What’s the Matter with Being a Strategist (Now)?
American strategic competence is in decline. Twenty years after victory in the Cold War, a victory brought about by the shrewd use of state power and alliances while ably balancing international and domestic pressures, the United States now is struggling to find the right balance of military force and other forms of power in its current wars, while peering into an uncertain future. Commenting on American strategic competence, noted defense analyst Barry D. Watts argues, "US performance in Iraq provides ample evidence that it has been declining for some time."l This line of thought typically asserts that American strategic competence reached its apex between the victory in World War II; implementation of ASC 68, a 1950 report advocating ends, ways, and means of countering communism; and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Solarium project, a 1953 evaluation of national security policy regarding the Soviet Union. Somewhere between the death of Josef Stalin and the rise of an era of limited war, the United States lost its strategic way. Given the diverse nature of today's threats, many observers look back with nostalgia on the clarity of the Soviet threat and the quality of the strategic thinking and planning that countered it. Rash comparisons between Cold War challenges--remembered as clearly identified, existential, and countered with bipartisan political support--and today's stew of pandemics, loose nuclear weapons, hackers, and undergoverned territories deserve closer scrutiny. Despite stark differences between the eras, there may be merit to the rising claim of strategic incompetence. From the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to the inconclusive ceasefire terms at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, there is evidence that the strategic skill of the United States has been found wanting. If Watts is correct, that it is America's strategic competence that demands repair, then perhaps the effort to slow the erosion has already begun. A reversal of that trend is taking place, one that has gone unnoticed and will likely remain underappreciated for years to come--the return of the Army strategist. It would be ideal if this progress could be announced with the flamboyancy of a John Williams score in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, but in reality this reversal is subtle, bureaucratic, and over a decade old. The US Army currently has more than 400 military strategists serving in the grades of captain to colonel, diligently assisting commanders from division to combatant command level. Strategists occupy key positions within the broader defense community, serving on the National Security Council, Joint Staff, Army Staff, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and recently at the Treasury and State Departments. In a number of ways, these strategists owe their development, education, and assignments to a vision articulated more than 20 years ago. In 1989, General John R. Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe and Commander-in-Chief, US European Command at the time, argued for the return of uniformed strategists in his article, "What's the Matter with Being a Strategist?" After succinctly defining the attributes of military strategists, General Galvin suggested that key elements of their development included advanced schooling, operational experience, and lifelong development. (2) His influential and timely argument helped stimulate a review of the requirement for military strategists conducted by the Army's Officer Personnel Management System Task Force XXI/3 in the late 1990s. This review resulted in the creation of the functional specialty supporting Army strategists, technically recognized as Functional Area (FA) 59, Strategic Plans and Policy officers. Despite the number of strategists and the breadth of their assignments, this functional specialty is still a relatively recent development. Since 1999, the Army has gradually formalized the development of the specialty and expanded the number of strategists. …
The Complexity Trap
When you start applying blanket policies on the complexities of the current world situation, you're going to get yourself into trouble. (1) --President Barack Obama The Cult of Complexity We live in a world of unprecedented complexity, or so we are told. President Obama's words above echo an increasingly common narrative in the American foreign policy and national security establishments: the forces of globalization, rising nonstate actors, irregular conflict, and proliferating destructive technologies have made crafting sound national security strategy more elusive than ever before. (2) If "strategy is the art of creating power" by specifying the relationship among ends, ways, and means, (3) then the existence of unprecedented complexity would seem to make this art not only uniquely difficult today but also downright dangerous, inasmuch as choosing any particular course of action would preclude infinitely adaptive responses in the future. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates memorably described, the pre-9/11 challenges to American national security were "amateur night compared to the world today." (4) And as former State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter recently stated, there is a "universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid and universal change," one in which the assumptions of the twentieth century make little sense. (5) The "Mr. Y" article that occasioned her comments argued that, in contrast to the "closed system" of the twentieth century that could be controlled by mankind, we now live in an "open system" defined by its supremely complex and protean nature. (6) Unparalleled complexity, it seems, is the hallmark of our strategic age. These invocations of complexity permeate today's American national security documents and inform Washington's post-Cold War and -9/11 strategic culture. The latest Quadrennial Defense Review begins its analysis with a description of the "complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union or the end of World War II has the international terrain been affected by such far-reaching and consequential shifts." (7) In a similar vein, the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 argues that the international system is trending towards greater degrees of complexity as power is diffused and actors multiply. (8) The Director of National Intelligence's Vision 2015 terms our time the "Era of Uncertainty," one "in which the pace, scope, and complexity of change are increasing." (9) Disturbingly, the younger generation of foreign policy and national security professionals seems to accept and embrace these statements declaiming a fundamental change in our world and our capacity to cope with it. The orientation for the multi-thousand-member group of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy calls "conquering complexity" the fundamental challenge for the millennial generation. Complexity, it appears, is all the rage. We challenge these declarations and assumptions--not simply because they are empirically unfounded but, far more importantly, because they negate the very art of strategy and make the realization of the American national interest impossible. We begin by showing the rather unsavory consequences of the current trend toward worshipping at complexity's altar and thus becoming a member of the "Cult of Complexity." Next, we question whether the world was ever quite as simple as today's avowers of complexity suggest, thus revealing the notion of today's unprecedented complexity to be descriptively false. We then underscore that this idea is dangerous, given the consequences of an addiction to complexity. Finally, we offer an escape from the complexity trap, with an emphasis on the need for prioritization in today's admittedly distinctive international security environment. Throughout, we hope to underscore that today's obsession with complexity results in a dangerous denial of the need to strategize. …
The Impact of the Law of the Sea Convention on the Regime for Islands: Problems for the Coastal State in Asserting Claims to “New-Born” Islands in Maritime Zones
ter-productive. The work of the Preparatory Commission will certainly suffer in consequence and the apparently perceived belief that in time, and before a longdelayed coming into force of the Convention, substantial re-negotiation of the Part XI provisions will be possible, may well be illusory. At the time of writing, 138 countries have signed the Convention and 14 have ratified.* What has been called "the convoluted compromise" over prospective Community participation will certainly be widely interpreted as an attempt by the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom to secure eventually a form of limited accession with major reservations.* Their stance will be subjected to criticism within the Community as well as in the General Assembly and the Preparatory Commission. This is a subject to which the writer hopes to return in a future article. For the moment, however, it is as well to note that the stance of these two countries is not to be identified with the US position although its adoption now makes even more remote the emergence of a deep sea-bed mining regime established by " . . . an international treaty of a universal character, generally agreed upon . . . " as required by the 1970 General Assembly Declaration of Principles Governing the Sea-Bed . . . Beyond the Limits of National Jurisdiction.*