Why has US strategic performance been deteriorating? The deeper problem seems
to be more a lack of understanding of what strategy is than structural or organizational defects in the United States’ national security establishment. Both public strategy documents from recent administrations and actual American strategic behavior suggest that US political and military leaders have been increasingly inclined to equate strategy with listing desirable goals, as opposed to figuring out how to achieve them.
As a practical matter, strategy is about making insightful choices of courses of action likely to achieve one’s ultimate goals despite resource constraints, political considerations, bureaucratic resistance, the adversary’s opposing efforts, and the intractable uncertainties as to how a chosen strategy may ultimately work out. Competent strategy focuses on how one’s ends may be achieved. In this vein, strategy is fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one’s ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints — most critically the opposing efforts of one’s adversaries and the inherent unpredictability of strategic outcomes.
How important is it to strive to do strategy well rather than poorly? Why is a concerted effort to do strategy well preferable to merely muddling through in response to unfolding crises and events? If the threat to use military force, or its actual use, is to be justifiable, then strategy appears to be necessary. Without strategy the use of force is merely random violence.
This being the case, is effective strategy feasible? Might strategic competence bemerely an illusion given the unpredictability of strategic outcomes? The various objections of academic strategists to the possibility of strategy are grounded in a Western standard of rationality that demands the explicit maximization of benefits relative to costs. In other words, unless strategies and their implementations are optimal in the sense of utility maximization across costs, benefits and risks, then strategy is an illusion. But while one might wish that strategies could meet this standard of rationality, in reality it is an impossibly high desideratum. As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon noted in the 1950s, humans lack the complete information and computational capacity required to make optimal choices. That is why strategic choices are, as strategist Richard Rumelt has observed, ultimately heuristics or guesses subject to the indeterminacy and contingency of ultimate outcomes. As for the option of merely muddling through in response to events, that too is a strategic choice. But it is unlikely to be the wisest one.
If strategy is both necessary and possible, are there historical cases in which strategic choices by the side that ultimately prevailed appear to have played a significant role in the outcome? One of the most extensively researched and documented instances is that of Anglo-American versus Nazi Germany strategic performance during World War II. British and American grand strategy was largely crafted by four men: President Franklin Roosevelt, General George Marshall, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Field Marshall Alan Brooke. German grand strategy, on the other hand, was mostly dictated by one man, Adolph Hitler. The contrast in strategic performance between the two sides is striking. Whereas the Allies avoided major strategic missteps, Hitler was guilty of numerous blunders, some of which were repetitions of the same mistake.