Whither the Strategic Narrative?

Gates: "Sure, but ... what's the plan?"
White House and Congress: "More of the same."



by Great Cthulhu
18 April 2011


It appears as if the President's proposed budget plan - including some $400 Billion in defense cuts through 2023 - has struck a nerve with a Defense Department that has already been working feverishly to find efficiencies and eliminate waste while maintaining a furious operational tempo throughout the globe. Don't look now but the Secretary of Defense, who seemed for a long time in step with the White House, may have created a third pole in the budget battle with a deep and valid question for both the Administration and its opponents. The question is implied in the words of DoD Press Secretary Geoff Morrell (emphasis added):

Although the defense secretary believed the Pentagon could not be "exempt" from efforts to reduce the rising deficit, cutting military spending in coming years would require difficult choices and could not be merely a "budget math exercise,"

...

"The secretary has been clear that further significant defense cuts cannot be accomplished without reducing force structure and military capability,"

...

"The secretary believes that this process must be about managing risk associated with future threats and national security challenges and identifying missions that the country is willing to have the military forgo,"

  Contrast the statements from White House and its critics:

"It's fundamentally trivial," he said. "This is stuff a comptroller can do while playing with his prayer beads." He suggested it would mean shrinking the force "a bit," trimming and deferring some hardware purchases and finding more efficient ways to handle operations and maintenance spending.

...

"The need to modernize the inventory of all the services is not going away and that bill will simply grow larger the longer policymakers defer modernization,"

...

The Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Howard McKeon, said he had "grave concerns" about spending reductions while the U.S. military was involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Embedded in the Defense Department's statements is a question about something that the United States has desperately needed for years now, a re-evaluation of its grand strategy - the overall method for producing security for itself or making itself powerful - if it indeed has one. It calls for the matching of ends, ways and means as informed by risk, the classic elements of any strategy. However, in the immediacy of the budget battle, the two wrangling sides appear mired in the struggle of short-term matching of long-term ways and means without a clear discussion of the ends. While the short-term struggle is very necessary, long-term ends are essential.

The same day Gates went public with his questions, Foreign Policy posted The Y Article by John Norris, shedding light on A National Strategic Narrative, a document "quietly issued" by the Pentagon "as members of the U.S. Congress engaged in a last-minute game of chicken over the federal budget". While A National Strategic Narrative is written by two active duty military officers acting as strategic planners inside the Pentagon, it is written as an independent, personal perspective and is therefore not, as Norris mentions, a Pentagon issuance.

Nonetheless, Norris' article and the paper itself are well-worth reading. The paper is moderate and a-political in tone, takes a long view and, in the vein of grand strategy, recognizes that all elements of national power, not simply the military, are necessary to "produce security".

Much more importantly, it addresses something beyond the traditional levers of power. It proposes a "strategic vision" for the United States in, as the document implies, a narrative. While general, it both links domestic and foreign policy and is much more palpable and well-defined than the throw-away slogans of "stronger", "better educated", "more secure", "energy-independent", and "healthy economy" that permeate the political rhetoric of the budget debate that will inevitably launch the main effort of the 2012 campaign season.

This is not to imply that A National Strategic Narrative is the answer to Secretary Gates' important question. But it is an answer, one of many possible. However this "answer" came, unsolicited, from two employees of an agency tasked with executing grand strategy, instead of from the two branches of government that should be creating and resourcing it. The preface hopefully offers:

"Their insights and ideas should spark a national conversation. All it takes is for politicians, pundits, journalists, businesspeople, civic leaders, and engaged citizens across the country to read and respond."

Hope is not a viable course of action. Those who truly desire a strategic narrative must demand it of those who are entrusted to write it.