Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Col. Chet Richards • 27Ad hoc strategiesAs we know from our everyday lives, “winging it” often produces acceptable results,despite aphorisms like “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take youthere.” At less than the top levels of tennis, for example, a good strategy is to keepthe ball in play and let the opponent make the first mistake – hit the ball into the netor set up an easy winner. Some of the greatest strategists have recommended similarapproaches to warfare. Sun Tzu told commanders, for example, to prepare their troopsand then let them exploit the current situation. 3 Instead of detailed battle planning,Rommel relied on the training of his troops and his own mental agility to find a meansto victory in the unpredictable action of combat. 4A closer examination of these examples, however, reveals that in both Sun Tzu andRommel were addressing the tactical level of warfare, fighting and winning battles. Nationalleaders, on the other hand, must be concerned with more than tactics. 5 Otherwise,the country will have a de facto strategy of concentrating our energies at the tactical levelwith the hope that victory on enough battlefields will force an acceptable solution onthe opposing government or whomever we are fighting. Unfortunately, there are toomany examples, from Pyrrhus in ancient Greece to Cornwallis during the AmericanRevolution to the German Army on the Eastern Front, to the United States in Vietnamand Iraq, where tactical victories did not produce the desired strategic results.There is a missing element in all of these, a layer of strategy that would link theefforts expended on the ground to the results that national leaders want to achieve.This layer is usually known as grand strategy. Ideally, a grand strategy would integrateall elements of national power to secure our vital interests against today’s and tomorrow’sopponents. It would of necessity operate for decades, carefully matching meansto ends and assuring that national strength is conserved for future generations. 6Although the need for a national or grand strategy stated in this manner may appearobvious, there are practical problems applying it to a republic like ours. Perhapsthe most limiting is that we have a political revolution every four years and thereforeexternal priorities are a reflection of the domestic political realities of the moment,or, at its most farseeing, the next election. One does not have to be a strategic Ludditeto question the role of more formal strategies in our national life.Domestic political considerations aside, it is debatable whether human beingshave the wisdom to construct such far-reaching structures. As the influential blogger“Fabius Maximus” observed:Even if the people of a developed State could agree on a goal, an ambitiousgrand strategy remains a chimera for a global power.It is hubris to believe that any person or small group has sufficient informationto develop a plan on a global scale. There are too many complex, unknowable