When National Strategy Document Is Not the National Strategy

Paul Kennedy

What does it mean when a national government, especially a government that is always at the center of world attention like that of the United States, issues public policy documents that are supposed to explain its defense priorities and its overall global strategy? And what sense does it make to let everyone, including your enemies, know what your concerns and your plans for the future are?

I should make clear here that the argument which follows is not an advocacy of government secrecy in general. After all, every functioning regime should, one supposes, have ideas about the political issues which surround them, and be capable of deciding which aims are more important (at least in their view) than others. In fact, they owe it to their publics to declare that, in education spending, they intend to give priority to, say, primary schools and lesser priority to, say, two-year colleges if that is what they really believe in doing; or, in another field, to make clear that they intend to protect some fields of medical research while reducing funding for others. And, if you don't like that choice, well, vote us out.

Seasoned cynics will point out that every new American administration will, within a year of being elected, produce "a plan for reducing the deficit" ... "for health care reform" ... "for improving public education." Sometimes, nothing much will happen (think back to Hilary Clinton's health care reform plans), but such setbacks should not and will not prevent governments from explaining their intentions and spelling out their priorities. Still, is it wise to do this in the trickier and more dangerous field of a nation's foreign and military strategy?

I have been pondering this question over the last half-year as I read and re-read the two most important public documents offered by the Obama administration on its overall assessment of global trends and America's recommended responses to them. I have emphasized the word public here, to distinguish what is going on nowadays from the usual practice of governments, historically, to keep confidential their efforts to measure national capabilities against foreign commitments.

Historians will tell you that there were endless internal memos produced in late imperial Spain about which of its various battlefields -- the Low Countries, Germany, the Mediterranean, the Indies -- had to be given priority. But all that was "high policy," not for the Cortes, and certainly not for the man in the street. Again, in the dangerous 1930s, British government planners spent much of their time assessing the relative threats to the Empire from Germany, Italy and Japan, but the public was not informed and therefore played no role in this, except by references in the documents to its unwillingness to fight abroad. And why let Berlin or Tokyo know what you were thinking?

So what is one to make of the fact that, in February, the U.S. Department of Defense published a weighty 105-page document entitled "Quadrennial Defense Review," a congressionally mandated assessment of America's armed forces and military policies which is supposed to survey all the challenges facing the world's Number One and is approved by Defense Secretary Robert Gates? Or of the fact that, three months later, the White House issued its own "National Security Strategy" of May 2010, approved by President Obama himself?

A critical comparison of the two documents is not intended here -- essentially, they sing much the same tune. But it does seem worthwhile to ask two broader questions. First, what is the point? And, secondly, where is the prioritization?

The first question is probably the easier to answer: It is for good public relations. Successive American administrations have been charged with the complaint that they lack a holistic approach to international affairs, that they do not have a "Grand Strategy," and that inter-service rivalries and "turf quarrels" with other agencies make it difficult for even the highest officials to separate the wood from the trees. So why not, then, confute the critics by showing that the U.S. government really can offer a national security strategy? Why not disprove the great geopolitician Sir Halford Mackinder's famous remark that democracies cannot think strategically unless they are in a state of war? Besides, the Congress has mandated the quadrennial defense reviews, so you have to feed them with something. These documents are therefore just bureaucratic offal, ready to be pulped a month or so after their publication.

More importantly, what do these solemn reports say about the policy priorities which the Obama administration is pledging to follow for the years ahead? Well, actually, not very much. The White House's "National Security Strategy" document is the flakier of the two. It begins, like the Pentagon document, by asserting that America is a "Nation at war," although it never explains why, if that statement is true, we have not mobilized to one-twentieth the degree that we mobilized when last we fought a great war. We seem to be either a nation pretending to be at war, or a country which really is at war but doesn't want to pay the inevitable costs. Either attitude is dangerous.

Secondly, the all-important "war" (whereby we should "disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qa'ida and its violent extremist allies") identified at the beginning of this document gets a mere three pages, pp.19-22, before the text goes soaring off to greater things: "Secure Cyberspace," "Spend Taxpayers' Dollars Wisely, "Strengthen the Power of Our Example." Much of this looks more like the Prologue to the U.N. Charter than a national strategy document. And the Pentagon's quadrennial defense statement is not much better, with large sections on "Taking Care of Our People," "Reforming How We Do Business" and "A Defense Risk Management Framework." Yet it is better, ironically, because the armed services each wanted to stake out their share of the future budget "pie" between now and 2015, and thus had to indicate roughly what their present and future weaponry -- attack submarines, Marine Corps brigades -- was needed for. The most interesting sections of their report are therefore a three-page tally of "Main Elements of U.S. Force Structure" over the next four years, plus a pretty candid statement about not being pushed out of Asia by a rising China (p.31, "anti-access environments").

Even this, however, is not a prioritized grand strategy. The armed services have to make a nod to the fight against global terrorism, global warming, and failing states, though none of them care much about those matters -- what can aircraft carriers do there? Nor are they especially interested in dealing with the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction -- perhaps the Air Force could blast some rogue nuclear facilities, but what is in that for the Army? Further, the blunt fact is that defining America's strategic and operational priorities in a real sense -- putting them in order -- is feared by all the services, lest they lose out. Declaring that a rising China is the gravest threat facing American interests is wonderful for the U.S. Navy, possibly the Air Force, but hopeless for the Army. Stating that the priority is to get more "grunts on the ground" is terrific for the Marines and the Army, but ominous for the larger-surface Navy. So, all these quadrennial defense reviews have to duck and weave, giving a bit of the pie to everyone, and are never able to explicate a coherent, ordered strategic policy. Perhaps Mackinder was right after all; democracies cannot think strategically unless they are in a real war, which is what the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are not.

Gouverner, c'est choisir (to govern is to choose), says the old French proverb. Right now, based on these two expensively produced documents, that is not happening. Unless some top-secret and supremely cunning and cold-blooded assessment exists in a White House or Pentagon safe, the United States really doesn't have a prioritized national security strategy at all.

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When National Strategy Document Is Not the National Strategy