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112 Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity The State Department snapped into action, negotiating the rights to place or expand U.S. military bases on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean, and in Somalia, Kenya, and Oman. DoD established the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which later became the U.S. Central Command. 18 It also worked with the Gulf States to develop military infrastructure throughout the Gulf region. Thus began a 36-year U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. Whatever the long-term merits of that policy, 19 the Soviet Union did not enter the Persian Gulf and the oil has kept flowing through the Strait of Hormuz to the United States and other buyers ever since. When it comes to disasters, the United States knows how to prepare. Following the debacle of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal and state governments were better prepared for Superstorm Sandy in 2013. Meteorologists forecast Sandy in time to warn the public. Authorities took appropriate steps to mitigate the damage, and the federal, state, and local responses following the storm were widely praised, although some significant disruptions to liquid fuel supplies still occurred. 20 But U.S. health agencies were unprepared to help African nations deal with the rapid spread of Ebola in West Africa, although the possibility (though not the probability) of such a pandemic had been widely foreseen. And there are multiple warnings from the scientific community that the United States remains ill-prepared and is underinvesting in resilience to deal with the effects of a climate that could change much sooner than we think. The United States has arguably been too slow to “get ahead of the game” on climate change not only because of the cost of doing so, but also because the threat poses all of the cognitive, methodological, and 18 Joe Stork, “The Carter Doctrine and U.S. Bases in the Middle East,” Middle East Report, Vol. 10, September/October 1980. 19 For the argument against U.S. forward-basing policy see, for example, Andrew Bacevich, who argues that the Carter Doctrine was a seminal mistake. Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, New York: Penguin Random House, 2016. 20 Center on Global Energy Policy, “Summary of the Roundtable on the Resilience of the Liquid Fuel Supply Chain in the New York City Area,” Columbia University, May 28, 2014; New York City Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, PlaNYC: A Stronger, More Resilient New York, June 2013.
Anticipation, Deterrence, and Resilience 113 political hurdles already described. Harvard University cognitive psychologist Daniel Gilbert identified the human limitations of thinking about nonhuman challenges a decade ago: Global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to . . . has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. . . . Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority. 21 It is the job of government to factor in such human foibles and put in place systems to make good decisions despite them. But that requires a deliberative long-term planning process. The U.S. military is well prepared to deal with threats it foresees because it has such a wellhoned, formal defense planning process. Civilian decisionmakers do not, but they may still benefit from working on a number of elements of the anticipation equation. The first element is to better understand surprise. The larger the discrepancy between one’s subjective (but distorted) model of reality and the objective reality, the greater the surprise. Decisionmakers with especially high confidence in their distorted models of reality were found to have the strongest tendency to resist information that would correct their misconceptions. 22 Next, policymakers will want to improve intelligence collection and analysis, and thus foresight. Anticipation also requires improving policymaker capacity to ask for and absorb intelligence about events that are deemed low probability but would be highly consequential if they happened—precisely those most likely to produce strategic surprise and thus demand anticipatory action. 23 This may require creating 21 Daniel Gilbert, “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006. 22 Gompert, Binnendijk, and Lin, 2014, p. 181. 23 James A. Dewar, Assumption-Based Planning—A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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STRATEGIC RETHINK STRATEGIC CHOICES
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Preface This is the sixth and final
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Preface v The RAND Strategic Rethin
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viii Strategic Choices for a Turbul
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Contents Preface...................
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Contents xiii Middle East..........
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Summary For more than seven decades
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Summary xix deal with because of it
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Summary xxi Familiarity does not ne
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Summary xxiii Whatever else is on t
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Summary xxv of richest Americans, i
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Summary xxvii reexamination arises
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Summary xxix Dwight Eisenhower—wh
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Summary xxxi of ISIS, the migration
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Acknowledgments RAND Corporation Pr
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CHAPTER ONE Introduction What is Am
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Introduction 3 that some allies hav
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Introduction 5 of distrust of the g
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Introduction 7 live with. Therefore
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Introduction 9 Bruce Jones points o
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Introduction 11 force decision make
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Introduction 13 United States for l
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CHAPTER TWO From Triumph to Stalema
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From Triumph to Stalemate: The Loss
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CHAPTER THREE Is the World Falling
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Is the World Falling Apart (And How
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CHAPTER EIGHT Option II: “The Ind
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Option II: “The Indispensable Nat
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CHAPTER NINE Option III: “Agile A
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Option III: “Agile America”: Ad
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CODA The Challenge of Leadership: A
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The Challenge of Leadership: Aligni
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