Strategic Theory and Practice: A Critical Analysis of the Planning Process for the Long War on Terror

Abstract

This study argues that the strategic planning process of the Long War on Terror has been conducted in a manner that did not pay sufficient attention to the tenets of classical strategic theory. The article shows that the strategy encapsulated in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and the Pentagon's initial responses to the challenges of irregular warfare departed from important principles associated with Clausewitz and other strategic theorists, undermining the prospects for successful counterterrorism. The reasons are partly the fault of the Bush administration, and partly a consequence of the American strategic culture and the preferred model of American civil–military relations. By turning back to strategic fundamentals, important improvements in strategic performance have been accomplished since 2006. The Obama administration can build upon the later successes of its predecessor in Iraq and in reshaping the US armed forces. In addition, the new president can refine and improve the Bush administration's counterterrorism strategy particularly by clarifying short- and long-term political goals. In order for this to happen, the new administration must do a better job of incorporating into its strategic planning main ideas from Clausewitzian strategic thought, such as the necessity for clearly defined political objectives in war and understanding strategy as first and foremost a process of employing military and non-military means in such a way as to achieve those political objectives.

The strategic performance of the United States and its allies in the Long War has been uneven over the past eight years. Important successes against al-Qaeda and other Salafist groups have been scored, but the overall approach adopted by the American government in its publicly available strategy documents and in at least some of its actions failed to tackle the problem in a manner that is in accordance with the classical understanding of strategic theory. If the Long War will be the main security challenge for the United States over the next several years, and there are very good reasons to believe that it will,1 it is important for the Obama administration, together with its NATO partners and other allies, to pay more careful attention to some of the main tenets of strategic theory. There have been numerous studies in recent years criticizing the security policies of the Bush administration and its handling of the War on Terror. Unlike most of them, however, this paper will offer a theoretical critique of the planning process instead of a policy critique of some of the resulting policies or their troubled implementation. This study has two main objectives. The first goal is to show that both the American civilian leaders and their military counterparts often failed to ground their decisions on a sound understanding of classical strategic thought, as it was developed by Clausewitz and others over centuries of experience with warfare. The second one is to identify some of the key challenges to ameliorating what British-American strategic theorist Colin Gray refers to as the ‘strategy deficit’ 2 of the American approach to warfare and to offer some suggestions on how strategic theory should inform future policy choices. In its likely attempt to redefine America's strategy in the ongoing war against al-Qaeda and its Salafist allies, few issues are more important for the Obama administration than reincorporating some of the principles of strategic theory into the government's planning process.

The first section of the paper will present a discussion of how the concepts of war, policy, and strategy have been traditionally understood by strategic theorists, and then will analyse and critique how the Bush White House conceptualized these terms in its main planning document for the Long War, the 2006 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT). By briefly introducing the ideas of one of the classics of strategic thought, Carl von Clausewitz, this section will develop a set of coordinates about the proper nature and function of strategy which will guide the narrative discourse for the rest of the paper. The performance of the US government in the conduct of the Long War will constantly be analysed through the lens provided by the strategic paradigms detailed in this first section. The second section attempts to demonstrate how a disregard for strategic theory has led the technophile American defence community to misjudge the nature of contemporary warfare and thus to engage in a process of military transformation that ill-prepared US forces for the missions that they are currently assigned. This process has been partly reversed by the changes adopted under the leadership of General Petraeus and Secretary Gates, but much work remains to be done. The third part of the paper is devoted to exploring some general causes for the lack of American strategic planning that go beyond any particular administration. Some peculiar characteristics of the American strategic culture and of the American Way of War, as well as the model of civil–military relations generally adopted by US leaders, are the two issues that will be analysed and critiqued in this section. The final section of the paper offers a brief discussion on the translation from strategic theory to strategic practice, and presents some policy recommendations for the Obama administration.

Policy, Strategy, and War

This paper contends that the first major intellectual hurdle that impedes a better strategic performance on the part of the US national security bureaucracy is its poor understanding of the proper meaning of the concepts of policy, strategy, and war, as well as of the appropriate connections among them. Unfortunately, Oxford's Hew Strachan is fairly persuasive when he argues that:

The word strategy has acquired a universality which has robbed it of meaning, and left it only with banalities … One of the reasons we are unsure what war is is that we are unsure about what strategy is or is not. It is not policy; it is not politics; it is not diplomacy. It exists in relation to all three, but it does not replace them.3

This concern for a more rigorous definition of war and strategy does not represent an instance of pedantic academic quibble, possible appearances to the contrary. In order to offer a meaningful theoretical critique of strategic practice, we must at first have a clear notion of what is meant when we refer to these essential elements of strategic theory. Failure to comply with the tenets of classical strategic theory obviously in and of itself does not represent a shortcoming of policy actions; however, this paper will attempt to prove that there are important practical costs associated with conducting security policies in a framework that is not sufficiently well-grounded in the tenets of strategic theory.

One does not necessarily have to agree with Richard Betts and consider that ‘one Clausewitz is still worth a busload of most other theorists’4 in order to accept that the work of the nineteenth-century Prussian war theorist represents the best place to start in clarifying the proper functions of war and strategy. In his famous treatise On War, Clausewitz insisted on multiple occasions on defining the instrumental role of war in relation to policy: war is ‘an instrument of policy’, and ‘a continuation of the political intercourse with the addition of other means’.5 This is very important because it is this subordination to policy that makes war more than a mindless exercise of violence. Thus, success in war is measured in the extent to which the political objectives that justified the recourse to war are achieved. Traditionally, in major conventional wars, a military victory against the opponent's armed forces translated fairly directly into a political victory as well because the victors imposed the terms of the peace treaty. In our contemporary security environment, however, the prevalence of irregular forms of warfare require the policymaker to pay much more attention to how military successes can be translated into political ones. This is particularly the case in counterinsurgency and armed nation-building operations, as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. Initial ‘military victories’, while an important part of the overall objective, were nevertheless far from sufficient in assuring the ultimate political goals of the missions and, implicitly, winning the wars in any real sense.

If wars are ultimately about achieving political objectives, the first question that needs to be addressed is how the Long War could be conceptualized as a true war in this instrumental (or strategic) understanding of the term. Traditionally, terrorist acts have been regarded as being closer to criminal acts than to warfare and therefore best addressed as a law enforcement issue.6 Counterterrorism as such was usually focused on capturing the perpetrators of terrorist attacks after the fact or, at most, on preventing future attacks by degrading the capacity of terrorist networks to plan for large-scale operations. After 9/11, the Bush administration argued that the sheer scale of that attack combined with the global nature of the al-Qaeda organization and its dangerous ambitions to use Weapons of Mass Destructions (WMDs) required replacing the old ‘law enforcement’ paradigm with the ‘Global War on Terror’ one. Whether such a paradigm shift was warranted or useful has been the subject of a lot of controversy; this paper is mostly agnostic on this issue and instead it is much more interested in analysing how the substantive elements of the war paradigm have found their place in strategic planning once the shift to the war terminology took place.

The US government could have chosen to continue addressing the terrorist challenge under a ‘counterterrorism’ strategic framework focused on intelligence and law enforcement operation, and therefore tried to avoid the challenging task of committing the United States to a generational global war against radical Islam. However, the Bush administration chose this latter and more ambitious course of action. If this choice means more than a rhetorical shift, however, then we should expect to find the definitional elements of war, such as the primacy of the political objectives in the conduct of operations, in the fight against al-Qaeda as well.7 Clausewitz warned statesmen to think very careful about their final political objectives before they decide to commit their nation to war, and today his words are as relevant as ever:

No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The first is the political purpose, the latter the operational objective.8

Therefore, one of the most essential elements of success in the conduct of wars is clarity on the desired political objectives of the conflict. Such clarity on the goals of the Long War is something that is present only in general terms in Bush's unclassified strategy documents. This is unfortunate, as the lack of clearly stated objectives in the public domain makes it more difficult to assess the progress made so far in the conduct of the war and prevents a more meaningful debate on possible strategy improvements from taking place.

In addition to having a political ‘logic’ determined by the policymaker, war also has a ‘grammar’ of its own.9 Clausewitz points out that even though war may indeed be a means to accomplish the political aim, this means has a peculiar violent and often unpredictable nature that must be taken into account by the policymaker. He advised the statesman to get to know ‘the instrument he means to use’.10 In other words, warfare is a very special instrument in the toolbox of the policymaker, and the latter should understand the intrinsic characteristics of this tool in order to use it effectively. It is of great importance that ‘the trends and designs of policy shall not be inconsistent’11 with the nature of the means intended to accomplish it. Of particular relevance to our current strategic situation and to the future of the preemption doctrine is to what extent US military forces could be used not only to bring about ‘regime removal’, but also to replace a rogue leader with a functional (and somewhat democratic) government. The jury is still out on both Iraq and Afghanistan, but the great costs incurred so far have had a humbling effect. The Obama administration and NATO leaders, particularly in regards to Afghanistan, should be careful to avoid making policy demands on war which war could not fulfil. They need to make every effort to understand what political objectives a potential increase in the Western military effort can and cannot achieve in that country.

As most strategic theorists traditionally understood it, the function of strategy is to assure the matching between the goals of the policy and the means used to achieve them. Clausewitz wrote that ‘strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war’. Consequently, ‘Strategic theory deals with planning; or rather, it attempts to shed light on the components of war and their interrelationships.’ And finally, ‘Though strategy itself is concerned only with engagements, the theory of strategy must also consider its chief means of execution.’12 Colin Gray offered the same advice in modern language when he described strategy as the ‘bridge that relates military power to political purpose … [and as] the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy’.13 Hence, the relationship between the three terms that give the title of this segment is rather straightforward: war is a military means to achieve a political goal determined by policy, while strategy is the process by which military force is employed in such a way as to facilitate the achievement of that political goal. Before proceeding to an analysis of the current US strategy, it is only proper to end this brief presentation of basic strategic theory with a reference to one of America's most talented strategic thinkers of the last century, Bernard Brodie. In a brilliantly simple formulation, he managed to capture the utilitarian nature of strategy:

Strategic thinking, or ‘theory’ if one prefers, is nothing if not pragmatic. Strategy is a ‘how to do it’ study, a guide to accomplishing something and doing it efficiently. As in many other branches of politics, the question that matters in strategy is: Will the idea work? … Above all, strategic theory is a theory for action.14

To sum up this brief review of Clausewitzian strategic theory, the following criteria need to be considered when analysing the strategic planning process of the Bush administration. First, the war must serve as an instrument of policy; it must be used to accomplish a political objective that is judged by the statesman to serve the national interest of the country. A corollary to this statement is that victory in war comes only when the political goals are met. Second, these political objectives which justified the recourse to war must be stated as clearly as possible in order for the war-planners to be able to employ military force and non-military aspects of power in such a way as to maximize the chances of accomplishing the desired policy ends. Clear political objectives are also required in order to determine the necessary level of resources that must be allocated to a conflict. Third, war does have certain intrinsic characteristics, such as its violent and sometimes unpredictable nature, which need to be accounted for when the statesman contemplates using war to accomplish a policy objective; while the policy logic dominates, war also has its own grammar. Fourth, strategy is the process of using military and non-military means to accomplish the desired political ends; it is first and foremost a pragmatic enterprise whose role is to show the ways in which resources are employed to achieve the desired ends.

It would be impossible to begin an analysis of US strategy in the Long War on Terrorism without initially offering at least a brief account of who the enemy is and what his goals are. In his acclaimed study of terrorist networks, Marc Sageman refers to al-Qaeda as being the vanguard of a global Salafi jihadist movement, ‘a worldwide religious revivalist movement with the goal of reestablishing past Muslim glory in a great Islamic state stretching from Morocco to the Philippines, eliminating present national boundaries’.15 The United States is regarded as the main obstacle in recreating the ancient Islamic Caliphate, and therefore the ultimate enemy of the Salafists. The major goal of the jihadists (i.e. the recreation of the Caliphate), even though influenced by a religious/ideological component, is nonetheless an essentially political objective. For Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's chief strategist, the understanding of the relation between military means and political ends is indeed Clausewitzian in nature:

If the successful operations against Islam's enemies and the severe damage inflicted on them do not serve the ultimate goal of establishing the Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world, they will be nothing more than disturbing acts, regardless of their magnitude, that could be absorbed and endured, even if after some time and with some losses.16

While Zawahiri's strategic influence and his ability to control al-Qaeda's operational plans are uncertain, to the extent that his ideas still hold sway within the Salafist movement we can see that America and its allies are facing an enemy whose conduct can accurately be described as strategic.

In order to accomplish their goals, Zawahiri stated that the Salafi jihadists need to force the US to withdraw from the Middle East and abandon its support for the ‘apostate’ rulers in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia. Only then, he believed, could the movement take control of a state and begin from there the recreation of the Caliphate. President Bush belatedly began referring to some of al-Qaeda's strategic ideas in 2006. In an effort to shore up support for the War on Terror five years after 9/11, he began to explain to the American public how al-Qaeda attempts to force the US out of the Islamic world:

First, they're waging a campaign of terror across the world. They're targeting our forces abroad, hoping that the American people will grow tired of casualties and give up the fight. And they're targeting America's financial centers and economic infrastructure at home, hoping to terrorize us and cause our economy to collapse. Bin Laden calls this his ‘bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.’ …With the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America … lost – according to the lowest estimate – $500 billion … Meaning that every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars of America.17

In short, as Thomas Mahnken observed, the United States is facing a strategically literate enemy, one whose understanding of the connections between its military actions and its political goals might sadly often surpass America's capability to obtain politically desirable outcomes from the application of force.18

The unrealistic nature of al-Qaeda's ultimate goals is immaterial. The main danger for the United States and its allies is clearly not the possibility of eventually confronting an actual Caliphate, but the immense harm it may suffer from future attacks (possibly including WMDs) perpetrated by Salafi jihadists in their quest to re-create a mythical past. Even though the terrorists will never achieve their final goals, the danger posed to American interests worldwide and ultimately to the American homeland by destabilizing countries such as Pakistan or Afghanistan is more than evident. Understanding the strategic logic of al-Qaeda and treating this challenge in a serious manner does not confer legitimacy on the terrorists or enhance their prestige, as some critics of the war terminology claim;19 it merely acknowledges the sophistication of our adversary, and it provides a solid foundation on which to design a successful grand strategy to defeat the Salafist movement.

The most recent formal attempt by the US government to chart a strategic course for the Long War is encapsulated in the 2006 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT). The first concern with this document can be readily observed just from reading its title, which suggests a strategy not to win a war against a particular adversary, but to eliminate a mode of warfare. One need not be as erudite a scholar of military affairs as Sir Michael Howard to observe that

We cannot be at war with an abstract noun … Who are our adversaries? Certainly not terror in the abstract: that is a meaningless term that may have rhetorical value for political leaders, but obscures rather than enlightens serious analysis. Our adversaries are people. [original emphasis.]20

A Clausewitzian understanding of war as a ‘clash of wills’ between two polities with divergent political interests might have helped the former White House avoid declaring war on a mode of warfare. This semantic confusion may be explained by a fairly understandable concern for the potential to further alienate Muslim publics by declaring a war against ‘radical Islamists’. However, a perusal of the US strategy leads to the conclusion that the Bush administration might have indeed considered that America is now involved in a war to eliminate global terrorism per se. The document does not detail the specific political objectives that the United States is pursuing in any particular theater of the War on Terror, or in any other particular country for that matter. Instead, it talks in general terms about the desired political conditions, such as the advancement of democracy, under which terrorism would likely cease to represent the major security concern that compelled the United States to launch the Long War. This lack of more clearly defined political objectives hurts the quality of the strategic dialogue in Washington because it makes it difficult to have some objective measurement of how well the current strategy works.

One of the few recent examples of successful strategizing, the ‘surge’ that changed the fate of the Iraq War, was successful in part because the Bush White House offered a series of political objectives which served as benchmarks to measure the progress made by the strategy. While it is obviously a much different task to define such ‘benchmarks’ for the Long War as it was for the Iraq War, the underlying strategic imperative of having clearly defined political goals remains the same. A slightly more appropriate analogy would be the containment grand strategy of the Cold War, when the political objectives of that long-term conflict, while retaining some degree of flexibility, have nevertheless been fairly detailed and consistent over the years. Hence, the quality of strategic planning, by which is meant how well resources have been employed to serve the policy goals, has been greatly enhanced by having clear political guidance. The Bush administration, in its classified National Implementation Plan for The War on Terror (NIP-WOT), must surely have had more specific political goals than the NSCT suggests. It is a shame, however, that the former administration could not do a better job in terms of making its strategic priorities and plans better known to the general public so that they could be more openly analysed and criticized.

The NSCT argues that terrorism is caused mainly by the following factors: ‘political alienation, subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation, grievances that can be blames on others, and an ideology that justifies murder’.21 The Strategic Vision for the War on Terror, which would more properly be termed the political objective of the war, is described as two-pronged: ‘The defeat of violent extremism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society; and The creation of a global environment inhospitable to violent extremists and all who support them.’22 Further confirming the impression that this “Strategic Vision” is really more like a statement of policy than of strategy, the document goes on to argue that ‘In the long run, winning the War on Terror means winning the battle of ideas. Ideas can transform the embittered and disillusioned either into murderers willing to kill innocents, or into free peoples living harmoniously in a diverse society.’23 These statements form the foundation for what the document calls the long-term US strategy for winning the War on Terror: ‘advancing effective democracy’24 in order to accomplish the former President's ‘forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East’.25 At the level of grand strategy, regarding a political liberalization of the Middle East as the long-term political objective of the Long War poses an immediate problem for short-term goals, and it is at odds with the global counterinsurgency paradigm that has been adopted by important parts of the national security bureaucracy. In basic terms, a counterinsurgency strategy attempts to maintain the political status quo and build up the capacity of local governments (both democratic and authoritarian ones) to deal with security threats within their territories. For example, the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review singled out ‘building partnership capability’ as a crucial priority.26 It is thus a clear tension between the long-term aspirations and the immediate priorities of America's conduct of the Long War, and there is no obvious solution as to how to resolve it. Most strategies involve such tough trade-offs, however, and it will be up to the Obama administration to make the judgment calls needed to find its own right balance between the short-term and the long-term political goals of the fight against al-Qaeda. The case of the American support for General Pervez Musharaf in Pakistan was a prime example of how difficult it could be to reach a sustainable compromise between short-term and long-term priorities.

The approach that gained traction in Washington in recent years and that also appears likely to be continued by the Obama administration27 attempts to resolve this tension by promoting so-called ‘good governance’, the latest silver bullet to capture the imagination of Washington's national security establishment. This emerging conventional wisdom de-emphasizes the spread of democracy as a universal palliative, and instead seeks to ‘fix’ failed states around the world through a large expansion of economic, military, and governance assistance. If such an approach harms the efforts to promote political liberalization by shifting attention to less controversial ‘technical’ matters, it has the potential of harming the long-term political goals of the US in this conflict. Moreover, as former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has observed, ‘peacebuilding (UN's term for post-conflict reconstruction/nation-building operations) is a profoundly political process’,28 not so much a matter of purely technical assistance. Therefore, a strategic approach to peacebuilding requires much more than merely a ‘laundry list’ of recommendations of needed economic, administrative, legal, and social reforms. Similarly, larger amounts of foreign and military aid, despite obvious appeal in the short-run, provide no guarantee for the development of sustainable long-term solutions, as the sad experience of official development assistance over the past decades had shown. If this new emerging approach focuses too much on short-term goals and hopes to transform the ‘Somalias’ of the world into ‘Singapores’, well-governed yet politically repressive states, it will offer some (dubious) benefits in the near term at the cost of further hindering the advancement of the long-term objectives of the Long War. The importance of political factors in tackling the threats coming from failed states also shows that Clausewitz remains as relevant for sub-state conflicts as he was for inter-state wars: as long as political motives form the main basis for conflict, the framework provided by classical strategic theory which emphasizes this primacy of political factors should provide us with the best conceptual tools to understand our security challenges.

If the political liberalization of the Muslim world could be conceived in broad terms as the overall long-term US political objective in the Long War, one important question that also needs to be addressed is if accomplishing such an objective will indeed serve to reduce the terrorism threat. A Congressional Research Service (CRS) appraisal of the NSCT pointed out that ‘democratization as counterterrorism strategy’ remains a controversial issue among terrorism experts, thus questioning the all-important issue of pragmatism in the Bush administration's strategy.29 The NSCT discusses the likely causes of terrorism and offers some seemingly plausible arguments in favor of promoting freedom and democracy as the best long-term antidote to the spread of al-Qaeda's fanatical ideology. The success of the surge in Iraq, if sustained over the long-term, would represent an important case study supporting the validity of Bush's approach. While some analysts have pointed out that the ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ network was dealt a fatal blow only when local tribesman in Anbar turned against it, the success of the surge was as much due to the political reintegration of the Sunnis into a democratic political system as to paying the Sons of Iraq. One should not forget that the final goals are ultimately political, not military, and therefore real success in Iraq will eventually be judged by the state of the political arrangements in Baghdad. Hence, one should proceed very carefully in suggesting that this perceived ‘lesson of Anbar’, i.e. the enlistment of local tribes in the fight against al-Qaeda, should be exported to other theatres of the War on Terror such as Afghanistan.30

While the value of open political arrangements in defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq represents in a sense a supporting piece of evidence for the ‘counterterrorism through democratization’ theory, the larger challenge for this strategic approach to the Long War is to show that the United States and its allies have the military and financial resources necessary to provide the kind of support that they did to the Iraqi government in 2007 to other embattled governments such as the ones in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In addition, it is also unclear that the US government has the appropriate tools at its disposal, or the willingness to use them for that matter, that would allow it to bring about ‘effective democracy’ in other states, including some formal American allies, that face a Salafist presence on their territory. The core of strategy-making, the matching of military and non-military means with political goals, does not receive an adequate treatment in the NSCT. The classified NIP-WOT may contain more details on how the US government is employing the resources at its disposal in the pursuit of its Long War objectives, and may also contain some specific scenario-planning, but unfortunately such analysis is not available in the public domain and hence its strategic quality cannot be appraised.

One thing that could be remarked though in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that ‘armed nation-building’ – as military expert Anthony Cordesman defines our activities in Iraq and Afghanistan – is not something the US government or NATO as a whole can perform with any substantial degree of competence with their current organizational structure.31 Future statesmen who consider involvement in such a mission need to achieve a much better matching between the resources available at their disposal and the political objectives they set for their militaries. One reason why Clausewitz wanted policymakers to be very familiar with matters of strategy was exactly to make sure that the necessary resources are allocated to accomplish the desired political goals, or, alternatively, that the goals are set in such a way as to match the limited level of resources available for a particular mission. Another reason was to appreciate the peculiar nature of war as a means of accomplishing policy objectives, and to set policy goals which are amenable to being accomplished by force of arms. Arguably, the conduct of nation-building campaigns has such a pronounced non-military aspect that other instruments of national power would be more suitable to address the challenges posed by such operations. The lack of both planning and operational/expeditionary capacity in other parts of the US government forced the Defense Department to (reluctantly) get involved in such operations in recent years, but the sustainability or the desirability of this arrangement for future missions is questionable.

In addition to combating terrorism in the long-run through promoting effective democracy, the Bush administration is also following four ‘strategic priorities of action’ in the short-run. The first element is the prevention of attacks by terror networks through ‘taking the fight to the terrorists, denying them entry to the United States, hindering their movement across international borders, and establishing protective measures to further reduce our vulnerability to attack’.32 Here we finally observe some detailed interest in the characteristics of the enemy; the document offers a solid enumeration of some of the aspects of a terrorist network that need to be attacked, such as its funding mechanisms, communications, leaders and foot-soldiers, and propaganda operations. To the extent possible in an unclassified document, these objectives seem to provide good guidance to the government agencies actively involved in the day-to-day operational aspects of the War on Terror. However, with the notable exception of curtailing terrorism financing,33 the United States still has a long way to go in improving its offensive strategy against al-Qaeda, particularly in the crucial realm of information warfare. The second priority offered by the strategy, denying terrorists' access to WMDs, is self-explanatory and does not warrant any further comment, except to say that there is still a lot of concern as to how adequate our efforts are.34 The third element however is a lot more controversial: denying terrorists the support and sanctuary of rogue states. Here we have a restatement of a signature phrase of the last administration: ‘The United States and its allies and partners in the War on Terror make no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor terrorists.’35 The failure to define the War on Terror as a war against the Salafi jihadist movement has led the US to a rather awkward position. Out of all the states mentioned in this category, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Cuba (with Iraq and Libya recently taken off the list), none of them could be seriously suspected of currently hosting or providing significant operational support to al-Qaeda and its Salafi affiliates. In fact, in the aftermath of the campaign against the Taliban in 2001, no regime with a sense of self-preservation would openly support or harbor members of the Salafist movement. In general, states with a substantial al-Qaeda presence such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen are unable rather than unwilling to prevent the terrorists from finding sanctuary on their territory. All of the rogue states mentioned here, Iran first and foremost, do indeed present great security challenges to the Obama administration, perhaps Iran's nuclear programme posing as important a challenge as that of countering al-Qaeda. However, the benefits of including them into the Long War rhetoric are dubious. The unfortunate allegations of Saddam's regime ties with al-Qaeda, which proved inaccurate, only reinforced the already widespread speculations around the world that the US is using the War on Terror as a cover to achieve its own cynical goals and dealt another blow to the already declining reputation of the US in the ‘war of ideas’.

For a traditional military strategist, some elements of these first three strategic priorities seem puzzling.36 While the inclusion of domestic law-enforcement elements into the conduct of war could be accepted as a necessary precondition to prevent the enemy from attacking the homeland, a vital objective in wars in all times and places, issues like non-proliferation and dealing with rogue states are complex matters which may relate tangentially to the Long War but are by no means simply a part of the struggle between the US and the Salafist movement.

The fourth and last short-term priority described by the NSCT is denying the Salafists' main long-term goal in this war, i.e. the control of a nation or territory where they could establish a fundamentalist regime and plan attacks against the infidels. Denying safe havens to the terrorists is a task whose extraordinary difficulty is matched by its vital importance. Unfortunately, as the NSCT acknowledges, there are multiple situations in which terrorists might seize control of a region: poorly-governed or wholly ungoverned territories, failed states, and post-conflict situations are the three most likely. The main task of strategy, the matching of means and ends, is exceedingly difficult when it comes to denying these safe heavens. Among the main obstacles are the challenging geographical and socio-political conditions in places like North Waziristan, the widespread lack of local allied capabilities in many parts of Africa, and also very importantly the lack of American and international capabilities when it comes to successfully performing tasks broadly associated with ‘state-building’ (or ‘armed nation-building’), especially in post-conflict situations. In addition, the tension between the short-term need of strengthening current regimes and the long-term goals of promoting political reform is most evident in pursuing this ‘counter-sanctuary’ priority, as David Kilcullen calls this challenge.37 The tasks of choosing the appropriate political objective in each case of a region at risk of becoming a Salafist safe haven, and of designing a case-specific diplomatico-military strategy to accomplish it, are two of the most important challenges that will need to be addressed by the Obama administration. Once again, the NIP-WOT followed by the Bush administration may provide the Obama team with a good road-map on this topic as well, but the quality of its strategic guidance is hard to judge due to its classified status.

In conclusion, if the function of strategy is to allow a country to achieve political goals from the application of force, or more generally of national power if we talk about grand strategy, then the NSCT does not offer a truly comprehensive strategic guidance for winning the Long War. The document looks more like a collection of policy statements and general objectives, and is only rarely specific or rigorous enough as to allow for a meaningful judgment of the strategic quality of Bush's counterterrorism efforts. According to media reports, the classified NIP-WOT may represent much more of a strategy document, as it contains detailed assessments of how the US government can best harness its resources and employ them to accomplish its objectives in the Long War.38 While the unclassified nature of the NSCT prevented a closer discussion of the means and ends connection, there are some other areas which could have been better addressed even in a public document that would have enhanced NSCT's strategic value. For example, this section highlighted the need for the following elements: better-defined short- and long-term political objectives; a more comprehensive assessment of the resources available to the United States and a discussion of the ways in which they can be used in pursuit of those objectives; a more rigorous analysis of how the broad political objective suggested by the strategy (democratization) would lead to eliminating the threat from the Salafist movement; and a better separation of the Long War-specific priorities from the other foreign policy objectives of the US government.

Pentagon Planning and the Nature of Contemporary Warfare

The paper now moves from the question of the functions of war and strategy to analysing the nature of contemporary warfare and DoD's (mis)understanding of it. Consequently, the focus of the critique will shift from the White House to the Pentagon, and from a discussion of war to one of warfare. Unfortunately, much of the narrower Long War-specific Pentagon planning, such as the newly enhanced roles and missions of Special Forces operations, is classified as well. However, the debate on the future of the United States military in the new strategic environment dominated by the Global War on Terror and the asymmetric/irregular forms of warfare associated with it, has been conducted in the public domain as well. Hence, an analysis of this debate is possible, and necessary, in order to understand how the Pentagon leadership, before 2006, failed to ground its defence planning into the principles of strategic theory.

In attempting to determine those dominant tendencies of war that are common to all wars in all times, Clausewitz referred to a

trinity composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.39

Thus, if a Clausewitzian framework remains as useful today as many scholars40 believe that it does, our understanding of the nature of contemporary warfare needs to begin with an appreciation for the continued presence of these three elements. Loose talk of an Information Revolution changing the nature of warfare needs to be regarded with a healthy dose of scepticism.41 The third element of the trinity (subordination to policy) deserves particular emphasis. Not only did Clausewitz himself pay significant attention to it in On War, but, ironically given Clausewitz's supposed influence inside the Pentagon, it is the one that was most overlooked in the defence debates of the post-Cold War era. Despite an obvious change in the main roles and missions that Western militaries were called to perform compared to past eras,42 plans for future warfare remained stuck on the familiar conventional force-on-force warfare.

In addition to the three perennial elements, Clausewitz also wrote of a ‘subjective nature of war – the means by which war has to be fought’ [original emphasis].43 Antulio Echevarria, a scholar with the Army's Strategic Studies Institute, argued that this subjective component of war's nature encompasses those elements – such as military forces, their doctrines, weapons, as well as the environments (land, sea, air, and danger) in which they fight – that make each war unique.44 In Echeverria's interpretation, given that Clausewitz considered war as ‘more than a true chameleon’,45 there must be a dynamic interplay between war's objective and subjective tendencies: the two are ‘closely connected to one another and interact continuously … Therefore, under Clausewitz's system, the nature of war cannot be separated from the means and the actors involved in its conduct’.46 In other words, in analysing the nature of war, we must consider the interactions between all of war's components, to view the process holistically. This is very relevant to the case of American defence policy, given that issues such as the characteristics of potential enemies and the likely political objectives of future campaigns did not play much of a role in the Pentagon's discourse on defence transformation. Capability-based planning displaced the supposedly anachronistic threat-based scenarios characteristic of the Cold War era, while exploiting advances in information technology took priority over more immediate concerns like improving the conduct of the stability and reconstruction missions of the sort experienced more and more often since the end of the Cold War.

Even before Donald Rumsfeld came into office with the intent of making defence transformation the top priority of his tenure at the Pentagon, there had already been significant efforts made in the previous years to transform the military. Initially, there was talk of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), supposedly made possible primarily by drastic improvements in the realm of information technology. Gradually, a more sophisticated theoretical approach to warfighting in the so-called Information Age has taken shape. An influential article by Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski and John Garstka first articulated and detailed the concept of Network Centric Warfare (NCW).47 Given the fact that Cebrowski was the Director of the DoD Office of Force Transformation and Garstka served as Assistant Director for Concepts and Operations in the same office, it did not come as a surprise when the Defense Department argued in a 2001 report to Congress that:

Warfare takes on the characteristics of its Age. Network Centric Warfare continues this trend – it is the military response to the opportunities created by the Information Age. Network-centric warfare is the military analogue of the new business models that are replacing their industrial age predecessors in the private sector. Like its counterparts in the commercial world, network-centric warfare provides the warfighter with improved precision, agility, and efficiency necessary to maintain a competitive advantage. In the sense that the transformation of DOD is its adaptation to Information Age concepts and technologies, then network-centric operations is a manifestation of DOD's transformation.48

Essentially, NCW as a theory of warfighting is designed to translate the informational superiority of military forces into increased combat efficiency. In order to better understand why NCW was held in such a high regard by its proponents, it is necessary to mention briefly the type of military operations that the Pentagon has prepared for and hoped to fight in the 21st century. According to Cebrowski,

In the Information Age, warfare is increasingly path-dependent – small changes in the initial conditions result in enormous changes in outcome. Thus, speed becomes a more valuable characteristic of the entire force because we want to be able to define or alter the initial conditions on terms favorable to our interests. Transformation and network-centric warfare will first and foremost equip the military with speed.49

Therefore, the Pentagon envisioned high-paced military operations in which US forces could define the initial conditions and set their own preferred tempo of operations, thus putting the enemy at a clear disadvantage. One of the ways the American forces could sustain this operational speed is by using networked forces, which are smaller, lighter, faster, and require less logistical support than non-networked ones, but that nevertheless benefit from the same level of firepower by exploiting precision weapons and air-support. Moreover, the ability to analyse data from sensors in ‘real time’ leads to very short sensor-to-shooter cycles, thus further increasing the lethality of US forces. These theoretical underpinnings form the foundation of the way in which General Tommy Franks and former Secretary Rumsfeld envisioned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both the initial successes and the messy aftermaths of those campaigns can be explained in part by looking at the characteristics of the NCW paradigm.50

The failure to mount a more successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq before 2007, or even to have prevented an insurgency from occurring to begin with, is in no small part due to having had a military optimized for fighting a high-tech, fast-paced conventional war, without much concern as to what happens after the collapse of Saddam's regime. However, it turned out that many Baathists chose not to engage American forces in open combat and thus avoided the lethal combination of American C4ISR systems and precision bombs. Instead, they abandoned their tanks and armed vehicles, dissolved into the local population, and started planning for a coordinated, low-tech, long-lasting insurgency meant to eventually wear down American political will. While the insurgency consisted of more than former Baathist elements, the role of these military-trained forces was an essential element in organizing and sustaining it. The characteristics of this fight against an elusive enemy, who uses mainly asymmetrical means against American forces, its allies, and the civilian population, are very dissimilar from the ones envisioned by DoD defence planners.51

Even in the Information Age, war remains primarily dominated by the human element, not by the technological one.52 Thus, the American forces found themselves dragged down into a lower-tech counterinsurgency campaign in which, as security expert William Lind puts it,

The problem isn't technology or equipment, the problem is we don't understand how to fight this kind of war … in Iraq, the guerrillas' most lethal weapons are the omnipresent rocket-propelled grenades, a weapon developed in the 1960s, and often crudely constructed improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The high-tech U.S. military, with all its computers, airborne sensors and spy satellites, has little counter against these low-tech weapons.53

In the period after Lind made his observation, the insurgents acquired slightly more sophisticated weapons like the dreaded explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), but his general point remained valid until General Petraeus implemented a new population-centric counterinsurgency strategy which shifted the operational focus away from mostly kinetic, direct-action tactics towards a more balanced approach.

One important reason why NCW fails to deal with asymmetrical threats is the fact that a networked-centric force uses speed and manoeuvre to substitute for a large commitment of manpower. However, in order to counter an insurgency, you need a considerable number of troops on the ground. As a comprehensive study by the Defense Science Board has concluded, technology alone is unable to significantly reduce the need for boots on the ground during the peacemaking phase in the same way it does during the traditional high-intensity warfighting period.54 The remarkable success of the surge confirmed once more the manpower-intensive nature of stability and counterinsurgency operations.

In its efforts to comprehend the nature of current warfare, the technophile American defence community failed to ground its assumptions in a set of sound strategic principles validated by hundreds of years of experience with ground warfare. Clausewitz's plea for a holistic understanding of the phenomenon that takes into account the interaction between the timeless elements and the unique circumstances of each era has been all but ignored. Instead, an infatuation with the Information Age opportunities and with successful contemporary business models undergirds the NCW approach. For those who remember the system analysis of McNamara's Pentagon, this latest obsession with ‘scientific’ solutions to the art of warfare is an unfortunate reminder that in strategic studies one can rarely talk about lessons learned. Eliot Cohen understandably deplores ‘the abstraction of RMA theorizing from the world of geopolitics; the enemy never really figured very much in the RMA debate, and this may have been the worst mistake of all’.55Indeed, NCW represents a military operational level paradigm par excellence; there are few if any elements of strategic level thinking in the entire transformation discourse. Obtaining political effects from the application of military power, the issue that lies at the heart of strategy-making, has been either ignored or assumed to be an automatic consequence of, to put it simply, blowing up the right targets as fast as possible. This sounds like a simple-minded caricature, but seemingly sophisticated notions like Shock and Awe are ultimately a fancier way of expressing the above. Strategic analyst Frederick W. Kagan, in a recent book on US defence policy transparently titled Finding the Target, offers an eloquent and penetrating critique of the basic foundations of transformation theory:

NCW, like its predecessors in transformation theory, treats war as a targeting drill. It defines the basic problem in war as identifying and destroying the correct targets in order to force the enemy to capitulate. It focuses, therefore, entirely on the use of military to destroy things and kill people, and thereby misses the point of war entirely.56

It is encouraging that the recent military successes in Iraq attributed in part to the counterinsurgency strategy implemented by General Petraeus have led to a movement away from the traditional focus on high-intensity conventional warfare and towards preparing American troops for the kinds of irregular challenges they are most likely to face in the near future. It is also refreshing to observe the stark difference between the strategic views of the current Secretary of Defense compared to his predecessor, and his dedication to improving the DoD's capabilities in irregular warfare. Gates' recent speeches show a remarkable command of the lore of strategic theory and a realistic understanding of the limits of technology. In September 2008, the defence secretary advised US troops to

be modest about what military force can accomplish, and what technology can accomplish … Never neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of warfare, which is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain. Be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, and doctrines that suggest otherwise.57

This shift in priorities advanced by Gates has not been uncontroversial. There are fears on the part of military thinkers such as Gian Gentile or Sean MacFarland that the swing towards the counterinsurgency side has left the Army unprepared for its traditional missions.58 In truth, the nature of future warfare appears to be much messier than simply choosing between conventional/high-intensity/high-tech combat or low-tech/insurgency-style missions. Cutting edge scholarship on the part of land-warfare experts such as Frank Hoffman of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and Nathan Freier of the Center for Strategic and International Studies now refer to the need to confront future ‘hybrid’ adversaries, part traditional, part unconventional, of which Hezbollah may be a prime example.59 Such enemies, be they insurgents, militias, terrorist networks or even foreign militaries, adopt a mix-and-match approach to various modes of warfare, choosing the one most appropriate to the particular situation. One of the most important challenges for the Pentagon in the next decade is to avoid either ignoring the lessons of current conflicts in the hope that they are anomalies or falling in the other extreme and focus so much on counter-insurgency that it loses vital competencies at the higher end of the spectrum. Confronting the hybrid enemies of the future will require a balanced and flexible approach to defence policy, one guided by a holistic understanding of ground warfare.

Obstacles to American Strategic Planning

The inability of the US government to better incorporate the principles of strategic theory into its planning process or into some of its actions cannot be explained solely by the personal errors of judgment made by a few members of the previous administration. Unfortunately, there are also some larger recurring problems that constantly plague American attempts at strategy-making. This section identifies a couple of such issues, which for analytical purposes will be presented separately although they are interconnected and often reinforcing. First, there are impediments to performing strategically due to the special characteristics of American strategic culture and of the so-called ‘American Way of War’. Second, the preferred American approach to civil–military relations hinders a closer and more dynamic coordination of political goals and military means, thus degrading strategic performance.

While the effects of a nation's so–called strategic culture on its planning and conduct of warfare are almost impossible to isolate for separate analysis, it is nevertheless useful to recognize that especially in the case of the United States one can speak of an American Way of War. In one of the most important American military history books of the post-Second World War era, Russell Weigley outlined the characteristics of what he considered to be the preferred approach to warfare adopted by the American military throughout their history. He wrote of an ‘American way of war centered on the pursuit of a crushing military victory –either through a strategy of attrition or one of annihilation- over an adversary’.60 As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, however, initial military victories over the enemy's forces have been insufficient to achieve the final political goals of those wars. The fact that most planning efforts focused on assuring the early military successes rather than on the follow-up operations needed to secure the political goals shows that Weigley's argument continue to remain relevant. Thus, it seems accurate to argue that some of the main strategic deficiencies of the American approach to recent conflicts have their roots in some of the main characteristics of American strategic culture.

If problems such as the ones described above would be amenable to easy fixes, they surely would have been resolved long ago. Unfortunately, they have recurred over and over again in American military history, thus earning the adjective ‘cultural’. The repeated failings of US military and civilian leaders to secure the desired political results from their military successes have led Colin Gray and others to characterize the American Way of War as ‘astrategic’ and ‘apolitical’.61 Gray argues that the demarcation between the use of military force and the pursuit of political objectives which is characteristic of American strategic culture puts the US at a severe disadvantage in the Long War:

Americans are wont to regard war and peace as sharply distinct conditions. When Americans wage war as a largely autonomous activity, leaving worry about peace and its politics to some later day, the strategy bridge has broken down … American separation of politics and the conduct of war is a lethal weakness when dealing with irregular enemies.62

Fortunately, the leaders of on the ground in Iraq increasingly understood the need for a complementary relation between military and non-military efforts, especially after the appointment of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker and after the subsequent intensification of the ‘clear, hold, and build’ counterinsurgency approach. The remarkable success of the surge strategy is undoubtedly related to the development of a strategic (in a Clausewitzian sense) understanding of the nature of conflict and of the necessity for a complementary relation between the diplomatic and the military instruments of national power.

One possible explanations for the ‘astrategic’ nature of the traditional American way of war is offered by Antulio Echevarria, who points out to the customary separation of responsibilities between civilian and military leaders:

The American way of war tends to shy away from thinking about the complicated process of turning military triumphs, whether on the scale of major campaigns or small-unit actions, into strategic successes. This tendency is symptomatic of a persistent bifurcation in American strategic thinking in which military professionals concentrate on winning battles and campaigns, while policymakers focus on the diplomatic struggles that precede and influence, or are influenced by, the actual fighting. This bifurcation is partly a matter of preference and partly a by-product of the American tradition of subordinating military command to civilian leadership, which creates two separate spheres of responsibility, one for diplomacy and one for combat.63

After the Vietnam War, the conventional wisdom in elite military circles held that political interference bore great responsibility for the dysfunctional conduct of that war. Consequently, the Powell doctrine sought to restrict to a minimum the interventions by civilian policymakers once the decision to go to war has been made and hostilities begun. This complete separation between the military and civilian spheres, unfortunately, is a sure recipe for poor strategic performance. Since earlier in the paper we have seen that policy must influence the conduct of war in order for the latter to lead to the achievement of political objectives, then it follows that policymakers and military leaders should work in close partnership to assure a permanent compatibility between means and ends. President George W. Bush has repeatedly argued that he listens to his generals in the field when it comes to making military decisions, but this should not be a one-way street. There should have been more back-and-forth in the exchange of opinions in 2002–2006 when it came to ensuring a harmony of military actions and the larger political objectives. On the other hand, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld surely did not suffer from too much diffidence in dealing with his generals, but he seemed to have fallen in the other extreme by pushing too hard for his own preferred theories of warfare. Thus, the larger and more fundamental issue here is one that relates to the theory of civil–military relations in the United States.

Just as a certain intellectual misunderstanding of the concept of ‘strategy’ has often hurt American defence planning, the ways in which Americans regarded the concept of civil–military relations had a negative effect on the recent strategic performance of the United States as well. The proper role of civil–military relations, much like the proper role of strategy, has often been less than fully comprehended by the American defence and national security establishment. Hew Strachan eloquently addressed this problem, while also noting that it is one that confronts most democratic nations, not only the US:

The principal purpose of effective civil–military relations is national security; its output is strategy. Democracies tend to forget that. They have come to address civil–military relations not as a means to an end, not as a way of making the state more efficient in its use of military power, but as an end in itself. Instead the principal objective, to which others become secondary, has been the subordination of the armed forces to civil control.64

Strachan deplored the fact that the main preoccupation of the civil–military relations literature has to do with the prevention of a military coup d'etat and with maintaining civilian control over the military, rather than with the effect that civil–military interactions have in the formulation and execution of strategy. If any one person could be ‘blamed’ for this tendency, the main suspect would clearly have to be noted political scientist Samuel Huntington. His ‘theory of objective control,’65 presented in his classic 1957 book The Soldier and the State, remains highly influential among American civilian and military leaders. While running the risk to unfairly caricaturize an undoubtedly more complex theoretical argument, for the purposes of this paper it is sufficient to summarize Huntington's thesis in the following manner:

1. There is a clear separation between making policy decisions and making military decisions.

2. Policy decisions are the sole responsibility of the statesmen, while military decisions, which are considered professional in nature, should be left to the military.

3. Hence, statesman should not become involved in military decisions.

A strict interpretation of the division of labour model described above poses great challenges for the conduct of effective strategy. If civilian policymakers do not possess the military expertise to guide them in the formulation of policy, and military leaders are consulted mostly when it comes to implementing policies rather than in their formulation, then no one is really responsible for making the connections between military means and political goals which are at the heart of strategy-making. President Obama, who lacks not only military but any sort of national security experience, should be particularly careful to master the details of military policy as soon as possible so that he will be able to competently engage in a constructive dialogue with military leaders, judge their advice, and choose among competing opinions those that best match his policy objectives.66

A sound strategy-making process is of course desired in all wars, but in a global security environment shaped by the Long War against the global Salafi jihadist movement it is particularly important that the US and its allies improve the conduct of their civil–military relations. In our era of irregular warfare, independent of whether one agrees with the characterization of al-Qaeda as a global insurgency or not, it is nevertheless clear that no crushing military defeat of the enemy will end this conflict. The recent combined Army-Marine Counterinsurgency manual recognizes that accomplishing political objectives requires a careful combination of the use of military power in close coordination with other instruments of national power.67 This being the case, the old model of politicians sitting on the sidelines and expecting the generals to win the war by virtue of their military professional expertise is clearly in need of reform.

To begin with, the accomplishment of political objectives in a counterinsurgency campaign requires professional expertise in tasks such as economic reconstruction or local governance that are not military in nature. We have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that, mainly out of necessity, the military is becoming more involved in stability and reconstruction operations; however, these missions should still be primarily assigned to civilian experts. What this means for civil–military relations is that the making of strategy in today's wars requires not only a closer dialogue between military leaders and civilian policymakers, but also a better working relationship among the military and the other government personnel both on the ground and in Washington. In addition, in the Information Age most military actions have a rapid political effect worldwide due to the presence and reach of the global media and the Internet. For example, each time US military leaders on the ground decide to take out a suspected al-Qaeda leader in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area through the use of air strikes and thus risk causing collateral victims, the negative political effects of that action can be felt not only locally but globally. Thus, the separation between military decisions and political decisions is not as clear as Huntington assumed in the sense that in irregular warfare politics permeates the conduct of warfare much more than in conventional conflicts. The close scrutiny that the US forces operate under greatly magnifies the consequences of their actions. Consequently, if the US government is serious about winning ‘hearts and minds’, then it must do a much better job at determining the political effects of seemingly useful military actions like Predator strikes.

In conclusion, an improvement in the conduct of civil–military relations –understood as an improvement in strategic performance rather than simply in better civilian control – is essential to a more successful strategy-making process. In addition to the ‘steady-state’ day-to-day operations of the Long War, the United States military and its NATO allies are more likely than not to conduct another large-scale intervention over the next decade in order to prevent an al-Qaeda sanctuary from emerging in some place where the local government is unwilling or unable to combat the Salafist threat on its own. The chances of strategic success of such a future intervention would be greatly enhanced by a closer civil–military cooperation than has been the case in the invasions of Iraq and, to a certain extent, Afghanistan.

From Theory to Practice

While this paper may have criticized policy decisions occasionally, the overall objective has been to illustrate the strategic deficiencies of the planning process. It was not the conclusions reached by the members of the US national security community or the decisions they made that were the main focus of this critique, but rather the failure to pay more respect to the tenets of strategic theory in the process of reaching those decisions. Policies may be easier to reverse than habits of mind, but strategic education can prove its worth only when it reaches that higher standard. To refer back to Clausewitz one last time, the role of theory is ‘providing a thinking man with a frame of reference for the movements he has been trained to carry out, rather than serving as a guide which at the moment of action lays down precisely the path he must take’.68 This paper is meant to illuminate the shortcomings of the current strategic planning process at various levels of government not in the hope of affecting any particular policy decision, but rather to improve the overall value of that process.

Having said that, the big question that remains is how would one actually translate the insights of strategic theory into practical policy advice. The Obama administration is surely not lacking in unsolicited recommendations on the best strategic course for the Long War, and policy advice was not a main concern of this study, but a brief final discussion detailing some of the choices that need to be made may nevertheless be an appropriate way to end this study. The first and most urgent question refers to the conflict against the jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The mismatch between the current political objectives of the mission and the resources allocated to it cannot be successfully addressed by a band-aid measure such as sending a few more US brigades. Instead, the Obama administration together with the NATO allies who are serious about this mission on the one hand, and the Kabul and Islamabad governments on the other, must jointly engage in frank strategic conversation meant to determine what is the near-term acceptable political end-state in both the Taliban-infested parts of Afghanistan and the FATA. Denying al-Qaeda safe haven in these areas should be a common goal for NATO, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and therefore the challenge will mostly be to sketch the contours of a commonly accepted political arrangement and to find the necessary resources (both military and non-military) to implement it. It is almost impossible for any of the three actors mentioned above to be able to develop and implement a workable solution on their own, but by working together there is at least a decent chance that al-Qaeda could be denied the sanctuary that it currently enjoys in that area. The defeats they suffered in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2007 could be repeated, as long as the workable partnership between international and local actors that existed in those two cases can be established once more. Once again, the essential condition for this is represented by agreeing on a common political arrangement that could be realistically implemented and sustained by a combination of local forces backed by US and NATO military and financial support.

While eliminating the al-Qaeda sanctuary from Waziristan and the surrounding areas would represent an important victory in the Long War and cripple the Salafist movement for a while, al-Qaeda's resiliency should not be underestimated. There are unfortunately quite a number of desolated and poorly governed areas of the world, Somalia and other parts of Africa being the most commonly mentioned ones, where the jihadist movement can attempt to find a new sanctuary. Or, in a much more perilous development, the Salafists could take advantage of the economic and social turmoil likely to be caused by the global economic crisis and plunging oil prices, and focus their energies on destabilizing (or even overthrowing) the government of one of the important US allies in the Persian Gulf or other parts of the Middle East. It appears fairly obvious, given the rhetoric of the Obama national security team, that the US intends to work with its allies in the Long War in an attempt to prevent either of the two scenarios described above from taking place by employing a combination of soft and hard power measures. The cautions offered by strategic theory for such efforts refers to the necessity to set reasonable political objectives for the at-risk states that could be accomplished with the limited capabilities available to the US and the international community. In practical terms, this means that the United States needs to offer the Muslim communities targeted by the Salafists the hope of a political future more attractive than both the status quo and the alternative offered by jihadists. How to work towards such a goal, which in most cases involves a liberalization of the political system, while at the same time maintaining the partnership with the local government whose help in the realm of intelligence cooperation is needed in the day-to-day fight to hunt down terrorists, is one of the biggest challenges for the Obama administration. The tension between short-term goals and long-term goals in the Long War mentioned earlier in the paper will be tough to handle; all theory can advise on this point is to be more clear about which political objectives are chosen in each case, and to achieve a better match between them and the resources at our disposal.

Lastly, the difficulty of effective prevention efforts means that there is a significant possibility that the United States and its allies will be compelled to conduct another large-scale military intervention to prevent an emerging al-Qaeda sanctuary from taking hold, maybe even within the next decade. Given the internal tensions in places with numerous al-Qaeda sympathizers across the Middle East, and the dangerous conditions in Pakistan, the US may well have to deal with collapse of one of these countries. As the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, neither the American national security bureaucracies nor those of its NATO allies are currently capable of conducting an ‘armed nation-building’ operation proficiently. If the US government wants to keep this policy option open, it needs to enhance the capabilities of both the military and the non-military instruments of national power. At the military level, it should continue Secretary Gates' efforts to shift the focus of the armed forces away from the traditional dominance of force-on-force conventional high-intensity combat towards a more balanced set of capabilities that incorporates expertise in counterinsurgency and hybrid forms of irregular warfare as well. Just as importantly, but possibly more challenging, will be to develop, along with the more willing NATO allies, the non-military set of capabilities that would allow us to have a better chance of transforming a potential initial military success into a strategic political victory. Such expertise includes not only technical support in civil administration, agriculture, governmental finance administration, legal reform, and other aspects of ‘good governance’, but also, more importantly, the ability of our diplomatic corps to work together with the military in order to facilitate progress on the crucial aspect of developing a functional and self-sustaining political system. Obviously there is no cookie-cutter approach to such complex issues, and regional expertise, language skills, and cultural awareness would be essential to advancing the political goals of the mission. Some of the non-military capabilities described above have been slowly developed on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan only after painful mistakes have been made. In the future, the extent to which these resources are available should play a much bigger role in deciding on the political goals of the missions. Strategic decisions, to repeat it one final time, involve the simultaneous consideration of both available means and desired ends. The two should be in accord from the beginning if future wars are to become less costly in blood and resources than the recent ones.

Showing respect for the principles of strategic theory obviously cannot guarantee one would be successful in wars; Clausewitz after all emphasized chance as a key element of warfare. What it can do is offer a time-tested way of conceptualizing combat that improves the chances that the goals of the wars would be accomplished and the interests of the nation would be advanced, thus increasing the odds that the extraordinary sacrifices of US armed forces would be made in a worthwhile endeavour.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is very grateful to Larry Caldwell, Peter Feaver, Frank Hoffman, and Alex Roland for their excellent comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

‘Transcript of Remarks by Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden at the Atlantic Council’, available at https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/directors-remarks-at-the-atlantic-council.html.

Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006), p. vi.

Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn 2005), p. 49.

Richard K. Betts, ‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’, World Politics, No. 50 (1997), p. 7.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 605.

Michael Howard, ‘What's in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism’, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2002).

For more details on this point, see Antulio J. Echevarria II, Clausewitz and the Nature of Contemporary War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Clausewitz, On War (note 5), p. 579.

Ibid., p. 605.

Ibid., p. 87.

Ibid., p. 87.

Ibid., p. 177.

Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1999), p. 17.

Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 452.

Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 1.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘Knights Under the Prophet's Banner’, trans. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, 2 December 2001. Quoted in Thomas Mahnken, ‘A Strategy for A Protracted War’, Conference Paper presented at Unrestricted Warfare Symposium 2006, 14–15 March 2006. Paper in possession of the author.

George W. Bush, ‘Remarks Delivered at the Military Officers Association of America’, 5 September 2006, available online on the White House website.

Mahnken, ‘A Strategy for A Protracted War’ (note 16).

For a recent eloquent critique of the “war” concept, see Olivier Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Michael Howard, ‘A Long War?’, Survival, Vol. 48. No. 4 (Winter 2006–2007), Foreword. Contrast this more recent appraisal of the “war” paradigm with Howard's earlier one referenced above for an interesting perspective on how his thinking evolved on this issue.

The White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, September 2006, pp. 9–10, available online at the White House website.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. 9.

George W. Bush, ‘Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy at West Point’, 5 May 2006.

Department of Defense, ‘Quadrennial Defense Review’, February 2006.

David Brooks, ‘Continuity We Can Believe In’, New York Times, 3 December 2008.

Kofi Annan, ‘Opening Inaugural Session of Peacebuilding Commission, Secretary General Stresses Importance of Supporting Countries Emerging from Conflict’, United Nations Department of Public Information Transcripts, 23 June 2006.

Congressional Research Service, ‘National Strategy for Combating Terrorism: Background and Issues for Congress’, 1 November 2007, pp. 6–8.

Michael Gordon, ‘Afghan Strategy Poses Stiff Challenge for Obama’, New York Times, 2 December 2008.

Anthony H. Cordesman, The Ongoing Lessons of the Afghan and Iraq Wars (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 2008), p. 16.

The White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 11.

John B. Taylor, Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post 9/11 World (New York: W.W.Norton, 2007).

World At Risk: Report of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, December 2008.

The White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 27.

Jeffrey Record, Bounding the Global War on Terror (Carlisle: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Monograph Series, December 2003).

‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’, 16 November 2008, transcript available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/16/fzgps.01.html.

Karen DeYoung, ‘A Fight Against Terrorism and Disorganization’, Washington Post, 9 August 2006, p. A1.

Clausewitz, On War (note 5), p. 89.

Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press 2007).

David J. Lonsdale, The Nature of War in the Information Age: Clausewitzian Future (New York: Frank Cass, 2004).

General Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force (New York: Vintage, 2008).

Clausewitz, On War (note 5), p. 85.

Antulio J. Echevarria II, Globalization and the Nature of War (Carlisle: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Monograph Series, March 2003), p. 8.

Clausewitz, On War (note 5), p. 89.

Echevarria, Globalization, p. 8.

Art Cebrowski and John Garstka, ‘Network Centric Warfare’, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1998.

Department of Defense, Report on Network Centric Warfare – Sense of the Report, available from http://www.dodccrp.org/files/ncw_report/report/ncw_sense.pdf, p. 17.

Quoted in Dan Caterinicchia and Matthew French, ‘Network Centric Warfare: Not there yet’, Federal Computer Week, 9 June 2003.

For a discussion on how the US transformation contributed to the success of the war in Iraq, see Max Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 4 (July/August 2003). For a critique of that argument, see Frederick W. Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), Chapter on ‘Iraq and the Future of Transformation’.

Rick Atkinson, ‘U.S. Expected a Different Enemy’, Washington Post, 28 March 2003.

H.R. McMaster, ‘Crack in the Foundation: Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future War’, Student Issue Paper, Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College Vol. S03-03 (November 2003), p. 20.

Greg Grant, ‘New U.S. Unit to Study Insurgent Operations’, Defense News, 1 August 2005.

Department of Defense, Defense Science Board 2004 Study On Transition To and From Hostilities, December 2004, report available from http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-12-DSB_SS_Report_Final.pdf.

Eliot Cohen, ‘Change and Transformation in Military Affairs’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 2004), p. 401.

Frederick W. Kagan, Finding the Target, p. 358.

Robert Gates, ‘Address to the National Defense University’, 29 September 2008.

Guy Raz, ‘Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within’, NPR Morning Edition, 6 May 2008.

Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Warfare (Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Monograph, December 2007); Nathan Freier, Strategic Competition and Resistance in the 21st Century: Irregular, Catastrophic, Traditional, and Hybrid Challenges in Context (Carlisle: US Army War College U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute Monograph, May 2007).

Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of the United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 475.

Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy (note 2), p. 30.

Ibid., p. 30.

Antulio J. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War (Carlisle: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2004), p. 7.

Strachan, Hew, ‘Making Strategy: Civil Military Relations After Iraq’, Survival (Autumn 2006), p. 70.

Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 84–5.

For an attractive alternative to the current model of civil–military relations, see Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command (New York: The Free Press, 2002).

Department of the Army, Counterinsurgency – Field Manual 3-24 available at the Army website.

Clausewitz, On War (note 5), p. 141.