STRATEGIC

142 Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity
macy and defenses, promotes bureaucratic coordination, and enables
more-efficient use of resources. Despite the limitations of strategizing
and policy planning in a turbulent world—to paraphrase President
Eisenhower—while plans in real-world application may turn out to be
worthless, planning is everything. 10
As Paul Miller noted:
It is true that the world is growing more complex—which is precisely
why the United States needs a more coherent and integrated
strategic planning capability. 11
In short, we conclude that the process of strategizing is essential,
even if the strategies that result must be adapted or discarded over the
course of time.
What Is Strategy, Anyway?
In the argot of foreign policy and defense specialists, there is no more
ambiguous and adaptable a concept than “strategy.” To say one has a
strategy implies a plan of action to achieve a specific goal or to solve a specific
problem. To say something is “strategic” means it is of exceptional
significance, if not of game-changing importance. A “grand strategy” has
been defined as a nation’s “policy in execution,” 12 “the calculated relationship
of means to large ends.” 13 Strategy-making has been characterized
as “the central political art . . . the art of creating power.” 14
10 Cited in Freedman, 2013, pp. 609–610.
11 Paul D. Miller, “Organizing the National Security Council: I Like Ike’s,” Presidential
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, September 2013, p. 604.
12 “. . . The role of grand strategy—higher strategy—is to co-ordinate and direct all the
resources of a nation, or band of nations, toward the attainment of the political objective
of [a] war . . .” B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, Second Revised Edition, New York: Meridian
Books, 1991, p. 322.
13 John Lewis Gaddis, “What Is Grand Strategy?” Heyden Distinguished Lecture, Duke
University, February 26, 2009, p. 7.
14 Freedman, 2013, pp. 609–610.