U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan is generally considered the greatest naval grand strategist the world has ever known. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, he laid out the strategic principle for the employment of U.S. naval power around the world that focused on first capturing and then exploiting “command of the sea,” or simply the ability of your navy to rule the waves and deny that capacity to opposing fleets. Without that resulting sea power, no great power could hope to dominate or even seriously influence the course of wars on land.
During the Cold War, Mahan’s precepts were fairly easy to follow, because the U.S. Navy faced a somewhat symmetrical opponent in the Soviet Navy. But now that the Soviet Navy seemed to be disappearing, naval leaders were becoming nervous about their role in U.S. grand strategy. Added to that growing unease was the sense that the Navy had been badly outclassed by the U.S. Air Force in the just-concluded Desert Storm. The Air Force had all those wonderful cameras in the noses of all those smart bombs that seem to dominate the combat, along with General Norman Schwarzkopf’s famous “left hook”—tanks that encircled most of the Iraqi forces, trapping them for rapid decimation.
Meanwhile, the Navy felt as though no one much appreciated all the aircraft sorties they flew off of carriers or all those Marines that were used to feint an amphibious assault on Kuwait City. Naval leaders were concerned that the wrong lessons were being learned from Desert Storm, meaning lessons that made it seem like you needed a smaller navy or Marine Corps. Everyone in the Pentagon knew that force-structure cuts were coming, meaning both personnel and equipment would be reduced. After all, the American public expected a peace dividend, and the Defense Department’s budget was the logical place to start.
So the naval leadership decided now was the time for a new naval strategic vision, or one that would reassert the utility of naval power as Mahan had a century earlier. Besides the handpicked flags, who later became known as the “Gang of Five,” the real work of this effort would be performed by thirty or so captains and colonels brought together at CNA for several weeks of visioneering. It was going to be a sort of constitutional convention for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. We were going to figure out “the way ahead.”
Every captain and colonel assembled must have harbored dreams of being the next Mahan. That was completely by design, for these guys really were the best and brightest—an amazing array of talent, intelligence, and experience.
I was assigned by CNA to assist the leader of the Gang of Five, a charismatic two-star admiral named Ted Baker. Baker, in turn, worked for the three-star admiral in charge of the whole affair, Vice Admiral Snuffy Smith. The Marines had similarly impressive flags attached, but as usual, as the bigger naval service, the Navy took the lead.
Just days after this historic effort was convened, Bill Manthorpe was brought in to deliver the official view of the Office of Naval Intelligence on the future of the world. To everyone’s amazement, Manthorpe laid it all out on one overhead vugraph. Like all great slides, it was quite simple in form—almost iconic. But what it did was nothing short of profound, for it captured the essence of the emerging debate within the U.S. military regarding the future security environment and the choices we faced as a nation.
Before I go any further, I need to explain the almighty cult of the briefing in Pentagon culture, and in particular the power of the right “slide” in steering important intellectual debates throughout the U.S. military.
The brief is the dominant form of idea transmission in the world of the Pentagon, far more than in any other part of the government and far more than in the business world. Inside the Pentagon, the “killer brief” is everything, and so an amazing amount of effort goes into the construction of slides, which back in 1991 still consisted of hard-copy vugraphs printed out on acetate sheets slapped onto an overhead projector. Today of course they are presented directly off laptops via state-of-the-art projectors.
The killer brief can do wonders for one’s career. It is just that simple inside the defense community: good briefers do what they will, and bad briefers do what they must. Every battle I have won in my career began with a brief that outperformed the ideas presented by competitors. Inside the Pentagon, that is how bureaucratic wars are essentially waged—one briefing room at a time. If you want to get to someone high up in the Administration, you will have to go through a plethora of gatekeepers, or lower officials whose goal in life is nothing less than to spare their “principal” from the proverbial “briefer from hell.” On the other hand, these gatekeepers want nothing more than to deliver the brief “that must be seen.” Many of them are quite explicit when you start your brief. They will say, “Do you know why you are giving me this brief?” If you say yes, then every comment they will offer you during your presentation will be explicit advice on how to reshape your material for presentation to their principal. For example, I was told once by an Assistant Secretary of Defense to remove the phrase “shit happens” from one of my slides prior to delivering the brief to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who at that time was a man notorious for his dislike of profanity of any sort. I was also told which slides I should dwell on, and where I should expect a rude question or two.
As an analyst, you want nothing more than to produce that killer brief and run it up the chain, because, frankly, that is just about the only way you ever get into the offices of the senior-most officials. A killer article will not do it, because the official can simply peruse a summary prepared by his staff. Only the killer brief can get you that most valued of Washington commodities—face time with a senior government official. Get your ideas to the right senior official (members of Congress can be especially good conduits), and you might find your ideas being briefed to the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State, or passed along to the President himself. If your timing is right, you can change U.S. policy or help to redefine its expression. In short, the right brief can change history.
A killer brief or slide can be especially powerful when delivered as a lead-in to some officially convened decision-making event involving senior leaders. These are the briefs most pol-mil analysts would give their eyeteeth for—the “briefing up” of top military brass as they begin some exclusive workshop or retreat where “straphangers” (or nonvoting aides and other lackeys) are not allowed and discussions are “off the record.” These no-holds-barred insider forums are where the biggest decisions are made, the ultimate one being “the Tank,” where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly. What they produce tends to be the most important steering policy documents, to include—in this historic instance—the precedent-setting publication known as the “white paper” signed out by the Secretary of Navy himself, along with the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Now, to hear Mr. Manthorpe present the slide, there really wasn’t any choice to be had, because, like all talented grand strategists, he had a particular vision in mind. I disagreed with that vision, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the slide as he talked his way through it. The visual image was simply that arresting.
The chart featured two axes: the horizontal one displaying time, or the unfolding post-Cold War era, and the vertical one displaying threat, gauged from low to high.◈ Manthorpe’s argument was straightforward: The great Soviet threat that had dominated all strategic planning for decades was rapidly dissipating, but no matter how much it declined, it was unlikely to be surpassed by that of the aggregate rest-of-world (or ROW) threat. In effect, the ROW threat was the Pentagon’s way of expressing the cumulative total of lesser-included scenarios, meaning those non-great-power threats not big enough to size and shape your forces around. Instead, the normal practice at that time was deciding how many armored divisions or aircraft carriers America needed based on the biggest high-end threat you could identify—the Big One dujour. The assumption at the time was that if we built for the Big One, then that same mix of forces would adequately handle all the smaller threats, but not vice versa—hence the hierarchy.
As far as Manthorpe was concerned, the U.S. military needed to stay focused on the Big One. The Russians might have exited stage right for now, he cautioned, but if history was a guide, and Manthorpe believed it was, then the Russians would probably become resurgent within a twenty-year time frame—just as the Germans had following their defeat in World War I. Manthorpe also held out the notion that China could replace Russia as the source of that resurgent long-term threat, but his money was on Russia.
I absolutely disagreed with Manthorpe’s judgment, though I recognized the power of his argument. As a Soviet expert, I knew the Big Red Machine was kaput not just for the 1990s but for all time, and as a political scientist tracking Deng Xiaoping’s amazing reforms in China, I saw a country that was finally joining the world, not setting itself up for confrontation. That did not mean I saw no need for employing U.S. military power around the world—far from it. I just believed the time for focusing on the Big One had passed, and that now it was time to adjust to a world of lesser includeds. That is what I advised every chance I got with Ted Baker and all the other flags involved in the process.
What was so immensely daring about Manthorpe’s slide was that it outlined the major choices we had as a nation, and then made a bold call regarding the correct choice—at least in Bill’s mind. I was stunned by his presentation. I had never seen anything so strategically audacious in my life. Every brief I had ever seen on the “strategic environment” since arriving in Washington had consisted of slide upon slide cataloging every “cat and dog” threat the briefer could dream up. You never put all your eggs in one basket in the carefully hedging environment that was Pentagon planning in the early 1990s.
But Manthorpe was not interested in covering his rear end. He had a call to make and he made it—unequivocally. I respected the courage of his brief immensely. While intuitively I knew I disagreed with his final judgment, I had to marvel at his analysis. The guy became my hero on the spot, because I knew someday I wanted a visual just like that—one that would make everything clear in one sweeping glance of both history and the strategic environment. I just wanted mine to prove the opposite point: The future was not about dealing with the biggest threat in the environment, but dealing with the environment of threats. Over time, that meant weaning the Pentagon off China and refocusing it on those parts of the world being left behind by globalization.
Manthorpe’s slide became, in many ways, the Rorschach test upon which all future visions could be tested. As such, the participants in this vision effort, known prosaically as the Naval Forces Capabilities Planning Effort (or NFCPE), debated it endlessly. You could basically divide all those captains and colonels into three camps.
The camps and their corresponding visions were differentiated by how far down the Manthorpe Curve they sought to peer in search of the “compelling” national security task. The first camp I dubbed the Transitioneers, because they focused on the near term. They saw a world minus the Soviets as quite chaotic, and so they believed U.S. forces needed to be out in the world, dealing with as many of those lesser includeds as possible so as to assure the transition to a safer era. In the naval community, this camp was primarily the surface fleet officers and the Marines, both of whom were ready to embrace the sort of other-than-war operations that would dominate the 1990s. This group figured that if they managed the world well, the major threat curve would never again turn upward, because all other great powers would accept our benign status as sole military superpower. In essence, their notion was “Master the lesser includeds to preclude the appearance of the Big One.”
The second camp looked farther down the curve, focusing on Manthorpe’s major-threat trough. They were not interested in trying to manage the world, because they saw that as a drain on much-needed warfighting assets. Instead, they wanted to gear up for the next Desert Storm, figuring the Persian Gulf tussle with Saddam would prove the template for future regional conflicts. Their argument was that if America handled would-be regional hegemons well, then no great power would be likely to rise in opposition to our management of the global security environment. This camp was populated by the naval air, or carrier, community, whose vision was, in effect, to walk softly and carry a big stick. Hence I named this camp the Big Sticks. While the Big Sticks agreed with the Transitioneers’ logic of mastering lesser includeds, they parted ways over the choice of which lesser includeds we should focus on. Their motto might be described as “Not all lesser includeds are created equal.”
The final camp rejected both the near-term and mid-term foci of the other camps, and instead looked the farthest down the Manthorpe Curve. By doing so, they effectively rejected any focus on the lesser includeds, preferring instead to wait for signs of the Big One—no matter how long that took. This group, populated mostly by the submarine community, fretted over a resurgent Russia as much as Manthorpe did, so I called them the Cold Worriers. But to be fair, their real argument was that America needed to keep its powder dry and stay technologically ahead of any great power that might sneak up on us in coming decades. Like Manthorpe, they figured the United States was living in a rerun of the 1920s, so we might as well start planning for the next world war, however it was going to unfold.
The opportunity to participate in these historic discussions was the chance of a lifetime. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, though, because the room was full of would-be Mahans, each trying to be the one whose brilliance would be imprinted on new strategic doctrine. As the weeks dragged on without resolution, each of the Gang of Five would anoint his own personal best boy to go off on his own and try writing the magnum opus all of us knew would eventually have to be written. In each and every painful incident, the resulting personal vision was summarily rejected by the congress as a whole.
Over time, the divisions of thought manifested themselves in the self-selection of the officers into various working groups, with the most iconoclastic of the quartet calling themselves the F Troop, led by a serving air wing commander named Howard “Rusty” Petrea. The lead thinker there was a brilliant, dry-witted captain who flew helicopters for a living, Bradd Hayes. Bradd was an enigma to just about everyone. A devout Mormon, he routinely had us in stitches with his shockingly bawdy sense of humor. More amazing, given all the brass hanging around, he started writing a daily parody of the Pentagon’s news-clipping service, known as the Early Bird, in which he not only made fun of the Gang of Five but also mercilessly lampooned the many national security “giants” we regularly hosted to brief the group as a whole. Bradd was a fearless sort of figure in those days—a captain who knew he would never become admiral and so had nothing to lose by speaking his mind. His influence over the group was enormous, because he was willing to state truths in an uncompromising fashion—a skill he retains today as a professor at the Naval War College.
As with all such efforts, we focused our daily grind on generating the master brief that would eventually spell out our vision to the Secretary of the Navy, so at the end of each day the various working groups would present their competing concepts, and then overnight a special “Integrators” group would merge those concepts for review by everyone the following morning. Those sessions were brutal. A small fire extinguisher was kept on hand during these debates. If anyone thought a particularly stupid statement had been made, they were allowed to take the extinguisher and present it to the offending party. It started out as a funny way to avoiding having people yell out “bullshit” when someone else was talking, but after a few weeks officers were angrily slamming that heavy metal canister down on tables with enough force to make most of us jump.
I was part of that Integrators group, working for probably the most able leader I have ever met, then Brigadier General-select Tom Wilkerson of the Marine Corps. Wilkerson’s great gift was that he could lead people toward decisions they did not want to make. He did it with humor (he sounded amazingly like comedian Dana Carvey), grace, and a natural sense of command. Wilkerson assigned me to write a script to go along with the
PowerPoint slides as we built them. In effect, I became the group’s historian, because my text had to reflect all the debate that went into the tortuously agreed-upon bullets. Despite the eighteen-hour days during my wife’s first pregnancy, I loved this assignment. Sure, I left Vonne eating alone on Thanksgiving, but I was part of history!
Our work came to a head after close to two months of nonstop debate. Tensions ran high, because the effort was dragging on too long, plus the Department of Navy was simultaneously being rocked by the infamous Tailhook scandal, in which a host of officers had been accused of sexual assault at an annual aviators’ conference. As the scandal migrated up the ranks in search of heads to roll, fuses grew shorter at our meetings. In one memorable incident, a member of the Gang of Five, Rear Admiral Dave Oliver, jumped over a table during a brief, yanked the acetate vugraph off the overhead projector, and destroyed it on the spot. Oliver had previously warned the captain giving the brief about one bullet that he found particularly offensive (the idea of refitting nuclear missile submarines with cruise missiles), declaring that if he ever saw it again, he would tear it off with his bare teeth (which he did).◈ This minor brouhaha was descriptive of the debates we were having at the time: the so-called rag-top option (the resulting sub was described as a “convertible”) spoke to moving away from the Big One, where nuclear missiles occupied the top roost of the force-structure pantheon, to a world of lesser includeds, in which America’s typical military strikes would involve conventional missiles. In 1992, the idea seemed sacrilegious to an old nuke submariner like Oliver, but Charlie Schaefer’s then-“crazy idea” is being implemented by the Navy today.◈
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