Ruminating on Strategic Thinking II. : Social Conditions
A follow up to Part I.
How does a society, as opposed to individuals, develop a capacity for “strategic thinking” ?
While war is an obvious answer, it is not an advisable first resort. First of all, although war teaches hard lessons about strategy, the costs of losing a war are high. Secondly, the costs of winning a war can be high. Thirdly, few people, relatively speaking to the number involved, have any direct input into genuinely strategic decisions during wartime; most will either gain tactical experience or be relegated to support functions. At best, wars seem to create a cohort of excellent tactical leaders with the potential to, someday, mature into strategic leaders or strategists. At worst, from a war, the wrong lessons may be drawn and institutionalized to create a future disaster.
What conditions produce strategic thinkers for a state? A brief example from American history:
Here are some of the US leadership of WWII, the postwar “Wise Men” and their Cold War successors, collaborators, thinkers and military chiefs:
Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Joseph Grew, Dean Acheson, Douglas MacArthur, Charles E. Bohlen, George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, George C. Marshall , Harry S. Truman, Robert A. Lovett, Dwight D. Eisenhower , John J. McCloy , W. Averell Harriman, William Donovan, James F. Byrnes, Chester Nimitz, John Foster Dulles, James Forrestal, Vannevar Bush, Allen Dulles, Ernest King, Albert Wohlstetter, Dean Rusk, Hyman Rickover, Herman Kahn, Robert McNamara, Bernard Brodie, Fritz G. A. Kraemer, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Nixon, Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger
Some commonalities that these individuals shared, sometimes in pluralities and others in large majorities:
Above average to very high IQ
Middle class to high socioeconomic status
Eastern Establishment
Fraternal organizations
Male
Protestant
Episcopalian
Ivy League education
Law
Politics
Military service
Diplomacy
Wall St.
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Harvard Law
Military Academy
University of Chicago
Berkeley
Skull & Bones
Scroll & Key
WWI
WWII
RAND
Executive Branch
Nuclear weapons/arms control/power
This list could be expanded or reduced on a number of grounds. For example, the list is composed of men primarily because almost no women, with very few exceptions, even from elite backgrounds, had an opportunity during the first 2/3 of the 20th century to contribute to strategic decisions or policy making. We could also include other characteristics, but what we have is sufficient for some broad generalizations.
- First, these men generally engaged in careers that featured complex activities that stressed and rewarded incisive analysis of factual scenarios, assessment of risk and potential benefits, intuitive judgment and organizational abilities – law, politics, the stock market, diplomacy and corporate leadership. A minority of the list had formal training in advanced mathematics.
- Secondly, the men all had the social wherewithal and ambition to gain entry into educational and social institutions that were by definition, highly exclusive on more than a strictly meritocratic basis. For many from higher SES families, this presented no significant barrier but for the “outsiders” like Kennan, Nixon or Rickover, it was a formidable obstacle to overcome. In either case, there were social mores or even commonly held prejudices to which they had to adapt in order to “fit in”. Despite this demonstration of social intelligence, most members of our list were not professional politicians (but those that were made an impact on American history much greater than that of an “average” president).
- Thirdly, the presence of such overlapping experiential commonalities, while not creating a formal “strategic community” was probably sufficient to impart a strategic mentalité as to how the world really worked, red in tooth in claw, as well as implicit ideological assumptions as how the world ought to work, if perfected. This meant that strategic debates about American national security could take place within the framework of commonly held assumptions and reference points. While certain individuals might be disliked (MacArthur, Truman, Nixon) or regarded warily, with little trust (Nixon, FDR, Kahn) their strategic arguments were nevertheless widely understood within the elite and could be assessed on their merits – an excellent environment for building an elite consensus and continuity on matters of policy and strategy. This condition may be a political prerequisite for a democratic state’s formulation and adoption of a successful grand strategy.
If we wonder why the United States has been so ineffective at strategy in recent years, maybe we should look at how our current (and most importantly, future) elite’s formative experiences have sharply diverged from their strategically gifted WWII-Cold War predecessors.
January 3rd, 2012 at 1:14 pm
Zen-
Nice post.
.
If we wonder why the United States has been so ineffective at strategy in recent years, maybe we should look at how our current (and most importantly, future) elite’s formative experiences have sharply diverged from their strategically gifted WWII-Cold War predecessors.
.
A couple of points:
.
First, how much did the international political context, rather than these individuals play the decisive part? During this period, say 1941-1965, the US was repeatedly able to capitalize from the mistakes/misfortune of the other major powers, rising to a position in 1945 of unequaled dominance. Along with this was the simple fact that the majority of the major (non-Communist) powers seemingly saw US interests as being in line with their own. This lasted roughly to the defeat in Vietnam, but then Nixon through deft diplomacy was able pull a political triumph from a military defeat (better relations with China) which had become possible through US defeat? So, today (part of) the problem could be that the US operates in a much less advantageous international political context.
.
Second, the men you list had a clear understanding of how the use of organized violence creates its own specific instabilities, dynamics and problems and thus is a problematical instrument of state power, whereas today there seems to be little if any understanding of this strategic reality. Instead, violence appears to be the increasingly preferred instrument of US power . . . ?
January 3rd, 2012 at 2:34 pm
In his briefings, Boyd would stress that US had little skills at the entry to WW2, recognizing the fact, the country went with a philosophy of massive overwhelming resources … along with logistics management of those resources and a rigid, top-down command&control structure (that assumed nobody at the bottom know what they were doing). The graft&corruption that went along with the massive resources likely contributed to Eisenhower’s warning about MICC (claims that he simplified, dropping “congress” at the last minute). Boyd would comment in the 80s that the approach was having significant downside on American corporations as former WW2 officers climbed the corporate ladder, creating similar massive, rigid, top-down command&control infrastructures (along with little agility to adapt to changing conditions, US auto industry being one such poster child).
January 3rd, 2012 at 4:23 pm
The Maginot Line was designed to 1) encourage British aid by overwhelmingly conveying France’s defensive posture towards Germany since British (and American) opinion during the 1920s thought France was too bellicose 2) compensate for France’s manpower inferiority compared to Germany 3) keep Germany away from France’s primary industrial regions which had fallen into German hands during WWI 4) channel a German attack onto the plains of Belgium which had been (and remain) prime fighting country. It accomplished all of those goals against Germans as did its southern portion against the Italians. The weakness of the Maginot Line was its assumption that Belgium would remain allied to France, that Belgium’s line of fortresses which ran north to the Dutch border would form an organic part of the Maginot Line because it could be reinforced by French troops, and rushed construction that went into fortifying the French frontier after Belgium declared neutrality in 1936, withdrawing from the alliance. Fall Gelb’s success was highly contingent. While I’m no fan of French strategy making in general since the death of Marshal Turenne and French strategy during 1939-1940 in particular, the Maginot Line is unfairly maligned in contemporary discussions.
January 3rd, 2012 at 6:43 pm
The passing of classical education has a role in how retarded today’s elite are:
First off, studying Latin and Greek were character forming: the study of the classics was completely useless by the utilitarian calculus of late nineteenth/early twentieth century America. You acquired a certain intestinal fortitude along with your Latin and Greek by having to do something that seemed so unfun and so pointless by the standards of the time.
The student of the classics developed a shared worldview not only with their living peers (at home and in Europe) but with dead white men who lived 2,000 years ago and all the dead white men who’d studied the classics between then and their own time. The Founding Fathers of our own country are more understandable in light of this background and their own understanding of the classics.
The student of the classics had a shorthand vocabulary that allowed him to convey meaning with a few allusions to any similarly educated peer (even enemies). Confucius emphasized study of the ancient Chinese classics by every shr for the same reason. Today’s equivalent is a hodgepodge of quotations from the Simpsons, Star Wars, and the thin gruel of American pop culture. Not a strong comparison.
Taleb argued that selecting your elite on the basis of demonstrated linguistic virtuosity (i.e. through intensive study of dead languages) was a better filter for quality leaders than America’s preference (in some fields) for picking leaders based on their quantitative prowess. This is part of Taleb’s personal crusade against “asbergerish nerds” whose preference for abstractions fails to see the world in 3-D. Taleb supports the rule of omnivorous polymaths instead (rather like Taleb himself hmmmm…)
The classics provided a richer set of metaphors, analogies, and crutches for the weak minded than its contemporary challengers. Not only was that set broad but it had been refined and applied by other practitioners of statecraft since classical times, creating a still larger set that was diverse but could be examined through a common frame of reference. Today we have short hands like “Munich”, “Hiroshima”, “Vietnam”, etc. that, while they contain metaphors, analogies, and crutches that are equally valid as “Cannossa”, “Cannae”, and “Sicily”, have been analyzed with a shallow contemporary framework and have not been subjected to the refiner’s fire of two millenia of examination.
January 4th, 2012 at 12:59 am
Jeff Shaara’s Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War is a great fictional account of showing how Lee, Grant, Sherman, et all grew up in combat years before the Civil War
January 4th, 2012 at 4:10 am
Hi Seydlitz.
.
Excellent point. You wrote:
.
” First, how much did the international political context, rather than these individuals play the decisive part? During this period, say 1941-1965, the US was repeatedly able to capitalize from the mistakes/misfortune of the other major powers, rising to a position in 1945 of unequaled dominance.”
.
It had quite a lot to do with it. There are periods of stability and instability in the international system. Stable eras feature a hegemonic power with lesser powers arrayed with or against it. Strategy is usually simpler (not easier or less dangerous, just less complex) because there are fewer actors that matter. Periods of instability are more multipolar with powers that are rising and declining in a state of rough parity, measuring their chances against each other and uncertainty. Greater chance for unforced errors, miscalculation, conflicting interests, sudden realignment of the “correlation of forces” when more players sit at the table. Statesmen who are aggressive gamblers – the Hitlers, Napoleon III’s, Alcibiades types – rise in a “busier” geopolitical environment because there are more opportunities to wager on, more “room” or “leverage” with which to operate and domestically their ruthless certainty can be attractive to the people in confusing, uncertain times. I think this gets back to the iterative nature of strategy – you plan but you must adapt as circumstances arise.
.
Agree with your second point.
.
Hi Lynn
.
” that US had little skills at the entry to WW2, recognizing the fact, the country went with a philosophy of massive overwhelming resources … along with logistics management of those resources and a rigid, top-down command&control structure”
.
Boyd was correct – however, as someone who took a gut on economic history in grad school, I have to point out this was itself a play to our primary strategic strength that was recognized as early as the 1890’s. The order of magnitude difference between US productive capacity and all of the Axis combined was so vast as to not even be comparable (in quantitative but not qualitative terms in regard to the Germans) Not building the largest army in world history was an active choice on our part – our depression era productivity, with excess idle capacity was already in a position a crushing superiority over Imperial Japan. The question was, could we bring all of this economic might to bear in a militarily effective way? Boyd was right on the moral-cultural critique of the Taylorism , corruption and secondary effects but I don’t see how this advantage would not have been used when the groundwork was laid during WWI national mobilization.
.
JF
.
Hmmm, is this one of your wry jests?:
.
“ in particular, the Maginot Line is unfairly maligned in contemporary discussions.”
.
It can hardly be maligned enough. The 5 billion gold francs sunk into that anachronistic white elephant while Germany was maniacally rearming was, in the hands of the elderly generals of the French Army, the cenotaph of the Third Republic. Just consider the opportunity costs of forgone alternative military investment and the historical balance between the Wehrrmacht and the Allies in 1940.
.
On the other hand, I must applaud you here:
.
The student of the classics developed a shared worldview not only with their living peers (at home and in Europe) but with dead white men who lived 2,000 years ago and all the dead white men who’d studied the classics between then and their own time. The Founding Fathers of our own country are more understandable in light of this background and their own understanding of the classics.
The student of the classics had a shorthand vocabulary that allowed him to convey meaning with a few allusions to any similarly educated peer (even enemies). Confucius emphasized study of the ancient Chinese classics by every shr for the same reason. Today’s equivalent is a hodgepodge of quotations from the Simpsons, Star Wars, and the thin gruel of American pop culture. Not a strong comparison.
.
Mike – I think you are in danger of becoming a 19th C specialist. Beware! 🙂
January 4th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
[…] This Post Tweet This PostCommenter Lynn Wheeler writes at zenpundit: “….Boyd would comment in the 80s that the approach was having significant downside on […]
January 4th, 2012 at 1:30 pm
@ zen: I like ruminating posts. Ruminating is good. That is the reason I like Kaplan’s “Monsoon,” even though I know it has been criticized as being middle-brow and all that. But there are chapters that read more like meditations that I like….
.
@Lynn Wheeler: I liked your comment so much I blogged it at ChicagoBoyz (…How did I get here?).
.
@MikeF: I collected some Robert McNamara quotes that fit in with recent discussions at Small Wars Journal on that blog post. When I get a chance, I will link them over there 🙂
January 4th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Grant. Was U. S. Grant a strategic thinker or not? If he was, he satisfies very few of the criteria you laid out. And several of those he does satisfy are redundant. Is there any evidence that would support the claim that very high intelligence is conducive to strategic thinking? I doubt it. When you remove that you find that most of the people in your list are actually just members of the professional class, with IQs typically from normal to a bit above one standard deviation above normal. That, too, is largely redundant. Professionals have the opportunity for strategic thinking. An innate propensity? Or learned faculty? I doubt it.
January 4th, 2012 at 3:54 pm
That “anachronistic white elephant” kept the Italians out of invading southern France in 1940 despite numerical supremacy and kept the Germans from invading France through Lorraine. Just like what it was designed to do. France didn’t fall in 1940 because they’d spent an expensive series of fortifications. It fell because there was a giant hole in the middle of its line that hadn’t been plugged with fortifications of similar density and quality. The route through the Ardennes follows four narrow roads through woods that could have easily been plugged if they’d been fortified (primarily a Belgian shortcoming). Even slightly better fortifications might have slowed the German advance sufficiently to let Allied airpower massacre the giant parking lot the Germans had created there. This is what happened to the Germans in 1944 once the weather cleared.
Lost opportunity costs assumes that there was something the French could have spent money on to better effect. Think of the opportunity costs the Germans lost by building their own “anachronistic white elephant” in the Siegfried Line opposite the Maginot Line from 1936-1940. They didn’t get to use it until 1944. One section of the West Wall in the Hurtgen Forest helped cause 30,000 American lives tin breaking through it. The French were able to use most of the Maginot Line until the 1960s when the development of thermonuclear weapons really made it an “anachronistic white elephant”.
The only technological edge the Wehrmacht had over the French army in May 1940 was the Me-109 and that edge was slight. The French didn’t have the decisive numerical edge in airpower they should have but that wasn’t a resourcing issue: they spent plenty of money on aircraft procurement but the French aircraft industry suffered from organizational issues that took too long to correct. France had more (and better) tanks than the Germans but they were in Belgium facing the expected German attack from that direction. Schlieffen II was the German plan until it fell into Allied hands and shook the Germans into switching the focus of their attack from their right flank to their center. But the only reason they found opportunity in the center was because it lacked fortifications.
January 4th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
In line with the comments about the common experiences of the elder statesmen and the demise of the classical education, I think there may be something to the broad education and backgrounds these leaders brought to the table and the increasingly narrow and specialized academic fields we have today, where everything is looked at through an electron microscope lens and little creedence is given to having a very broad, generalist outlook. No longer renaissance men, every academic qualifies his comments outside his tiny play patch with, “Well, I’m not an expert on that so I can’t really comment in detail…” I’m not talking about a Middle East specialist commenting on the economy in China, I’m talking about an Egypt specialist, for example, declining to comment on Syria. We can’t understand linkages, second-plus order effects, etc, if we don’t think beyond a narrow lane, not just casually but from a systematic educational basis.
January 4th, 2012 at 11:04 pm
Add Ferdinand Eberstadt and the Dillon, Read investment bank.
One critically important figure, of the stature of the men on this list, but who is an outlier in terms of affiliations, is Curtis LeMay. He is a peer of Rickover, who certainly belongs on here.
Vannevar Bush probably belongs on here.
As to military men who had a larger role, Walter Bedell Smith probably belongs on there. Also Lucius Clay. Also, I would say, Matthew Ridgeway.
I would put Will Clayton on there, too.
Possibly Robert E. Osgood rises to this level.
Not to get too hung up on the Maginot Line, I will just drive around it, and say that the basic idea here is absolutely right. You can actually have a grand strategy if your fundamental presuppositions about your country and its role and its place in the world are shared and need not be stated. The British had this, and we had it. The WASP (either side of the Atlantic) elite could act coherently because they saw the world the same way — whether you like or agree with it or not.
January 5th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Perhaps its my political background that makes me think this way, but I would suggest there is another factor which hasnt been mentioned here so far. The men you describe existed in a different world, in which decisions were not subject to immediate and gruelling analysis by endless talking heads.
Strategy requires development time, and then the time to let it take its course, necessitating a certain amount of confidence on the part of the decision maker. We don’t live in a world which rewards that, thus, people don’t do it. Instead tactical decision making is most highly rewarded, since it can be shown to have an immediate benefit “X number of insurgents were killed today… [the operation necessitated withdrawing almost all troops protecting villages throughout the province]” or “Company Y saw their value of their shares rise 10% on news they were buying a company [which is a terrible fit to their business in the long term]”. Being very flippant in my fictional examples, but there is a certain about of familiarity with what you might see on CNN or the BBC any day of the week.
January 6th, 2012 at 12:57 am
[…] blog friend Mark Safranski’s recent musings on the nature and sources of strategic thinking brought to mind an old politically incorrect joke […]
January 8th, 2012 at 6:18 am
My apologies for the long delay in responding to a now stale thread, work was a bear last week.
.
JF,
.
Lex is right, the Maginot line is really besides the point though I stand by my comment and would suggest that alternate areas of investment in mobility and an increased edge in tanks would have helped and the Italians, given their army’s performance against the Ethiopians, Greeks and British, posed no great danger to France. We can re-argue WWII on another day.
.
Dave,
.
Great question. I see Grant as a great operational commander and secondarily a military strategist who understood how to use the Union’s net advantages effectively on the battlefield against the enemy. Grant was in sync with changes in warfare as a commander in a way that Lee was not. He was however, no Bismarck and did not aspire to be when he was President
.
I did not say “very high intelligence is necessary” but above average intelligence to very high intelligence existed in my set of statesmen and military leaders. Many were only above average, some like Wohlstetter, Kahn, Bush were exceptionally bright. I cannot think of many dull-witted successful strategists though.
.
Agree with Peter and Chris that specialization and the scrutiny of modern media/punditry are factors