A Lexicon Deconstructed: A-G

14 Jan 2009

A is for Articulation The first function of a grand strategy is to articulate a nation's desired standing within the international system, suggesting not o...

A is for Articulation

The first function of a grand strategy is to articulate a nation's desired standing within the international system, suggesting not only implied "rules of the road" but a desired future architecture. It determines the expression and application of the state's military strategy and foreign policy. This articulation should be inspirational to one's own citizens and attractive to existing and potential allies, and it should logically speak to the nation's existing strengths and desired characteristics. If it does not, then it is likely to suffer from a lack of both internal and external support, for it will be judged as corrosive to the nation's spirit and therefore unsustainable on the international stage.

The primary function of any grand strategy must be to maximize the number of allies while minimizing the number of threats, because, as the old saw goes, "Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." Therefore, the best articulations stress universal positives and eschew identified targets. Better to be for something that others also want achieved (e.g., freedom of the seas) than to expect allies will persistently stand against specific outcomes you seek to deter (e.g., China's development of a "string of pearls" naval bases in the direction of the Persian Gulf). In short, always give today's problem child the easiest possible route to becoming tomorrow's favorite son.

B is for Balance of power

By definition, a grand strategy aspires toward some future equilibrium, or steady state. For an imperial or revolutionary grand strategy, the implied equilibrium would be a preponderance and/or monopoly of power by one state or bloc of states. However, this is more the exception than the norm in international affairs, where typically a collection of major powers seek to balance one another either externally through persistent competition over contested spheres of influence (i.e., satellite states kept under control) or internally through the build-up of resources (e.g., military might, technology) that dissuade a competitor's aggressive impulses.

Historians consider the balance of power model to be the most stable form of international architecture, with the ideal number of great powers being above three (two-against-one leaves the one feeling cornered) but not extending into the double digits (too many players can lead to temporary bandwagoning, or the temporary ganging up by the many against the one or few). The ideal balance of power system would look something like the US Supreme Court: an odd number of players rather evenly divided between status quo upholders (conservatives) and status quo challengers (radicals), with a few moderate swing voters shuffling back and forth as circumstances dictate. While no such balance of power exists currently in the security realm, where the US dominates, one is clearly emerging in the economic sphere, suggesting a rough balancing function between these two linked but distinct domains. The school of thought most associated with balance-of-power theory is called realism. This school's favorite historical example is the Concert of Europe that prevailed from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War I.

C is for Containment

Containment describes the essence of America's Cold War grand strategy as originally enunciated during the Truman administration (1945-1953). As first articulated in diplomat George Kennan's famous Long Telegram from the US embassy in Moscow and later fleshed out in his seminal Foreign Affairs article entitled, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," the strategy entailed resisting Soviet Bloc expansion through the extension of economic aid and military alliance to vulnerable states. This logic propelled America toward a decades-long policy of protecting western Europe and east Asia (see Korea and Vietnam) from communist aggression out of the fear that, if not kept in check, the communist bloc would extend itself in the fashion of falling dominos (i.e., one country's capture would destabilize the next country over and lead to its eventual demise). Later, America's resistance would expand to southwest Asia (the Carter Doctrine), culminating in the Reagan administration's active support of the mujahideens' resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Containment's ultimate rationale held that the Soviet political and economic system was inherently corrupt and inferior to Western democracies and capitalism, so by containing its spread, the Soviet Bloc would eventually succumb to its own "internal contradictions." This analysis proved to be amazingly correct, partially due to the fact that the Soviets themselves aided our cause greatly by sealing their bloc of states off from the rest of the world.

Given that historical success (and the wonderful model of selling grand strategy contained therein - more on that later), many strategists today argue for a similar approach to the threat of radical Islamism, both in its Sunni (al Qaeda) and Shiia (Iran) forms. However, given the nature of today's globalization and the interconnections it creates among all states, even those considered rogues, it's not clear how such a containment strategy would function, especially against nonstate actors waging a global insurgency. Radical Islam functions more like a virus within globalization than an attempt at building a rival system, and, as we also learned in the Cold War, such "free riders" are hard to isolate.

D is for DIME

The acronym DIME stands for the four major elements of national power to be applied in any grand strategy. They are diplomacy, information (e.g., intelligence gathering, propaganda, strategic communications, the manipulation of information networks in general), military power and economic strength (foreign aid, economic sanctions, trade preferences, etc.). Of the four, diplomacy and military power are exclusively functions of the state, whereas information and economics also involves the private sector to a significant-if uncoordinated-degree.

When military strategists employ this term, they're typically suggesting that military power alone is insufficient to achieve the desired objectives. When, in the midst of any overseas intervention, military commanders speak of the need to employ "all aspects of U.S. national power" or state that "there is no military solution to this political problem," they're implicitly invoking the DIME concept and effectively begging the rest of the US government (e.g., Department of State, the intelligence community, Treasury, the Agency for International Development) to better pull their shares of the load. Coordination of the DIME package is considered an "interagency" process, by which various departments coordinate activities under the supervision of the National Security Council, to include enlisting similar support from coalition partners. While some real success has occurred in pursuing the DIME package against transnational terrorist networks, our system is clearly broken when it comes to postconflict stabilization and reconstruction efforts (Iraq, Afghanistan). Indeed, within the Bush administration, we saw plenty of major bureaucracies actually working to sabotage each other's efforts. If partisanship should stop at the water's edge when it comes to foreign policy, then in the matter of grand strategy, bureaucratic in-fighting should stop at least at the Beltway.

E is for Endstate

The concept of an endstate pertains to grand strategy in both a macro and micro sense. The articulated grand strategy should include some implied definition of an international endstate so as to permit the measuring of progress toward that ultimate target (and thus enable self-corrections) and to dispel popular fears of never-ending struggle, two issues pertaining to the maintenance of public morale and thus long-term support. Politicians naturally fear any such objectification of ultimate goals, because if progress can truly be measured, then accountability with the voters soon follows. Still, we as a nation ought to be able to come up with some equivalent of Ronald Reagan's clever campaign question - to wit, "Are we closer to a sustainable and fair globalization than we were four years ago?"

In the case of military interventions pursued as part of a grand strategy, the articulation of a desired endstate serves to limit "mission creep," a military term for operations whose initial limited military objectives balloon into a host of non-military tasks - i.e., nation-building. Vietnam is considered the classic case of mission creep.

In response to that debacle, the US military, and the Army in particular, formulated a warfighting doctrine of "overwhelming force," meaning a rapid application of overkill-level military power designed to achieve near-immediate victory, the subtext being, "If we can achieve the limited military objectives (typically, kill or snatch a few key bad guys) at lightning speed, we'll be out of there before our political leaders start tagging us for the follow-on duties we hate having to do!" - again, nation-building. This logic was the essence of the Powell Doctrine popularized by then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell (1989-1993). The problem with this approach is that it tends to create return dates, as in, we went to Iraq (1990) and then we went back to Iraq (2003). Ditto for Haiti (there in 1994, back in 2004) and Somalia (there in 1992, back - secretly - in early 2007).

F is for Friction

The concept of friction comes from the German military strategist Karl von Clausewitz and his seminal writings on the Napoleonic Wars (On War, first published posthumously in 1832). Clausewitz described it as "the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper," including the danger of war, the physical impact (wear and tear) warfare has on combatants, and - most famously - the "fog" of war, or the lack of clear or complete information during war.

Elevated to the level of grand strategy, friction describes the inherent difficulties of pursuing conflict with adversaries across a lengthy period of time. For example, America's decision to involve itself so heavily in the Vietnam conflict created tremendous friction with regard to its overall strategy of containment - the so-called Vietnam syndrome. The same can be argued for the Bush administration's difficult occupation of Iraq in relation to the "global war on terror." In effect, friction serves to deplete resources and resolve, and in that diversion create the mental environment for strategically myopic decision-making - as in, "I'll do whatever it takes to win this war and damn the larger consequences!"

As such, in the current global counter-insurgency that we wage against al-Qaeda and its associates, our enemies can employ friction-creating tactics as a strategic weapon in this long-term conflict. If, for example, every time a terrorist tries to smuggle some new weapon onto an American commercial airliner, it results in a huge and lasting security response, like the requirement to scan all shoes or restrict all liquids, then our enemies have achieved a substantial return-on-investment in friction. Ditto for a relatively cheap 9/11 attack that draws the US into two lengthy and costly interventions in southwest Asia.

Conversely, we need to view grand strategy in this long war less in terms of avoiding the creation of a cause celebre, for terrorists will always have one, and more in terms of encouraging, and/or taking advantage of, rising friction between radical groups and the more moderate masses upon whom they heap the bulk of their cruelty so that we can isolate them progressively within their own communities - the essence of General Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq.

G is for Goals

Evoking the late American strategist, Col. John Boyd, we can say that the generic goals of any grand strategy should revolve around: 1) improving your nation's overall health, or what he called "fitness"; 2) the widening and strengthening of your network of allies and sympathizers and the commensurate isolation and weakening of your enemy's; 3) avoiding the angering of the uncommitted; and 4) the ending of conflicts on favorable terms that "do not provide seeds for future unfavorable conflicts." In a global environment of rising interpersonal connectivity, these goals are particularly apt.

But a fundamental question remains: In this long-term struggle with radical elements, should the US lead with economic development or political development? In other words, should our goals focus on spreading globalization's economic connectivity and assume that political freedom will follow? Or should we push the goal of rapid democratization while denying economic connectivity to those who resist? Does America remain more "fit" by surrounding itself with autocratic market economies? Or does it risk too much "friction" by trying to impose democracy on others? I look around the world and see no democracies that are not also market economies, even as I spot plenty of market economies that are not democracies. To me, that suggests a path-dependency or historical sequencing that means we should prioritize economic connectivity over political liberalization. Do democracies economically outperform autocracies? All things being equal, yes, because democracies allow for the optimization of knowledge management and in an information-driven global economy, that's a huge competitive advantage.

But things are rarely equal for the developmentally backward, and so I understand many emerging markets' desire to prioritize economic liberty over political freedom. With all the immense social changes imposed by globalization on emerging economies, I believe some patience is in order regarding political reform, especially in societies long based on tribal order. Tell countries how to connect, and let that connectivity determine their code - both external and internal - over time. I think that approach fits America's past more than we care to admit.

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