One can disagree with Steve that some of the assumptions underlying our purported grand strategy are flawed and one can disagree in detail with his fixes. One can even disagree over what a “grand” strategy should be and do. But is the basic, down-deep, real problem we face today one of the strategy’s substance, or is it a structural problem regarding strategic planning, coordination and implementation?

Since the fall of Bagdad (hard to say the end of combat operations), I’ve become more and more convinced the core problem is just that, structural. I don’t pretend to have an answer, but it might pay for those of you who share some agreement with me about structure being a very big part of our problem to take a look at the shorter Fournoy and Brimley article on strategic planning in the Joint Forces Quarterly No. 41 at http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pa...i41_iad_01.pdf Or better yet, the longer paper on which it is based at http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/pa...agencyQNSR.pdf

I’ve also wondered of late what an alien standing on the Moon would think about the potential potency of our military and economic power while applying Clausewitz’s secondary Trinity of the People, the Government, and the Military Services. The first two are fractured with the first, to paraphrase Sam Huntington, increasingly not knowing who they are, and the second working hard, legislative and executive alike, to surpass the Athenian Assembly during the Peloponnesian War. We all know what happened with the demise of that empire: the democratic experiment disappeared until we resurrected it some two thousand years later. The last leg of the Trinity: the Land components are, if not yet broken, badly cracked and the Air and Naval appear to be looking for a place.

As I look forward to what appears to me to be the set of possible futures following our ultimate withdrawal from Iraq (whatever shape that might take), I can’t help but wonder whether, after more than a few failures to achieve our stated ends, we will possess, as a people, the willingness and fortitude necessary to fulfill the international role we have consciously and unconsciously assumed. Thinkers like Colin Gray and Niall Ferguson see no alternative to our actively playing that role. Gray’s The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the new World Order completed in Nov ’03 and Ferguson’s
2004 article “International Relations: A World without Power” make for interesting and to a degree compelling reading even given the course of events since they were written. http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3009996.html. There is the usual expected chorus of those others who much prefer we pull back and to a greater or lesser degree be less active, depending of on their parochial interests in an issue.

Personally, I don’t believe we have the choice of being less active. Our interests are going to be involved; we are far from being the self-sufficient nation we once were; and the issues this discussion group focuses on will be somewhat more than nagging, but not the only ones. I just don’t see how we can intelligently address interests and issues and be pro- rather than reactive without a reasonable structure for development, planning and implementation. Without it, I only see more failures.

What one hammock and a good cigar have wrought.

Bob T