A Complex Environment

Strategy provides an illustration of one of the abiding themes of modern thought, which is that the relationship among things and persons often counts as much or more than the characteristics of the things themselves. From relativity, psychiatry, and existentialist and post-modernist thought onwards, persons, political bodies, ideas and events have been seen to be defined by how they interact. The challenge of strategic thought may be expressed as the attempt to bring elements into agreement in spite of their antagonism. The paradox of military strategy is that the means are violent, inherently unsettling, as likely to inflame antagonism as to extinguish it, or to only temporarily quell antagonisms, leaving the real cause untouched and as ignitable as ever.   Not only is strategy dependent on the relationship of opposing forces to one another, of force to the geopolitical landscape and to policy, but (as we have seen) the production and execution of strategic thought is also based on many relationships among individuals and organizations, from small departments to nation states, non-state actors, and other international organizations. The officer-as-strategist must navigate in this complex social and political terrain in which perceptions of commitment and credibility count as much as the inherent merit of plans and ideas. Even the most brilliant plan, lacking necessary support and imaginative and determined execution will fail to be adopted or will simply fail.  To accept and execute the best strategy, there will often have to be learning, new ways of thinking, the overcoming of habits and even of allegiances.  Strategic thought often involves the overcoming of narrow or parochial loyalties and relationships in favor of a broadly national, global, humanitarian outlook.

The political and pragmatic aspects of strategy must never be confused with moral relativism.  It is a challenge for every officer, especially given the sometimes-brutal nature of her calling, not to lose sight of the precious things she serves and guards. Whatever role they occupy, the credibility and authority of officers continues to depend on their being persons of honor.

Conclusions

            What can be done to improve the contributions of officers to strategic thought? The solutions are both structural and cultural. On the structural level, the armed forces should consider adopting some of the non-hierarchical organization of some businesses and becoming less rigid and authoritarian. This may appear anathema to military ideas of discipline and command and control, but real discipline is more a matter of compliance than compulsion. The armed forces must do a better job harnessing its own brain power. The rigidity of military organizations is responsible for some of the “brain drain” among some of the brighter junior officers and NCOs.[i] They see weary years ahead before their ideas can have much impact, and so are seeking occupations that are not so tied to mere seniority.

The cultural changes are more numerous and important. A military culture stressing brain over brawn would help to create an atmosphere for better strategic thinking. This might include diminishing the fetishization of athletics at the service academies, for example. We should not reduce physical standards, but we should consider the evaluation and recognition of mental achievement to match. Currently, professional military education seems to be getting poor grades for the development of strategic thinkers.[ii]  A more rigorous and reflective approach to professional education is part of the solution, but the military should also consider sending more officers (and some enlisted members) to graduate school to earn degrees in fields like history and the humanities.[iii] These fields can prepare officers to think in the ways required of strategists, to grasp ends as well as means, to consider history and the future as well as the present and immediate effects.  The pursuit of strategy is a grand drama of epic and tragic proportions. It requires an historical perspective, human and ethical understanding, a poetics of war as much as doctrine. Military officers literally invest their lives in the pursuit of victory. They must also invest in the intellectual capital that make strategic success and victory attainable.

[i] There has been much writing on this subject over the last fifteen years. One of the most extensive and influential contributions to the literature of military retention is Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) by ex-Air Force officer Tim Kane.  Kane calls for radical changes in the military personnel system and military career patterns to keep and cultivate the brightest and best.

[ii] War Room. Online. “Whiteboard: How Well Does the Army Develop Strategic Leaders?” June 25 2018.

[iii]See Christopher D. Miller, “Creating the Force of the Future,” interview with Brad R. Carson, Acting Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness).  Journal of Character and Leadership Integration, Volume 3, Issue 2, Winter 2016 Special Edition, “Leading in the Profession of Arms.”  Carson laments the small and diminishing number of senior officers with advanced degrees in areas like literature and military history.  See also Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli and Major Stephen Smith, USA, “Learning From Our Modern Wars: The Imperatives of Preparing for a Dangerous Future,” Military Review, September-October 2007, pp. 2-15.  Chiarelli observes that, despite his numerous “muddy boots” assignments, “the experience that best prepared me for division and corps command in Iraq was the 5 years I spent earning a masters degree and teaching in the Social Sciences Department at the U.S. Military Academy.”

Officers as Strategic Thinkers

            The officer will function as strategist in one of three roles, as commander, as staff officer, and as adviser. Most officer-strategists are staff officers.  Among commanders, only the very senior, those at the three or four-star level, are usually considered to be functioning as strategists. Although junior, tactical leaders should also understand strategy.[i] The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior American unformed officer, is the president’s principle military adviser. Officers’ strategic roles may appear to be straightforward and well-delineated by statute and table of organization, but they are in fact defined by personal, cultural, and organizational factors. Strategic thought involves and often demands a multiplicity of voices, of competing concerns and outlooks.  This can both inform and impede the strategic process. At times, strategic thought and direction, overwhelmed by the difficulties of reconciling the many departmental mouths to feed, has come to a halt, opening a fatal gap in the transmission of policy into military action, leaving to operational and even tactical commanders the task of wrestling with strategic issues that should have been worked out for them. In these cases, officers can become strategists by default, the task of strategic direction having been abdicated by those nominally entrusted with it. Historical examples of this are almost too numerous to mention. That of Vietnam has already been discussed. Korea may offer another. U.S. strategy regarding Korea turned quickly from indifference to commitment to World War II-style decisive victory.[ii] Shaped by the experience of victory in the recent war, it took U.S. planners some time to acknowledge that this was a different kind of war in which there might be a different kind of victory. Sometimes absent clear strategic guidance, commanders in the field from MacArthur to Van Fleet flirted with and sometimes danced attendance on the idea of decisive victory, reuniting all of Korea at the point of the sword and punishing or even openly warring with mainland communist China. Aiming for intervals at victory, the U.S. and its allies achieved stalemate, or status quo ante bellum. It might be useful to contrast this with Vietnam, a war shaped by the previous experience of Korea, in which aiming at a stalemate produced defeat.

The tendency for American strategic direction to be hazy and “ad hoc” continues into our own time. In “National-Level Coordination: How System Attributes Trumped Leadership,” Christopher Lamb and Megan Franco depict a strategy process dealing with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that turns out “consensus” strategy documents that are largely ignored, leaving real strategy in the minds of a few senior officials, and sometimes to be guessed at.[iii] Important questions regarding the nature of the terrorist threat and the priority given to nation-building were left unanswered, to be improvised or intuited by those in the field.

Officers are expected to be professionals and the experts on military strategy, but Georges Clemenceau’s statement that war was too important to be left to generals still resonates.  It is the means of war which is officers’ area of expertise, not the ends, and this suggests that an incomplete grasp of the ends limits even their understanding of how the means should be employed. The officer, by her training and experience, will often stop at the military victory, with insufficient thought or preparation to securing the peace.  This predilection was arguably played out as the allies approached victory in World War II, when large sections of Europe were left to Soviet control, in the difficult Civil War Reconstruction, when the freedom of many ex-slaves was rendered almost nominal by a revival of racist policies in the southern states, and most recently following the American and allied invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The matching of military strategy to policy presents a problem. Officers (especially those at the strategy level) are expected to be politically literate and even sophisticated, but not politically involved or motivated.  In effect, the respect of the civilian leadership and the public for officers as strategists rests on their expectation that officers’ expertise and code of honor will see that they render well-considered advice that is neither partisan nor self-serving. Of course, it may be both, as well as simply and honestly wrong, because officers are human, subject to their limitations and sometimes to outside pressure. Interpersonal and inter-agency relations have a strong influence on the development of strategy, and so may the consensus or “laundry list” approach that sometimes seems to be encouraged by doctrine and the bureaucracy.

The military strategist looks up and down. He implements policy and also creates the conditions for success on the operational and tactical level.  Part of this falls under the officer’s role as organizer, under training and force planning, but the strategist is also a warfighter.  Working at a greater remove from the fighting, she is also expected to think across a broader area, even the whole of earth, and a longer expanse of time.  In focusing on the fight, he must always consider the position at the end of conflict, of the moment when the fighting ends and the long denouement begins, as the armies return home, reduce in size, change from waging war to keeping peace, as rebuilding begins and the political map is redrawn.

Next: A Complex Environment + Conclusions

[i] B.A. Friedman, On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017).

[ii] D. Clayton James and Anne Sharpe Wells, Refighting the Last War: Command and Crisis in Korea 1950-1953 (New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1993).

[iii] Richard D. Hooker and Joseph J. Collins Eds. Lessons Encountered: Learning From the Long War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 2015), pp. 168-169.