United States Strategic Culture and Asia-Pacific Security

Abstract

This article adopts an historical socio-cultural lens to analyse the United States' strategic cultural tendencies. It traces the roots of the mutually constitutive relationship between technology and political structures in the United States to explain the dominant tendency of the United States to substitute technology for strategy in war as a predisposition of national strategic culture. This predisposition was seen particularly in network-centric warfare and effects-based operations. I conclude that the United States risks strategic failure due to the limitations of its ethnocentric security paradigm. Over-reliance on technology obscures strategic understanding of the people and cultures of the world, including those of the Asia-Pacific region. The development of the AirSea Battle is a case in point, a direct application of technology to strategic concerns in the Asia-Pacific region. The strategic pivot towards the Asia-Pacific may be characterized as reflecting more historical continuity than change in America's strategic calculus. The emerging Asia-Pacific security dynamic is no different a challenge for American policy-makers in that regard than challenges presented elsewhere in the world. Perhaps the biggest challenge for American leaders is to overcome institutional intransigence or the lure of ideological conformity when addressing military requirements and budgetary commitments.

Notes

1. Generally, those states that possess the greatest potential to rise to near peer competitor status vis-à-vis the United States by 2020 are Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. For an insightful and seemingly balanced report on the subject of rising states and more, see Robert L. Hutchings, Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, December 2004).

2. With no competitive intelligence analysis like the so-called Team ‘B’ report of 1976 from which to draw a comparison, such assertions as the end of America's dominance within such a short time are ripe for debate. See Richard Pipes et al., Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternative View, Report of Team ‘B’ (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, December 1976); Christopher Kojm, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, December 2012), p. 18. The report hypothesizes four alternative world order scenarios that could reign by 2030, none of which includes the United States maintaining its traditional role as the harbinger of peace and stability throughout the world. See also Michael J. Mullen, The National Military Strategy of the United States of America: Redefining America's Military Leadership (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2011), p. 2; Barack Obama, Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: The White House, January 2012).

3. Parts of this article have been adapted from the author's book, America, Technology, and Strategic Culture: A Clausewitzian Assessment (London & New York: Routledge, 2009).

4. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1973), p. xxii.

6. Ibid., p. 475.

7. Many of Weigley's contemporaries shared this view. Among others, see Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), and Frank G. Hoffman, Decisive Force: The New American Way of War (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996).

8. Max Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 4 (2003), p. 42.

9. Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Prepared Testimony by US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’, Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, 108th Cong., 1st Session, 9 July 2003, p. 2.

10. Antulio J. Echevarria II, ‘American Strategic Culture: Problems and Prospects’, in Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 435. Other characteristics that Echevarria notes often cited in depictions of American strategic culture are the penchant for ‘fighting wars as battles’ and the aversion of American policy-makers to battlefield casualties. While these traits are present in the American way of war, Echevarria notes that none appears ‘uniquely American’ in that ‘each can be found in some significant degree in the strategic culture of any Western nation’ (p. 436).

11. Leon E. Panetta, Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, January 2012). A primary example of the DoD's emphasis on cyberspace is the move to establish and rapidly expand the operating capabilities of US Cyber Command as a component of US Strategic Command.

12. Nikhil Kumar, ‘US Draws up Battle Plan to Stave off Digital Attack Cyberstrikes’, The Independent, 4 February 2013.

13. Colin S. Gray, ‘The American Way of War: Critique and Implications’, in Anthony McIvor (ed.), Rethinking the Principles of War: The Future of Warfare (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), manuscript, p. 23.

14. Antulio J. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2004), p. 1 (emphasis original); see also Weigley, American Way of War (note 5), p. xx.

15. Edward A. Smith, Effects Based Operations: Applying Network Centric Warfare in Peace, Crisis, and War (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program, November 2002), p. 26.

16. James Moffat, Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program, September 2003), p. 50.

17. Smith, Effects Based Operations (note 16), p. xx.

18. Ibid., p. xxiii.

19. As can be expected of any ‘new’ military concept, the ideas named here have been subject to what is at times severe criticism. For example, in his monograph, Rapid Decisive Operations: An Assumptions-Based Critique (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, November 2001), p. 17, Antullio J. Echevarria II cast the ‘Rapid Decisive Operations’ concept as ‘an incoherent concept that rests on several faulty assumptions’. In so doing, Echevarria warned against the dangers of such concepts for their creation of ‘false expectations’, which he speculated could lead to ‘potentially dangerous results’ for the US military. For an explication of ‘Rapid Decisive Operations’, see Dean W. Cash, A Concept for Rapid Decisive Operations (Final Draft): RDO White Paper Version 2.0 (Norfolk, VA: US Joint Forces Command, J9 Joint Futures Lab, 25 October 2001). For an explication of ‘Shock and Awe’ and ‘Rapid Dominance’, see Harlan Ullman et al., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1996).

20. Robert E. Scurlock, Jr., ‘The Human Dimension of Transformation’, in Williamson Murray (ed.), A Nation at War in an Era of Strategic Change (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, September 2004), p. 364, fn. 10.

21. For a brief discussion on the historical development of EBO, see Williamson Murray with Kevin Woods, Thoughts on Effects-Based Operations, Strategy, and the Conduct of War (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, January 2004), IDA Paper P-3869, pp. 27–33.

22. Donald Lowe and Simon Ng, ‘Effects-Based Operations: Language, Meaning and the Effects-Based Approach’, Paper submitted at the 2004 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, sponsored by the Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program, and held in San Diego, CA, 15–17 June 2004.

23. Ibid.

24. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq during a speech delivered from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003. See George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President from the USS Abraham Lincoln’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 1 May 2003.

25. See, for example, Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Statecraft: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006).

26. Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm, 1979).

27. Ibid., p. 9.

28. Ibid., p. 65.

29. Ibid., pp. 104–7. ‘Groupthink’, Booth explains, ‘is not necessarily a product of ethnocentrism, but there is an important relationship, for strategy in practice is “made” by groups. Characteristic features of groupthink activity include the tendency to develop stereotyped and dehumanized images of the out-groups against whom the in-groups are engaged in competitive struggles, and the tendency for collective judgments arising out of group discussions to shift towards riskier courses of action than the individual members would otherwise have been prepared to take.’

30. Ibid., p. 181. Second- and third-generation advocates of the strategic cultural approach served to refine and expand Booth's original concept. For summary treatment of this evolution, see, for example, Colin S. Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation Strikes Back’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25 (1999).

31. Colin S. Gray, ‘Strategy in the Nuclear Age: The United States, 1945–1991’, pp. 49–69, in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Berstein (eds), The Making of Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 590–91.

32. Ibid., p. 590. This note on America's relationship with technology is echoed by Max Lerner, who characterized Americans as a ‘machine-intoxicated’ people. See Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 227. Playwright Arthur Miller expressed a similar sentiment, albeit in a more personal manner, when he said of himself, ‘I'm an American. I believe in technology’. See Robert Kelley, The Shaping of the American Past (5th edition) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), p. 780. Robert Scales described ‘techno-centric solutions’ as being integral to America's ‘strategic cultural DNA’. See Robert H. Scales, ‘Clausewitz and World War IV’, Armed Forces Journal, July 2006.

33. Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (6th edition) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 410.

34. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 33.

35. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in George Rogers Taylor (ed. and intro.), The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in America History (Lexington, MA: DC Heath and Company, 1972). For an example, see Brice F. Harris, America, Technology, and Strategic Culture: A Clausewitzian Assessment (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 74–96.

36. Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier’ (note 36), p. 5.

37. Ibid., p. 3.

38. Ibid., p. 47.

39. Gray, ‘Strategy in the Nuclear Age’ (note 32), p. 590. Gray also advances this view in his book, Colin S. Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style, (Lanham: Hamilton Press, 1986), p. 44; Stanley Hoffman offered a similar account of the American national style in Gulliver's Troubles, Or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), part II.

40. Colin S. Gray, ‘U.S. Strategic Culture: Implications for Defense Technology,’ in Asa A. Clark IV and John F. Lilley (eds.), Defense Technology (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989), pp. 31–48.

41. Gray, ‘Strategy in the Nuclear Age’ (note 32), p. 590.

42. Gray, Irregular Enemies (note 26), pp. 35–6.

43. Scales, ‘Clausewitz and World War IV’ (note 33), p. 16.

44. It is no accident that some of America's most prestigious reserve military officer training programmes are at A&M universities.

45. Peter Maslowski, ‘To the Edge of Greatness: The United States, 1783–1865’, in Murray, Knox, and Berstein, The Making of Strategy (note 32), pp. 233–4.

46. Ibid.

47. Carnes Lord, ‘American Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1985), pp. 288–9.

48. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, Military Heritage of America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 4.

49. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

50. Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 197. American armed forces continue to employ the JMEMs for operational planning purposes. Classified ‘confidential’, they are unavailable for use as primary source research.

51. Moffat, Complexity Theory (note 17), p. 45.

52. See, for example, Milan Vego, ‘Net-Centric is Not Decisive’, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (January 2003), Vol. 129/1/1,199, at http://www.usni.org/proceedings/articles03/provego01.htm; Robert David Steele, ‘The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate’, Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 1999, No. 20, pp. 78–84; and Frank B. Strickland, Jr., ‘It’s Not About Mousetraps – Measuring the Value of Knowledge for Operators’, Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn 1996, No. 13, pp. 90–96.

53. For comprehensive treatment of the evolution of military command from the time of Alexander the Great through and until the rise of nuclear authority, see John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Viking Press, 1987).

54. Popular opinion holds ‘legacy’ systems to be impediments, as opposed to catalysts, to operational change. For a key discussion on legacy information systems and the challenges associated with re-tooling an organization's infostructure to achieve operational capability, see Don Tapscott and Art Caston, Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), ch. 10.

55. Clay Wilson, Network Centric Warfare: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 2004), pp. 7, 8.

56. United States Public Law 99–433, ‘Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986’, 1 October 1986. Goldwater-Nichols obliged the US Department of Defense to integrate command and force structures to achieve joint operating capability. See James R. Locher III, ‘Building on the Goldwater-Nichols Act’, in Dennis J. Quinn (ed.), The Goldwater-Nichols DoD Reorganization Act: A Ten-Year Retrospective (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1999), p. 11. Some years after the passage of Goldwater-Nichols, the principle of joint operations was reinforced in a conceptual template known as Joint Vision. That underwent refinement until 2004 when it was officially incorporated into American military strategy. See John M. Shalikashvili, Joint Vision 2010 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, July 1996); Henry Shelton, Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 2000); and Richard Myers, The National Military Strategy of the United States of America: A Strategy for Today; A Vision for Tomorrow (Washington, DC: Department of Defense).

57. Emily O. Goldman and Andrew L. Ross, ‘Conclusion: The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas – Theory and Practice’, in Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason (eds), The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 374.

58. Ralph Peters, ‘Betraying Our Troops; Pentagon vs. US Defense’, New York Post Online Edition, 2 February 2006.

59. This point was recognized in Toffler and Toffler, War and Anti-War (note 35), p. 11.

60. Counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3–24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3–33.5 (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, December 2006), pp. 1–16. At the time, this was the first warfighting publication devoted entirely to the topic of counterinsurgency that the US Marine Corps had published in 25 years. It had been 20 years since the US Army had published such a field manual.

61. National Security Council, Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review: Summary Briefing Slides, January 2007, p. 5.

62. Obama, Sustaining US Global Leadership (note 2), p. 2.

63. For insight into DoD budgetary planning during times of economic austerity, see Ashton Carter, ‘Handling Budgetary Uncertainty in Fiscal Year 2013’, Internal DoD Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Net Assessment to the Secretary of Defense, 10 January 2013.

64. AirSea Battle Office, Air-Sea Battle: Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access and Area Denial Challenges (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2013).

65. The formally stated intent of the ASB concept ‘is to improve integration of air, land, naval, space, and cyberspace forces … to deter and, if necessary, defeat an adversary employing sophisticated anti-access/area-denial capabilities’, such as in the case of China. See Gen. Martin Dempsey, Joint Operational Access Concept (JAOC) (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 17 January 2012), Version 1.0, p. 4; Richard A. Bitzinger and Michael Raska, ‘Policy Brief: The AirSea Battle Debate and the Future of Conflict in East Asia’, RSIS Policy Brief, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, February 2013.

66. Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘China's Anti-Access Strategy in Historical and Theoretical Perspective’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2011), pp. 299–323; Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: WW Norton, 2011); Kyle Christensen, ‘Strategic Developments in the Western Pacific: Anti-Access/Area Denial and the AirSea Battle Concept’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2012), pp. 1–24.

67. David W. Kearn, ‘Air-Sea Battle and China's Anti-Access and Area Denial Challenge’, Orbis, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2014), pp. 132–46; Ronald O'Rourke, ‘China Naval Modernization: Implications for US Navy Capabilities: Background and Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Service RL33153, 2012.

68. America's foreign policy heritage is captured in a succinct, albeit revealing, fashion in Charles O. Lerche, Foreign Policy of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), ch. 3.

69. Ellen Nakashima, ‘Pentagon to Boost Cybersecurity Force’, Washington Post, 27 January 2013.

70. Barton Gellman and Ellen Nakashima, ‘US Spy Agencies Mounted 231 Offensive Cyber-Operations in 2011, Documents Show’, Washington Post, 30 August 2013.

71. John A. Gentry, ‘Doomed to Fail: America's Blind Faith in Military Technology’, Parameters, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter 2002–2003), pp. 93–4.

72. For a compelling report on the use of encryption and other technologies by terrorist groups and criminal organizations, see Dorothy E. Denning and William E. Baugh, Jr., ‘Encryption in Crime and Terrorism’, in Alan D. Campen and Douglas H. Dearth (eds), Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries and Reality (Fairfax, VA: AFCEA International Press, 1998), pp. 167–78. In the cases of both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo campaign, opponents demonstrated proficiency at concealing electronic and heat signatures, and whole tanks, and using mock targets to draw UN and allied firepower away from their actual military assets.

73. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People's Republic of China (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2006), p. I.

74. U.S. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People's Republic of China (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2009), p. 1; Wendell Minnick, ‘Study Examines China's Expansive UAV Fleet’, Defense News, 11 March 2013. China is also said to be developing stealth weaponry.

75. Dawn S. Onley and Patience Wait, ‘Red Storm Rising’, Government Computer News, 21 August 2006. The authors went on to write: ‘A big part of the strategy is the PLA's civilian units – [Information Technology] engineers drawn from universities, institutes and corporations. The PLA views these militias as its trump card and a way of asserting virtual dominance to paralyze the United States and other potential adversaries’.

76. Patience Wait, ‘Chinese Seek Military ID Info’, Government Computer News, 15 August 2006.

77. Ibid. One terabyte has an approximate value of one trillion bytes of information.

78. Mandiant, APT1: Exposing One of China's Cyber Espionage Units (Alexandria, VA: Mandiant Corporation, 2013), p. 3.

79. David Barboza, ‘China Says Army Is Not Behind Attacks in Report’, The New York Times, 20 February 2013.

80. Peters, ‘Betraying Our Troops’ (note 60).

81. For penetrating analysis of China's grand strategy and operational history in Africa, see Donovan C. Chau, Political Warfare in Sub-Saharan Africa: US Capabilities and Chinese Operations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 26 March 2007).

82. People's Republic of China, China's Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean (Beijing: Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, 5 November 2008).

83. Sean P. Gorman, Networks, Security and Complexity: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2005), pp. 23–4. See also Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), pp. 96–8. Gertz's assertion that ‘China's connection with Cuba has received no attention from the news media or from US policy-makers, who lack a clear understanding of Chinese strategic goals and ambitions’ could well be argued in a present-day context.

84. Q. Liang and W. Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999), pp. 44, 47. Quoted in Gorman, Networks, Security and Complexity (note 85), p. 24.

85. Beijing's relationship with Brazil includes collaboration in the areas of aviation and aerospace science, rocket launch systems, and spy satellite technology.

86. Emanuele Scimia, ‘China Pivots to Latin America’, Asia Times, 18 July 2012. These investments are heavily concentrated in the energy, mineral, and manufacturing sectors.

87. Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China's Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2000), p. 99.

88. ‘OECD Economic Surveys: China 2013’, Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), 22 March 2013, p. 14.

89. Lu Hui (ed.), ‘Xi Explains China's Reform Plan’, Xinhuanet, 15 November 2013.

90. J.M., ‘The Party's New Blueprint’, The Economist, 16 November 2003.

91. Kent E. Calder, ‘China and Japan's Simmering Rivalry’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (March/April 2006), p. 139.

92. Dan Blumenthal et al., ‘Securing US Interests and Values in the Asia-Pacific’, American Enterprise Institute, 4 June 2013.

93. John Kerry, ‘Statement on the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone’, 23 November 2013, at http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/11/218013.htm; Dan Lamothe and Yochi Dreazen, ‘Team Obama Changes Course, Appears to Accept China Air Defense Zone’, Foreign Policy, 4 December 2013.

94. See Harris, America, Technology, and Strategic Culture (note 36), pp. 99–131, for further treatment of this subject.

95. Bill Gertz, ‘Inside the Ring: Asia Pivot Threatened’, The Washington Times, 6 March 2013.

96. One research partnership that focuses on the subject of strategic culture is that between Florida International University and US Southern Command, at http://strategicculture.fiu.edu/Home.aspx. Other institutions, such as the US Army War College and the National Defense University, routinely publish studies that address the human dimension of war, including strategic culture.

97. Andrew Marshall, ‘Creation of an Organization to Explore the Information Aspects of Warfare’, Internal DoD Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Net Assessment to the Secretary of Defense, 29 March 2002, p. 2. One option for achieving this goal would be to expand and replicate the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, which is a cyber-security research and training programme established through a partnership between the University of Maryland, industry, and relevant federal government entities.

98. Sun Tzu, Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 177.