplistic and wrong.
John
Kennedy entered office campaigning on the so-called “missile gap”
between U.S. and Soviet armaments. It turned out that the Soviets’
missile threat was massively inferior to U.S. strategic and conventional
capabilities. Indeed, Khrushchev had finally accepted the Eisenhower
doctrine of massive retaliation, with less emphasis on costly
conventional forces. He wanted to institute huge defense cuts in order
to shift money to domestic needs and recharge a languishing economy. In
essence, Khrushchev wanted to create a Soviet variant of nuclear
deterrence that corresponded to Eisenhower’s strategic policies designed
to defuse and not fuel an arms
race. The
United States and Britain knew all this through intelligence sources,
notably U-2 spy-plane surveillance and top-secret Soviet documents
passed to the CIA by Soviet military-intelligence Colonel Oleg
Penkovsky, who later was caught and executed. For cynical political
reasons, Kennedy ignored this intelligence so he could run to the right
of his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon. Upon entering office, he
sent several supplemental defense spending bills to Congress to build up
American strategic and conventional forces and triple the size of the
American nuclear arsenal. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S.
build-up signaled to the Soviets that the Eisenhower days were over and
that something had to be done to maintain strategic balance if defense
spending was to be curtailed.
Rather
than raise defense spending and curtail domestic programs designed to
improve Russia’s standard of living, Khrushchev sought to outflank U.S.
strategic systems by inserting shorter-range missiles in Cuba. After
all, the United States had done this in Turkey. And with those missiles
based in Cuba, Moscow could avoid a costly build up of longer-range
rockets. Kennedy’s
advisers knew of the Penkovsky material. McGeorge Bundy, National
Security Advisor, and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, later
described in graphic detail why it was rejected. That intelligence was
not relevant, said McNamara over a lengthy lunch, because the
president had decided on a military buildup and no one was prepared to
question that decision. The result was more Cold War and elimination of
any prospect for an earlier termination of that conflict.Bullheadedness won out over brains.
Second, senior officials should be required to undergo training on a brains-based approach to strategy. Historical
analyses of what went right and what went wrong can help
institutionalize strategic thinking and greater reliance on brainpower.
The reality is that the last president who entered office
prepared for the job was George H.W. Bush. Bill
Clinton, the younger Bush and Barack Obama simply lacked experience and
genuine strategic understanding. And, while inexperienced presidents
bring in officials with prior experience, they often are removed from
office by four to eight years at a time when events are moving at the
speed of instantaneous communications.
Third, the Department of Defense, which maintains the largest reservoir of educational assets in the government, needs a revolution in how this array of institutions is
put to use in behalf of continuous learning. Technology can
support this undertaking through distance learning and the creation of
new Wikipedia-type repositories of strategic case studies and knowledge.
This revolution, which need not be expensive, could serve as a resource
for all government entities engaged in strategy and national security.
Indeed, we probably can save significant amounts of money if we apply
some strategic thinking to how we educate our people. Politics
being politics, the chances of these actions occurring are not good.
More likely, future presidents will not enter office properly prepared
for their duties. The same can be said of many members of Congress.
History need not repeat itself. But a probing
analysis of past successes and failures will show that, unless a
strategic approach is indeed taken, the future track record will not be
better than the past and could be much worse. In international
relations, brawn is good. But brains are needed if we are going to think
our way clear of danger.
Harlan
Ullman is Chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of
government and business and senior advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic
Council.
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