Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

[Entropy]

Here's where I'm going with it, by the way. As soon as I finish the book and read Joe Collins' new monograph, I'm going to draft an article tentatively called "The Logic of Strategy and the Invasion of Iraq." The basic thesis is that there is a logic of strategy which says--to oversimplify it--that the expected benefits of an action (in terms of more security) must outweigh the expected costs and risks.

One area you might want to look at is research into decision making between loss choices and misjudgments of comparative risks. In that regard, there are some parallels between the Japanese decision for war in 1941 and OIF. In essence, leaders, when faced with a status quo situation they perceive will result in a loss, often choose very risky options to prevent that loss and also delude themselves into believing that those risky actions contain less risk than they actually do.

There's been some research on this effect I can try to dig up if you'd like.

[ipopescu]

In deciding to invade Iraq, the Bush administration abandoned that logic. It used a legal rather than a strategic form of thinking, concluding that the establishment of guilt was sufficient. Once guilt was established, punishment proportionate to the guilt was applied. I contend that make sense for a domestic legal system, but not for strategy.

Feith, being a lawyer, fully adopted this position. He spends dozens of pages establishing that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and a few sentences on the costs and risks of addressing that threat by invasion and social re-engineering.

I believe--and I hammer this theme in my book--that this abandonment or distortion of the logic of strategy was made possible by the unusual post-September 11 psychological climate.

I think you are exactly right in pointing out the lack of solid strategic thinking on the part of the administration in the run-up to Iraq. My reasoning for that is that they did not really understand the nature of military power and what it can and cannot do, and hence they asked of it something alien to its nature, to loosely paraphrase Clausewitz. And, broadly speaking, the ideological belief in the power of freedom to solve all the problems of the Iraqi society definitely did not help whatever cost/benefit analysis it may have taken place.

But I am intrigued by your argument that they acted "astrategically" because they addressed the issue in a legalistic fashion. I've always been rather uncomfortable with the fact that so many lawyers end up in high decision-making position on issues of national security, so this would confirm to me that my bias against people with a legalistic frame of thinking making decision about war and peace may not be totally misplaced. I think lawyers are best at arguing for or against a course of action, not at actually analyzing and thinking through many options and choosing the most appropriate one. But I wonder whether this abandonment of strategic logic was due to 9/11, or it is something more endemic to the "American way of war" in general, as Colin Gray never tires of arguing, and something whose causes go beyond any particular administration and have more to do with, in his words, "a longstanding tradition of material superiority which offers few incentives
for strategic calculation; and the nation’s traditional theory of civil-military relations, which discourages probing dialogue between policymaker and soldier."