One can easily identify other competitions that are critical to defending the free world. There are geographically based competitions for influence and control of resources, such as those ongoing in the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Ideological competitions between free-market capitalism and socialism are intensifying in the Western Hemisphere. Consider the autocratic regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua; the failing dictatorship in Venezuela; discontented populations trying to end statist economic practices in Ecuador and Bolivia; and those advocating for their return in Mexico, Argentina, and, to a lesser extent, Chile. Battlegrounds of criminality and organized crime in Mexico and Central America are perpetuating state weakness, inflicting human suffering, and driving large-scale migration. Many African states are battlegrounds between aspiring, young populations who are demanding a say in how they are governed and those who would expand autocratic governance to preserve power for the privileged few. The novel coronavirus pandemic in 2020 highlights the need for international cooperation on health. Preserving peace and prevailing in these and other competitions will require a rejection of strategic narcissism and an effort to foster understanding of complex challenges as the first step toward crafting solutions.
* * *
I CONCLUDE with what may be the most important competition critical to future security and prosperity: education. It is time for a new initiative similar to the National Defense Education Act, passed in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik. That event motivated bipartisan efforts to prioritize not only science, but also history, political science, and language. Lawmakers back then recognized that education was a national security matter. Given China’s advantages in AI and other emerging technologies, lawmakers should approach education reform with similar urgency today.
We might remember that education is not only for the young. As the historian of technology Elting Morrison observed in 1966, “the development of the instruments of industrial organization and our emotional and intellectual responses to them—cannot be learned once and for all in high school, college, graduate school, one Sloan Fellow year, or ten weeks in a senior executive development program. To live safely in our society, let alone manage it, will require a continuous education until a man dies.”40 Education is also critical to preserving our competitive advantages, because educated citizens are entrepreneurs who start new businesses and scientists who create medical breakthroughs and develop solutions to complex problems like climate change or the coronavirus. Educated citizens learn languages to connect with other societies, foster strategic empathy, and build a peaceful world. Educated citizens appreciate the great gifts of our free and open society as well as what we must do together to improve it. Educated citizens are best equipped to foil efforts to divide communities and pit them against each other. They are also best prepared to exercise their sovereignty in our democratic system by electing principled, thoughtful leaders and holding them accountable to strengthen our republic.
Conclusion
Many of our contemporaries are extraordinarily reluctant to acknowledge the reality of past time and prior events, and stubbornly resistant to all arguments for the possibility or utility of historical knowledge.
—DAVID HACKETT FISCHER, HISTORIANS’ FALLACIES: TOWARD A LOGIC OF HISTORICAL THOUGHT (1970)
THE RAMP of the Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft dropped. I thanked the crew, yelling above the roar of the spinning tilt rotors, grabbed my two bags, and walked out to meet members of my new Secret Service detail, who, over the next thirteen months, would become like members of our family. The team took me directly to the White House to begin my first day as national security advisor. There had not been much time to prepare for the new job.
It had been a whirlwind twenty-four hours since President Trump announced my appointment in front of the press pool at Mar-a-Lago on President’s Day. Now, I had accompanied him, the First Lady, and the presidential entourage on Air Force One back to Andrews Air Force Base. There, Ospreys positioned on the tarmac flew me back to Fort Eustis, Virginia. Maj. Kevin Kilbride, my aide-de-camp, met me and gave me a ride home. He, my executive officer, Col. Neal Corson, and my enlisted aide, Sfc. Juan Sanchez would help manage my very sudden departure from my job as deputy commander, futures, at the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. I would return to my home at Fort Eustis only once before I moved with Katie to Washington two months later.
At home, between a torrent of phone calls (mostly from people wishing me luck in the new job), I discussed with Katie and our daughter’s fiancé, Lt. Lee Robinson, the transition to what was certain to be an interesting and challenging tour of duty. Lee, who was serving in the U.S. Army’s Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, had been driving through Virginia on his way back to Fort Benning, Georgia, and had stopped to spend the night. The next day, after we got back from an early morning workout, he asked me why I was spending more time packing books than clothes.
I explained to him that I intended to draw on history to help frame contemporary challenges to national security. An important first step in developing policy and strategy, I believed, was to understand how the past produced the present. I also believed that the history of how previous presidents, their cabinets, and the National Security Council staff made decisions, developed policies, and crafted strategies held lessons for how to deliver the best advice and sound options to the president. For me, history was an avocation. I spent my spare time writing articles, reviewing books, and serving as a contributing editor to Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. As a general officer, I found that examining the history of a new position helped me ask the right questions and understand better the possibilities and difficulties associated with current challenges. For example, as commander of Fort Benning, I had based our educational reform effort on the changes that then-Lt. Col. George Marshall implemented there after World War I. And the army study I commissioned in 2015 on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine was modeled on the study that Gen. Donn Starry initiated on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. For me, history came to life when it was applied to contemporary challenges and circumstances. As a regimental commander preparing our team for Iraq in 2004, I had consulted a wide range of literature on counterinsurgency to identify best practices. In the 1991 Gulf War, our cavalry troop used battle drills (rehearsed responses to a predictable set of circumstances in combat) based on my reading of U.S. major general Ernest Harmon’s and German field marshal Erwin Rommel’s accounts of armored warfare in North Africa in World War II. For military leaders, reading and thinking about history is an integral part of our sacred duty to our nation and our fellow soldiers. Because the stakes in war involve life and death, combat leaders who choose to learn exclusively from personal experience are irresponsible. So, it was not a stretch for me to regard military and diplomatic history as foundational to improving U.S. strategic competence—that is, our ability to integrate elements of national power and the efforts of like-minded partners to advance and protect America’s vital interests.
My soon-to-be son-in-law, Lee, got a longer answer than he had anticipated; it was the price he paid for asking a historian about the value of history. And readers who have stayed with me until this point know that the importance of history to understanding and coping with contemporary challenges is a major thrust of this book.
WALKING INTO the West Wing of the White House should be humbling for any person fortunate enough to serve there, but walking into the office occupied fifty-two years earlier by McGeorge Bundy, one of the principal characters in a book I had written twenty years earlier, was particularly so. In Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, I seek to explain how and why Vietnam became an American war. As I wrote about the national security decision-making process, I had no idea that I would one day become responsible for that process. Before I walked into that office and met members of the NSC staff, I had in mind four resolutions to improve U.S.
strategic competence. All four are based on pitfalls that, during the Johnson administration, contributed to unwise decisions, a fundamentally flawed strategy, and, ultimately, a lost war that took the lives of 58,000 Americans and well over a million Vietnamese, consumed billions of American dollars, and inflicted on the United States one of the greatest political traumas since the Civil War.1
First, our NSC process would deliver options to advance and protect the interests of the American people and overcome national security challenges. The story in Dereliction of Duty is, in large measure, one of abdication of responsibility. President Lyndon Johnson made wartime decisions based primarily on his domestic political agenda: getting elected in his own right in 1964 and passing the Great Society legislation in 1965. Because he viewed Vietnam principally as a danger to those goals, he chose a middle course that he hoped would allow him to avoid difficult decisions. Johnson’s path of least resistance proved unsustainable because it was built largely on lies aimed at the American people and their representatives in Congress. Once Americans realized that they had been misled about the scale and cost of the American military intervention in Southeast Asia, many lost faith in that effort. Now, in our work to develop integrated strategies for our most pressing national security challenges, we would provide the president with options differentiated by their level of risk to American interests and citizens, the resources required, and the prospect of their progressing toward national security and foreign policy goals and objectives. The president would then hear from his cabinet officials, who would recommend their favored course of action and their rationale for that recommendation. The NSC process would not consider the effect of policy decisions on partisan political concerns, the assumption being that successful policies serve all American people. Besides, the presentation of multiple options would give plenty of opportunity for political advisors to offer their assessments and recommendations.
Second, we would spend more time understanding and framing the nature of the problems and challenges we faced, viewing them through the lens of vital U.S. interests and crafting overarching goals and more specific objectives. During the period in which Vietnam became an American war, McGeorge Bundy argued that the objectives in Southeast Asia should be kept ambiguous, to give the president flexibility should the war effort fail.2 The lack of clearly understood objectives, combined with the primacy of domestic political considerations, resulted in a strategy for Vietnam based on what its Washington, DC, purveyors preferred rather than on what the situation in Vietnam demanded. The next steps up the “ladder” of graduated pressure (such as the initiation of covert operations against North Vietnam in early 1964, the beginning of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in February 1965, or the deployment of large U.S. combat units to South Vietnam that summer) had all been taken without meaningful discussion of how those decisions fit into an overall strategy designed to achieve a clear and agreed policy goal. To ensure that we did not repeat the Vietnam War mistake of confusing activity with progress, our staff would institute “framing sessions,” which I believed were necessary to foster understanding, before we developed options for the president. These sessions would result in succinct analyses of a particular challenge to national security; the “so what,” or a description of the effect of that challenge on American security, prosperity, and influence; and the recommended goal and objectives. Consistent with Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s observation that it is only worth discussing what is in our power, the framing would include an assumption of the degree of influence the United States and others had over that challenge. Only after key members of the president’s cabinet had discussed, modified, and approved the framing would they share ideas and give guidance concerning how to integrate all elements of national power, and the efforts of like-minded partners, toward the agreed objectives.
Third, we would insist on the presentation of multiple options to the president, as a means of providing best advice from across all departments and agencies of government. When it became clear that President Johnson wanted a strategy that allowed him to avoid difficult decisions on Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara delivered “graduated pressure” to placate both those who advocated for resolute military intervention in the war and those opposed to intervention, whom Johnson called “the sob sisters and peace societies.”3 Yet implicit and flawed assumptions that underpinned the strategy went unchallenged. It is important to provide any president with multiple options because, unlike members of the cabinet or NSC staff, the president is elected and should be the person to set the course for U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy. Presenting a single option designed either to tell a president what he or she wants to hear or to present the consensus position of the cabinet is doing him or her a disservice.
Fourth, we would not assume linear progress toward our objectives and would instead acknowledge the degree of agency that others (whether the authoritarian powers Russia and China, transnational threats such as jihadist terrorist organizations, hostile states such as Iran or North Korea, or multiple actors in emerging arenas of competition in cyberspace or space) had over the future course of events. Two war games in 1964 exposed as false the principal assumption underpinning graduated pressure: “By applying limited, graduated military actions, reinforced by political and economic pressures against a nation providing support for an insurgency, we could cause that nation to decide to reduce greatly, or eliminate altogether, its support for the insurgency. The objective of the attacks and pressures is not to destroy the nation’s ability to provide support but rather to affect its calculation of interests.”4 This vintage example of strategic narcissism is striking for its utter disconnection from the ideology and aspirations that drove the North Vietnamese and Vietnamese Communist leaders and for the implicit assumption that the principal cause of insecurity in South Vietnam was external support from the North. The last turn of the war game imagined the situation three years later, in 1968. The United States had more than five hundred thousand troops in Vietnam and no hope for success. Popular opposition to the war was growing. The war games and their eerily prophetic results, however, were ignored. Bundy thought the findings were too harsh. Therefore, to ensure that the president received the best assessments, we would include measures of effectiveness for every approved strategy. Assessments would go to the president periodically or when an event occurred that presented a new hazard or an opportunity. And we would scrutinize the assumptions on which the strategies were based and be prepared to reframe challenges if assumptions were invalidated.
PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE as well as the study of history shaped my approach to my new responsibilities. Experience in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced me that our inconsistent and flawed strategies in those wars did not satisfy the simple definition of strategy taught in the U.S. military’s professional education system: the intelligent identification, use, and coordination of resources (or ways and means) for the successful attainment of a specific objective, or end. But strategy in war extends beyond logic and reason because it has a moral component. I believed that the strategies in ongoing wars had become morally untenable because they did not explain to the American people how the exertions of their sons and daughters would achieve outcomes worthy of the cost in blood and treasure.5 As in Vietnam, the wars of 9/11 suffered initially from a form of strategic narcissism based on the conceit that American military technological prowess obviated the need to think deeply about the nature of the enemy or the political and human complexities of those wars. That conceit was made possible through the neglect of history and, in particular, of continuities in the very nature of war. It is easy to ignore continuities and assume that future wars or future competitions short of war will be fundamentally different from those of the past. I would therefore do my best to encourage the development of options for the wars in South Asia and the Middle East consistent with four fundamental continuities in the nature of war.
First, war is political. In Afghanistan and Iraq a
nd, later, in Syria, war strategies violated the dictum articulated by eighteenth-century philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz that “war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.”6 Just as there was no simple or purely military solution to the problem of Vietnam, there was no military-only solution for the contemporary wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Instead of learning from the failure to put the strength and legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces at the center of that effort, later American leaders viewed Vietnam as a mistake to be avoided.7 They assumed that the consolidation of military gains politically in Afghanistan and Iraq were not an integral part of war. Yet, successful military operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq are not ends in and of themselves; they are the results of only one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve and sustain political goals. The lesson to learn from the American experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is to be skeptical of concepts that divorce war or competitions short of war from their enduring political nature, particularly concepts that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.
Second, war is human. People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor, and interest. In Vietnam, as predicted, covert raids and tit-for-tat bombing did not convince Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of North Vietnam to desist from supporting the Vietnamese Communist insurgency in the South. Vietnamese Communist leaders were committed to winning even at an extraordinarily high price; they had demonstrated that commitment not only in the Johnson administration’s war games, but also during the First Indochina War against the French. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader war against jihadist terrorists, strategies that simply target enemy leaders or forces do not address the human as well as the political drivers of violence. That is why breaking the cycle of violence, restoring hope, reforming education, and isolating vulnerable populations from jihadist ideology are essential to defeating those who foment hatred to justify violence against innocents. It is also why strategic empathy and, in particular, the effort to understand how emotion and ideology drive and constrain the other is fundamental to improving strategic competence.
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