Strategic Planning in International Relations

Nina Silove

2019 - ongoing

When faced with an emergency, urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first thing to do is “take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window.” “Plans are worthless,” according to Eisenhower, but “planning is everything.”

This statement is less of a riddle than it may seem. Behind Eisenhower’s thoughts likely lay the military aphorism, paraphrased from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” The interactive dynamic between two adversaries is too complex to predict accurately, so any specific plan is likely to be ill-suited to the actual dynamic that emerges. What matters, therefore, is not the plan itself, but the planning undertaken to produce it. In Eisenhower’s view, “if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.”

In addition to affecting purportedly the degree of “intelligence” with which a state can respond to a contingency, planning has another interesting attribute: It is a widely prevalent practice. All states, militaries, and private corporations invest significant personpower and time into processes that are in fact designated or could reasonably be called strategic planning.

The potentially important and undeniably widespread practice of planning presents the academy with a deep paradox. Why so little scholarly study of this phenomenon?

The primary aim of this project is to resuscitate the study of planning and develop it as a framework for application in International Relations. This aim is inspired by the potential that characteristics of planning processes may have strong effects on state performance and that this may be only one of many important relationships revealed by inquiry into such processes.

Related Publications

Nina Silove (2018), external page Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of “Grand Strategy”, Security Studies, Volume 27, Issue 1