Good people can disagree and there are different opinions about the source cause, but our record on the national level of the last few decades has been spotty at best. Tactically, we have no peer. Sure, we often force our way through our mistakes through superior firepower, but that is why it is there. On the Tactical level though, we’re pretty darn good.
On the Operational level, considering the adjustments for things done to be in line with Strategic/POLMIL D&G, we have been OK.
Feh to meh OK. I say this as a former Operational Planner, our system is clunky at best. Sure, we all quote Clausewitz, Sun Tsu, and can create Operational Designs to make your brain bleed. I will happily stay up until 4am and argue if something is a Decisive Point, Decision Point, and which side of a Phase transition it belongs to. Heck, give me enough time, I’ll even convert your “traditional” OPLAN in to an Effects Based Plan over a weekend as long as I get to pick my core planning team and you leave me alone. Most Operational planners can do that. But, to what end?
Once you get in the planning process deep enough, you realize that there is something a bit off about it. Something monastic, esoteric, and a bit too formulaic. What at one time may have been a well designed system, has through iterations and revisions gathered an eclectic mix of beggar weeds and confessions.
What was a nuance at the Strategic level gets translated in to a clunky design at the Operational level, and by the time it gets to the Tactical level, winds up being a $43 million gas station west of M-e-S in Sheberghan.
As with many problems, our challenge in all likelihood starts with the top. How we determine, define, and explain strategy. Is it a process, personnel, or political problem? Maybe all the above? From the false signals that helped set the events that set of the Korean War, to the Vietnam War, to being flat footed in surprise in the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the blind-man’s-bluff of the last decade and a half of the Long War – the record is all right there and begs the question; is it time for a fundamental reset?
I believe we need to go back and reassess everything we have structured since the end of WWII starting with the National Security Action of 1947, Goldwater-Nichols from 1986 and all their various accretions.
Forget what the retired O-5 things, there are some great minds out there that are not waiting for something to sprout out of someone’s head in DC. LtGen Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret.) has some required reading over at Infinity Journal on a way forward.
It is one heck of an entering argument. Here are my pull quotes, but you need to read it in full:
The method the United States Government currently uses to develop its “grand” or national security strategy is dysfunctional, and the approach its military uses to design campaigns and major operations is seriously flawed.
Compounding the problems I have discussed to this point is an even more fundamental one: Congress’s demand that the president develop a NSS annually. A grand strategy needs to have enduring qualities. It should certainly be a strategy—barring the rise of a significant new challenge—that remains viable for years if not decades. Ideally, it should survive across administrations as NSC-68 did. I believe this is possible if our leaders—executive and congressional—based the NSS on principles derived from strategic practices such as those I have listed above and then treated the NSS as a “treaty” with ourselves. In other words, the president in consultation with Congress would create a NSS and then ask the Senate for approval through passage of a “sense of the Senate” resolution. Ratification would be undesirable because ratified treaties are of two kinds; “self-executing,” that is, judicially enforceable and “non-self-executing,” that is, judicially enforceable if Congress chose to implement it through legislation. No president is likely to want the NSS to be judicially enforceable. Moreover, seeking Senate ratification of a NSS would raise significant Constitutional questions.
To recap, “getting it right” relative to the nation’s grand strategy requires the US Government to:
- Repeal legislation requiring the president to submit a NSS annually
- Create a true grand strategy based on long-standing practices that reveal vital national interests
- Publish a NSS that would survive through multiple administrations by seeking a “sense of the Senate” resolution supporting that NSS
- Enact legislation that requires the president to revise or develop a new NSS if the Senate revokes its “sense of the Senate” resolution supporting the current NSS
- Repeal legislation requiring the DOD to submit a NDS. The NDS serves no purpose that the NMS cannot meet
- Repeal legislation requiring the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to update or develop and submit a new NMS biennially and replace it with legislation requiring each new Chairman to update or develop and submit a new NMS when the president issues or updates a NSS or other circumstances warrant a revised or new NMS
First among these is the general confusion of terms, in particular policy and strategy. Many people in key positions in the US Government and elsewhere conflate and misuse the two words. A noted military academic writes, “Today strategy is too often employed simply as a synonym for policy.”[ii] He provides startling examples reporting a speech President George W. Bush gave in 2003 mentioning a “forward strategy of freedom” and a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office White Paper describing the “UK’s strategy for policy.”[iii] Freedom of course is a condition, not a strategy, and having a strategy for policy is meaningless. A number of authorities have observed also that government and defense officials use strategy so loosely that we have forgotten its original meaning.[iv] The US national security establishment would do well to adopt the definitions provided by Colin Gray, one of today’s premier writers on strategy:
It is time for the US military to scrap all existing planning manuals and to start afresh. Few officers read these voluminous and poorly written documents except to meet academic requirements.[xxii] The new manuals must begin with recognition that there are three approaches to decision-making, not one. These are intuitive, analytical, and systemic. None is better or worse than the others are; officers must know which to use in the situation at hand. The analytical approach cannot remain the default choice.
To conclude, the US national security community must overhaul the way it currently acquires policy, which it needs to develop the nation’s grand strategy and in turn its military strategy. The 1988 NSS did this best. To translate strategy successfully into campaign plans and operational plans the national defense community must adopt a systemic approach to operational design. In doing so, the community will replace analytical checklist-like procedures with discourse. The latter method enables planers to discern what makes an unfavorable situation a problem, thereby uncovering the counter-logic needed to resolve that problem.
