![\"\"](\"http:\/\/static.guim.co.uk\/sys-images\/Admin\/BkFill\/Default_image_group\/2011\/3\/15\/1300202844533\/Portrait-Of-Otto-Von-Bism-007.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I have been involved, on and off, with another grand strategy discussion. Several discussions to be exact, one of which was prompted by Adam Elkus’<\/strong>s well-constructed\u00a0volte-face<\/em> on the concept of grand strategy. While I can find merit in many of Adam’s points regarding our dysfunctional policy-strategy process, the need to make definitive choices in order to have sound policy and our partisan epistemological crisis, I part company with him on his core argument:<\/p>\n ….The idea of grand strategy as both policy\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0strategy is by definition unachievable, and the source of much confusion.\u00a0 By infusing normative policy elements into strategy, this fusion turns strategy into a manifestation of ideology rather than a technical device for getting things done.\u00a0 Think, for example, of how debates about regional strategy and even the tactics and operations of COIN, drones, and counterterrorism have become proxies for domestic ideological political battles. This happens, in larger part, because the policy-strategy distinction in American national security circles is extremely weak, as strategy is taken to be politics and politics becomes strategy.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Adam has further endorsed a more emphatic follow-up post by our mutual blogfriend Joseph Fouche, <\/strong>where, much like his fictional countryman,\u00a0\u00a0Captain Renault<\/a><\/strong>, JF in his forcefully argued post is shocked to discover that gambling is going on in here:<\/p>\n Terminology Proliferation is the Escape Hatch of Politics<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n ….One sure way to detect politics is signs of desperate efforts to call politics something other politics. Though politics is the most elemental of human endeavors, disgust with overt political machinations is one of the most elemental of human emotions:<\/strong><\/p>\n Who likes a brown noser?<\/strong><\/p>\n Who likes a squealer?<\/strong><\/p>\n Who likes the kid who gathers up his toys and goes home when he doesn\u2019t get his way?<\/strong><\/p>\n Who likes the guy who obviously looks out for number one?<\/strong><\/p>\n ….Policy is portrayed as the objective, virtuous, and expert pursuit of ponies for everyone. Framed this way, policy\u00a0is politics without the division of power. But politics without the division of power\u00a0is impossible. \u201cPolicy\u201d is a mythical beast.\u00a0\u201dPolicy making\u201d is mere politicking, trading one favor for another to offset one interest with another, persuading through influence when possible and enforcing compliance with violence when impossible.\u00a0But this reality reeks of knavery so it must be wrapped in the most virtuous lies imaginable. Hence we see a dramatic proliferation of \u201cpolicy makers\u201d and \u201cmaking\u00a0policy\u201d where we\u2019d normally expect to see politicians and politics. WIth so many policy makers making so much policy, you\u2019d think the good and true would be breaking out all over. But, looking around, we see nobody down here but us dumb humans, horse trading with each other to get incrementally ahead.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cGrand strategy\u201d and \u201coperational art\u201d represent further efforts to divorce politics from politics through politics, leaving behind a vacuum inhabited only by virtuous technocrats. In reality, they\u2019re both attempts by one political group to escape the power of another political group, hopefully gaining more power for themselves in the process.\u00a0The formulator of \u201cgrand strategy\u201d is often an\u00a0aspiring political actor who lacks the gifts necessary for political succes<\/a>s. So they whine from the sidelines, falling back on a passive-aggressive strategy of victimhood where they denounce expertise in politics as squalid while advocating its replacement with their own (implicitly) more virtuous expertise. They attempt to reframe political questions as technical questions best handled by professional specialists. If a political question can be reframed as a technical question, resolving it is a merely an implementation detail. Such technical minutia should be beneath most politicians. Their attention should be devoted to truly important questions, leaving details to the poor peons.<\/strong><\/p>\n ….Policy, grand strategy, and operational art are merely the continuation of politics with the addition of other layers of obscurity.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, the insightful Mr. Fouche is not wrong in detecting politics in strategic clothing. In my judgement, he’s very much correct. \u00a0His objection, as I infer it, to grubby political decisions within a state being regularly deferred “downward” to be made in the guise of nominally apolitical (in American tradition) operational planning, or “upward” to be masked as “technocratic” grand strategy is reasonable because it is a sign of dysfunction in our political community. He’s right – America has a systemic problem in being unable to overtly<\/strong><\/em> make any hard political choices through it’s formal political process.<\/p>\n However, being politically dysfunctional doesn’t mean that grand strategy (or policy, or operational art or whatever) in general is purely fictive or that it is always simply a deceptive substitute for an honest political process. Or that raw politics can replace all these conceptual tools equally well or better. These conceptual tools were developed as a form of intellectual specialization because politics as a general and broad societal activity too often failed to meet the challenges of diplomacy and war. Or worse, politics worked irrationally against the survival of the political community <\/a>in wartime while to the benefit of a faction within it.<\/p>\n Grand strategy, policy, strategy and even operational art are imbued with a political character, but one that is a step or several more removed from the general politics – the art of strategy is, after all, intended to serve a political community and “Ends” of “Ends-Ways-Means” \u00a0is always infused with value-laden assessments of worth and priority. Nor is politics their *only* character; all are, foremost, instrumental, while some may also be specifically cultural and technical. \u00a0The recession of politics (ideally as settled choices and not ongoing, sub rosa<\/em>, competition) in strategy to the background permits greater focus on solving particular problems with diplomacy, coercion and force of arms. If made a substitute for domestic politics, these things are less likely to work for their intended purpose – to the risk of all.<\/p>\n Grand strategy can be useful, and while it is not always needed, at times having a sound grand strategy is vital for survival. As I have previously written on the subject<\/a>:<\/p>\n ….Grand strategy is not, in my view,\u00a0simply just\u00a0\u201dstrategy\u201d on a larger scale and with a\u00a0longer time line. Strategy is an instrumental activity that unifies ends, ways and means. While grand strategy subsumes that aspect, it also provides ordinary strategy with\u00a0a\u00a0moral purpose<\/em>, perhaps even in some instances, an identity.\u00a0\u00a0Grand strategy\u00a0explains not just \u201chow\u201d and \u201cfor what\u201d, but\u00a0\u201dwhy we fight\u201d and imparts to a society\u00a0the supreme confidence in itself to sustain the will to prevail, even in the face of horrific sacrifice. Grand strategy brings into harmony our\u00a0complex military\u00a0and political objectives with the cherished,\u00a0mythic narrative\u00a0of a\u00a0\u201dgood society\u201d\u00a0we conceive ourselves to be, reducing \u201cfriction\u201d, \u201cpumping up\u201d our resolve and demoralizing our enemies.\u00a0Grand strategy is constructive and energizing.<\/strong><\/p>\n A simple but profound\u00a0moral argument is a critical element of a grand strategy, to a great extent, it\u00a0frames the subsequent political and military objectives for which war is waged.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n and furthermore<\/a>:<\/p>\n ….First, to use an analogy from the biological sciences, grand strategy enunciated by a great power is a process of geopolitical\u00a0co-evolution<\/a>. There is an effort in grand strategy to impose over time one\u2019s political will upon others to shape the \u201cbattlespace\u201d, the sphere of influence, the hegemonic dominion to a state of affairs favorable to the state actor. Often, this is done by military force in times of crisis but over the long term, economic and diplomatic factors, all of DIME really,\u00a0weigh heavily on the outcome. The process is never a one way street, even for actors who are considered to be largely triumphant. It is coevolutionary. If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.<\/strong><\/p>\n ….Secondly, sustaining the national or group identity is a critical component of grand strategy that makes it a different, more expressly political\/cultural\u00a0\u00a0exercise than crafting strategy as Clausewitzians use the term as being driven by policy. Grand strategy should guide policy formulation because it is not just a set of concrete structural ends, or a laundry list of \u201cvital interests\u201d\u00a0but a constructive, values-laden, attractive, motivating, civilizational narrative. An ideal or cultural identity for which men and societies are willing to go to war, to stand, fight and die. As\u00a0Thomas P.M. Barnett\u00a0<\/a>once put it, for a \u201cFuture worth creating<\/a>\u201c. Grand strategy is a defiant clarion call of civilizational supremacy, marshalling those who will fight for that which is not, but could be.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Men do not stand, fight and die for mere instrumentalities. You can show a man how to do an unpleasant chore in the most efficient manner but he may remain unmotivated to do it, still less to make terrible sacrifices to do it. Conversely, the passion of faction is strong, but usually rejects the logic of strategy for it’s own self-destructive calculus. It divides the house against itself in the hour of maximum danger.<\/p>\n Not every nation needs or can execute a grand strategy. Having sound policy and competent strategy, as Adam Elkus suggested, is often more than sufficient ( nations frequently prevail despite incoherent policies and poor strategies) and is no small task to get right in itself. A grand strategy, if required, is something that crystallizes into consensus because it emanates from deep cultural roots as well as empirical dangers – without such an anchor to give it legitimacy, it is less likely to amount even to a sound policy than a trite political campaign.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been involved, on and off, with another grand strategy discussion. Several discussions to be exact, one of which was prompted by Adam Elkus’s well-constructed\u00a0volte-face on the concept of grand strategy. While I can find merit in many of Adam’s points regarding our dysfunctional policy-strategy process, the need to make definitive choices in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[516,216,361,46,662,304,586,102,87,178,78,336,596,462,39,270,187,127,530,13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ae","category-academia","category-america","category-analytic","category-blog-friends","category-defense","category-dime","category-diplomacy","category-foreign-policy","category-geopolitics","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-josephfouche","category-metacognition","category-military","category-national-security","category-politics","category-strategy","category-strategy-and-war","category-theory","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5238"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5240,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions\/5240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}America Needs Sound Policy, Not Grand Strategy<\/a><\/h3>\n