Betts-StrategyIllusion-2000.pdf

Is Strategy an Illusion? Author(s): Richard K. Betts Source: International Security , Fall, 2000, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall, 2000), pp. 5-50 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2626752 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2626752?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Security This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an IIlusion? Richard K. Betts Strategy is the essen- tial ingredient for making war either politically effective or morally tenable. It is the link between military means and political ends, the scheme for how to make one produce the other. Without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure. Without strategy, power is a loose cannon and war is mindless. Mindless killing can only be criminal. Politicians and soldiers may debate which strategic choice is best, but only pacifists can doubt that strategy is necessary. Because strategy is necessary, however, does not mean that it is possible. Those who experience or study many wars find strong reasons to doubt that strategists can know enough about causes, effects, and intervening variables to make the operations planned produce the outcomes desired. To skeptics, effec- tive strategy is often an illusion because what happens in the gap between pol- icy objectives and war outcomes is too complex and unpredictable to be manipulated to a specified end. When this is true, war cannot be a legitimate instrument of policy. This article surveys ten critiques that throw the practicability of strategy into question. It pulls together many arguments that emerge in bits and pieces from a variety of sources. Some are my own formulation of skepticism implicit but unformed in others' observations; few analysts have yet attacked the general viability of strategy head-on. The notion that effective strategy must be an illu- sion emerges cumulatively from arguments that: strategies cannot be evalu- ated because there are no agreed criteria for which are good or bad; there is little demonstrable relationship between strategies and outcomes in war; good strategies can seldom be formulated because of policymakers' biases; if good strategies are formulated, they cannot be executed because of organizations' limitations; and other points explored below. Unifying themes include the bar- Richard K. Betts is Leo A. Shifrin Professor and Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Co lulmbia University, and Senior Fellozv at the Couincil on Foreign Relations. For comments on earlier drafts the author thanks Yael Aronoff, Robert Art, David Baldwin, Eliot Cohen, Timothy Crawford, Scott Douglas, George Downs, Annette Baker Fox, Charles Glaser, Arman Grigorian, Michael Handel, Robert Jervis, Ronald Krebs, Alan Kuperman, Peter Liberman, Charles Miller, Allan Millet, Andrew Moravcsik, Rebecca Murphy, Barry Posen, Cynthia Roberts, Gideon Rose, Stephen Rosen, Scott Sagan, Warner Schilling, Randall Schweller, Mark Sheetz, Jack Snyder, Stephen Van Evera, Kenneth Waltz, Dessislava Zagorcheva, Philip Zelikow, and Kimberly Marten Zisk. Space limitations preclude dealing with many good points they raised. Betts is also grateful for comments by participants in a conference on scholarship inspired by the work of Sam- uel Huntington held in Cambridge in 1995, and, in 1999, seminars at Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies, Harvard's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the University of Chi- cago's Program on International Security Policy, and MIT's Security Studies Program. Initerinatioinal Security, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 5-50 ? 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 5 This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 6 riers to prediction and control imposed by political and military complexity; the pervasive undertow of goal displacement in the behavior of governments and militaries that reverses the canonical relationship between ends and means; and the greater difficulty of strategies of coercion, which aim to change adversaries' policies, as compared to strategies of control, which impose the objective by destroying capabilities to resist. In this article strategy is defined as a plan for using military means to achieve political ends, or as Clausewitz put it, "the use of engagements for the object of the war."' If effective military strategy is to be real rather than illu- sory, one must be able to devise a rational scheme to achieve an objective through combat or the threat of it; implement the scheme with forces; keep the plan working in the face of enemy reactions (which should be anticipated in the plan); and achieve something close to the objective. Rational strategic be- havior should be value maximizing, choosing appropriate means according to economistic calculations of cost and benefit. These general descriptions leave room for confusions. Let me clarify two. First, this essay is most concerned with strategy as a cause of victory that can be distinguished from raw power. The distinction is blurred when the strategy is simple attrition, the direct application of superior resources to defeat the en- emy by having the last man standing. Attrition meets the definition of strategy when it is used by a strong power against a weak one, and circumstances sometimes make it the right choice. In those cases, however, strategy is not in- teresting, because it does not tell us more than we could estimate from the dis- tribution of power. Strategy is most important when it provides value added to resources, functions as a force multiplier, and offers a way to beat an adversary with equivalent resources or to minimize the cost of defeating an inferior. Second, strategies are chains of relationships among means and ends that span several levels of analysis, from the maneuvers of units in specific engage- ments through larger campaigns, whole wars, grand strategies, and foreign policies. The reader is forewarned that this article blithely moves back and forth across these levels. Considering examples at different levels of analysis is reasonable as long as the focus remains on the linkages in the hierarchy of pol- icy, strategy, and operations, where the logic at each level is supposed to gov- ern the one below and serve the one above. A scheme for how to use a particular operation to achieve a larger military objective, or a foreign policy decision that requires certain military actions, are both strategic matters at dif- 1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 128 (emphasis deleted) and p. 181. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 7 ferent levels in the chain between means and ends. Strategy fails when some link in the planned chain of cause and effect from low-level tactics to high-level political outcomes is broken, when military objectives come to be pursued for their own sake without reference to their political effect, or when policy initia- tives depend on military options that are infeasible. The issue for strategy is whether choices at any level do or do not maintain a logical consistency with levels above and below, and ultimately a consistency between political ends and military means. Why is a long article on whether strategy is an illusion necessary? Because many are insensitive to the question, forgetting that strategy is a distinct plan between policy and operations, an idea for connecting the two rather than ei- ther of the two themselves. Among practitioners, politicians often conflate strategy with policy objectives (focusing on what the desired outcome should be, simply assuming that force will move the adversary toward it), while sol- diers often conflate strategy with operations (focusing on how to destroy tar- gets or defeat enemies tactically, assuming that positive military effects mean positive policy effects). Both policymakers and soldiers have more than they can handle, working around the clock, to deal with the demanding problems in their respective realms, with neither focusing intently on the linkage-the bridge between objectives and operations, the mechanism by which combat will achieve objectives. Strategy becomes whatever slogans and unexamined assumptions occur to them in the moments left over from coping with their main preoccupations. Among academics, many do not take seriously the barriers to effective strategy. A generation ago students were more immersed in literature that emphasized nonrational patterns of decision, implementation, and outcome. The brief vogue of bureaucratic politics theory in the 1970s was fed by disil- lusionment over U.S. policy in Vietnam: It seemed impossible that the civilian and military leaders who produced that disaster could have known what they were doing. Soon, though, the pendulum swung back. Rationalist theories returned to the fore and have remained ascendant since. Political science no longer encourages operational analysis as a prime mission for ambitious schol- ars. Thus few of them anymore learn enough about the processes of decision- making or military operations to grasp how hard it is to implement strategic plans, and few focus on the conversion processes that open gaps between what government leaders decide to do and what government organizations imple- menting those decisions actually do do. Rationalist models provide the best normative standards for what strategists ought to try to do, but they are only heuristic beginnings for real strategies which, by definition, must be demon- This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 8 strably practical. "The question that matters in strategy is: Will the idea work?" as Bernard Brodie writes. "In that respect it is like other branches of politics and like any of the applied sciences, and not at all like pure science, where the function of theory is to describe, organize, and explain and not to prescribe."2 The article groups four sets of critiques. In the first set, Critique 1 argues that strategy cannot reasonably be judged in advance because anything goes: Virtually any choice-even one that later proves disastrous-can be justified before it is tried. Critique 2 is that we cannot use hindsight to select model strategies because experience shows that nothing goes: The record of strategies played out reveals so little correspondence between plans and outcomes that strategic choice proves to be seldom more than a shot in the dark. In the first criticism, strategy is no better than a crapshoot; in the second, it is not even that, but instead a "random walk." The rest of the article explores why it is so hard to use strategy to integrate ends and means: Critiques 3-5 discuss psychological barriers; 6-8 concern or- ganizational processes and pathologies; and 9 and 10 are about political com- plications. Several cases are used recurrently as illustrations; using different facets of a single case underlines the multiplicity of barriers to strategic effectiveness. Following each critique is a response that tries to refute or mitigate it. The aim of the responses is to salvage the practice of strategy against the cumula- tive weight of the criticisms. The article is not meant to be a screed against strategy, and I do not accept the pacifism that is the only legitimate alternative to belief in the possibility of strategy. The salvage mission succeeds, however, only in part. The essay concludes with reflections on the implications of a dis- mal view of the limits of strategy. Risk or Uncertainty: Anything Goes in Foresight, Nothing Goes in Hindsight Strategies can be judged looking backward, but they must be chosen looking forward. If any choice of action can be deemed strategically reasonable before- hand, or none can be afterward, strategy cannot be meaningful. CRITIQUE 1: LUCK VERSUS GENIUS Strategy is an illusion because it is impractical to judge in advance w reasonable or which strategy is less justifiable than another. The illusion 2. Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 452-453 (emphasis deleted). This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? I 9 cause observers confuse what they know about results of past strategic choices with what they can expect strategists to know before the choices are tested. Almost any strategy can be rationalized and no rationale falsified at the time that a strategy must be chosen. If strategy is to be useful, there must be adequate criteria for judging be- tween smart and stupid strategies and between reasonable and excessive risks. This must be done in terms of what decisionmakers know when they choose strategies, not what proves out after strategies are tried. Successful strategy must also achieve an objective at acceptable cost. The best strategy does so not just effectively but efficiently as well-at the lowest cost of any option. Accept- able cost cannot be determined easily or precisely, however, because there is no unit of account for weighing objectives and prices in the way that money pro- vides for market exchange. Notions about acceptable cost may also prove very volatile, as political circumstances change or costs accumulate. (Economists know that sunk costs should not influence decisions, but psychologists know that they do.) There must be some judgment about acceptable cost, however imprecise it may be, or there is no basis on which to decide why some causes are worth fighting for and others not. Because strategic choices depend on estimates about risks and subjective judgments about the value of the stakes, they are gambles. If there is scant danger of failure, counterproductive results, or excessive cost, the strategic problem is not challenging. If strategic decisions are gambles, however, it is hardly reasonable to judge one as foolish simply because hindsight shows that it failed. The wisdom of a choice of action also depends on the objective it is meant to serve. Strategy may be immune to criticism if the objective could not fail to be achieved. For example, U.S. spokesmen declared that the objective of Operation Desert Fox-the four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998-was to "de- grade" Saddam Hussein's capabilities. Any combat action would do that. Strat- egy cannot be faulted, however, just because the objective it serves is dubious to the observer, if it makes sense in terms of a different value of concern to the one making the decision. If the decisionmaker puts priority on a moral value that conflicts with material welfare (e.g., honor), even self-destructive behavior can be strategic. These qualifications put assessment on a slippery slope, where it becomes difficult to discredit any strategic choice, and the concept of strate- gic behavior degenerates into indeterminacy and nonfalsifiability.3 3. "If, on one hand, the investigator superimposes a clear and definite pattern of tastes on eco- nomic actors and assigns a clear and definite mode of rationality to them, then the possibility of determinate theoretical explanations is increased. If, on the other hand, tastes and modes of ratio- This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 10 What amount of risk is strategically sensible? Without hindsight, it proves hard to distinguish calculated risks from shots in the dark. Judgment is often contaminated by hindsight, as good fortune is mistaken for strategic foresight. Before the fact, what kind of a gambler should a respectable strategist be: a per- centage player or a high roller? It is not easy to prescribe the cautious percentage-player model even if we want to, because the odds of military success or failure are never as clear be- fore the fact as they seem to be in hindsight. Success makes the estimable odds before the fact seem better than they were, and failure makes them seem worse. Even if odds are calculable in advance, what do we make of a strategist who has a 30 percent chance and wins, compared with one who has a 40 per- cent chance but loses? Can we call the first wise and the second wrong, or both wrong or right? By what standards can one say which choices are reasonable attempts that do not pan out and which are egregious miscalculations, which ones reflect strategic genius and which simply good luck? Among practitioners and observers of military affairs, there is no consensus whatever on the abso- lutely fundamental question of what degree of risk is acceptable. Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Douglas MacArthur all gambled more than once, and all won some and lost some. Hitler rolled the dice several times against the advice of prudent generals, and won stunning victories from the 1930s until his two big mistakes in 1941: attacking the Soviet Union and de- claring war on the United States. Churchill's inspiration contributed to the di- saster of Gallipoli in 1915 but also to Britain's finest hour in 1940. In 1950 MacArthur overrode the fears of U.S. military leaders that a landing at Inchon would be a fiasco and he scored a stunning success, then took a similar gamble in splitting his force on the march to the Yalu and caused a calamity. In hind- sight most judge Hitler to be strategically foolish, Churchill brilliant, and Mac- Arthur either one, depending on the observer's political sympathies. Do the strategies chosen warrant such differing verdicts? Or are the prevalent judg- nal action are regarded as idiosyncratic and variable from actor to actor, then theoretical determi- nacy is lost as analysis moves in the direction of relativism of tastes and a phenomenological conception of the actor." Neil J. Smelser, "The Rational Choice Perspective: A Theoretical Assess- ment," Rationality and Society, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 1992), p. 399; see also pp. 398, 400-401, 403. These problems apply to strategies for preventing wars as well as fighting them. "One disturbing possibility lies at the intersection of the nonfalsifiable character of the weak model [of deterrence] and the difficulty of testing any proposition about the nature of deterrence empirically.... history rarely presents evidence that unambiguously falsifies the weak version of rational deterrence the- ory." George W. Downs, "The Rational Deterrence Debate," World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 2 (January 1989), p. 227. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? I 11 ments really not about these leaders' strategic sense, but about the higher val- ues for which they stood? Consider Churchill more carefully, since Britain's resistance alone after the fall of France ranks among the epochal decisions of the past century. Only after the fact did it seem obvious that the British should have continued to fight af- ter June 1940, risking invasion and occupation (or at least a draining war of at- trition they could not win), rather than make peace when Hitler was willing to "partition the world" with them.4 The gamble made sense if there were good odds that the Soviet Union or the United States would save the day, but in 1940 either eventuality was a hope, not a probability. It was hardly terrible for For- eign Secretary Lord Halifax to say, as he did on May 26, that "if we could ob- tain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we would be foolish if we did not accept them."5 The rationales in 1940 for how Britain could win rested on underestimation of the German economy, ungrounded faith in strategic bombing, and over- estimation of the U.S. propensity to intervene. Nor did most British leaders be- lieve that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union until a few weeks before he did. Churchill's decision seems less risky if the British knew for sure that the Germans lacked the amphibious capability to invade, and would lose the Bat- tle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. These are many ifs, and still would not offer a chance of defeating Germany--the only thing that would make con- tinued combat and losses, as opposed to negotiated peace, worthwhile. Chur- chill's poor excuse for a victory strategy, apart from the hope of rescue by the Americans and the Russians, was to peck at the periphery of Festung Europa, foment insurrection in the occupied countries, and pray for a coup in Berlin. As David Reynolds concludes, "In 1940 Churchill and his colleagues made the right decision-but they did so for the wrong reasons."6 This is another way of saying, "Thank God for bad strategy." 4. The deal would have been to let Britain keep its empire while Germany kept Europe. Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich, trans. Anthony Fothergill (Berkeley: University of California Press, n.d.), pp. 93-94; Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims, Vol. 1, Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), pp. 157-158; and Wilhelm Deist, "The Road to Ideological War: Germany, 1918-1945," in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1994), p. 388. 5. Quoted in John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 117. 6. David Reynolds, "Churchill and the British 'Decision' to Fight on in 1940," in Richard Lang- horne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of FH. Hinsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 147, 154-155, 156-160, 163, 167. "A belief which is unjustified... may well be instrumentally useful, but it seems odd to call it rational. Ra- This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 12 None of this means that the British should not have made the gamble. Who can quarrel with the results? It does suggest, however, that the decision should be approved on grounds other than strategic logic. Churchill's odds were not clearly better than Hitler's. Hitler had rationales for invading the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States: Attacking the Soviets was preventive, because their power was increasing; the British would not come to terms as long as they held out hope for Russian assistance; the Soviet Army was less formidable than the French; American entry into the war was inevitable, but it would take at least a year for American power to be applied, by which time the war would be over and the continent secured; declaring war on the United States kept faith with Axis treaty obligations and increased the chances that the Japanese would divert Soviet as well as American power. Hitler also had inad- equate intelligence on the strength of Soviet forces, at the same time that the string of German victories in Poland, Norway, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia gave no reason to doubt Wehrmacht invincibility. Only in hindsight should those rationales seem wilder than Churchill's.7 Apart from the fact that it paid off, few are willing to challenge Churchill's gamble against the odds because of how crucial it was to the survival of liberalism in Europe and perhaps the world.8 That is, the ambit for functional rationality is widened by considerations of higher rationality. Many feel com- fortable endorsing the risk because of a visceral conviction that a value higher than life was at stake. How else to justify Churchill's chilling declaration, "If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground"?9 This was grisly, absolut- ist, nationalist idealism. tionality... is a variety of intentionality. For something to be rational, it has to be within the scope of conscious, deliberate action or reflection. Useful false beliefs obtain by fluke, not by conscious reflection upon the evidence." Jon Elster, Solomonic Judgments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 7. Churchill's rationale for confidence in the defensibility of England is set out in his June 18, 1940, speech in the House of Commons. See "Their Finest Hour," in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, Vol. 6 (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), pp. 6231-6238. 7. Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1982), pp. 130-133. 8. In terms of imperial interests, which were a powerful motive at the time, the result is different. Churchill declared, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liqui- dation of the British Empire," but that is more or less what he did-a reason that reactionary revi- sionists criticize his failure to consider a deal with Berlin. John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), chaps. 37, 38 (quotation on p. 431); and Charmley, Churchill's Grand Alliance (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), chaps. 5, 19-20. 9. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939-1941 (London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 420. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? 1 13 High risk does not in itself discredit a strategy. The logic of choice depends on expected utility. If the interest at stake is great enough and the anticipated costs of failure low enough, a gamble can be sensible even if its odds of success are low. In cases we have been discussing, the interests at stake were large but the prospective costs of failure were large as well. Moreover, there is little evi- dence that many decisionmakers think in terms of specific gradations of utility or likelihood. As the subsequent discussion of cognitive processes notes, they often think categorically rather than probabilistically, and see the interest at stake as close to absolute. Can any values or interests be excluded as legitimate grounds for choice if we are considering the logic of strategy rather than judging the values them- selves? If not, virtually any action can be rationalized, even suicide. Everything works for something. Once moral values like honor or ideology are allowed to trump material values of survival and prosperity, any long-shot scheme can be justified. There is always some preference function by which a choice seems valid-especially given that policymakers juggle numerous values and seldom make clear what their rank order is. If the strategist's logic proves faulty in se- lecting means appropriate to ends, the fault can usually be attributed to imper- fect information. If the problem is that the ends are wrong, we are in the realm of policy and values, not strategy. As Gen. Henry Pownall confided to his diary in 1940, Churchill was useful, but "also a real danger, always tempted by the objective, never counting his resources to see if the objective is attainable."10 Churchill's willingness to have the English choke in their own blood was functionally rational as long as "death before dishonor" defined the rank order of values to be served by strategy. But this sentiment is not far from Hindenburg's comment that he preferred "an honorable end to a shameful peace," which most would see as evidence of "the mentality of a military caste that attached little importance to the nation's vital interests."11 Only the differ- ence in the moral background of these two invocations of honor, not the strate- gic logic attached to either, can account for why we endorse one and not the other. Nor is Churchill's rationale that far from the willingness of Japan's leaders in 1941 to risk annihilation by attacking the United States. Some judge that deci- sion to be rational even in standard terms of national security calculations, given the economic strangulation that Tokyo faced and the cabinet's hope that 10. Quoted in Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 23-24. 11. Wilhelm Deist, "The Road to Ideological War," in Murray, Knox, and Bernstein, Making of Strategy, p. 356. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 14 limited war could end in negotiated peace (which before December 7 was a possibility envisioned by American military leaders as well).12 Others reject this interpretation, seeing Japanese culture at the time as romantically anti- strategic, or decisionmakers as simply unthinking and unrealistic. "Japanese values appeared to decree the rejection not merely of mercantile rationality but of strategy itself," writes MacGregor Knox, who goes on to quote accordingly from The Way of the Warrior, an eighteenth-century work of Samurai morality that was extremely popular just before World War II: "Calculating people are contemptible... common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply be- come desperate and 'crazy to die.'13 Churchill may have simply had better luck than Tojo. RESPONSE 1 Issues entwined in assessing a strategic choice include chances of success, costs of failure, value of the objective, alternate strategic options, and acceptability of the consequences of not fighting. After assessing the value of the stakes, the fundamental question is the degree of acceptable risk in operations designed to secure them. It is more reasonable to gamble against high odds when the objec- tive is truly vital-in the strictest sense (meaning literally necessary to life)- and there is no satisfactory alternative option, than it is if the interest is not ab- solute or another less risky course of action might suffice. Even if real strate- gists rarely reason carefully in all these terms, we can use them as a basis for judgments about strategy in principle. This is a defense against the notion that in strategy anything goes. Facing the full implications, however, will leave many uneasy. These standards, together with the principle that we must judge according to what was reasonable before the fact rather than in light of what becomes known afterward, would require condemning some successes and excusing some failures. If we reject the advance to the Yalu, we may also have to reject the magnificent assault on Inchon. Apart from MacArthur, military leaders op- posed the landing because an overwhelming number of factors made it appear foolhardy.14 One cannot say there was no choice. Other options offered less risk 12. Scott D. Sagan, "Origins of the Pacific War," in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 345-347. 13. Quoted in MacGregor Knox, "Conclusion," in Murray, Knox, and Bernstein, Making of Strategy, p. 634. See also Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1963), pp. 84-85, 95. 14. Richard K. Betts, "Strategic Surprise for War Termination: Inchon, Dienbienphu, and Tet," in Klaus Knorr and Patrick Morgan, eds., Strategic Military Surprise: Incentives and Opportunities (New This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 15 of catastrophic failure. Army Chief of Staff Lawton Collins preferred to use the 70,000 men earmarked for Inchon to support the breakout from the Pusan per- imeter or for an amphibious flanking operation closer to Pusan."5 These alter- natives implied a more costly campaign of attrition back up the peninsula. The success of the long shot at Inchon averted these costs, and yielded one of the most impressive coups de main of the twentieth century. With the comfort of hindsight, one may celebrate that roll of the dice. To see it as strategic genius rather than a stroke of luck, however, or to see it as less reckless than the opera- tions near the Yalu, requires that prop of hindsight which strategic planners do not have. By criteria of forecasting rather than hindsight, it is also unreasonable to be more critical of Churchill's promotion of the Gallipoli campaign than of his persistence in 1940. There were errors at the highest level of command in 1915, but they did not doom the campaign. The critical mistakes were operational and tactical choices-failures to adapt-by the men on the spot.16 As to alter- native options, the obstacles to strategic success in the Dardanelles were not overwhelming, and success might have yielded a decisive shift in the fortunes of war years earlier than 1918. Do we give better marks for 1940 because the stakes were so much higher, and thus deserving of absolute commitment? Yes, but because of the moral imperative behind the strategy, not the economistic standards of strategy itself. It is hard to keep clear the distinctions between material and moral stan- dards for strategic choice, because in practice it is hard to have any but a seat- of-the-pants estimate of the odds for a strategy's success or its relative costs and benefits, or to know the counterfactual (what would happen if a different option is chosen). It is especially easy for many to endorse high-risk commit- ments on behalf of subjective values such as national honor because it is often unclear how the implications differ from a material standard of interest. Mate- rial standards are most often identified with realist theories of international politics, but while generally better than the alternatives for diagnosing prob- Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1983), pp. 148-153. To be accurate, the advance to the Yalu was not MacArthur's decision alone. 15. Clay Blair, The Forgotten War (New York: Times Books, 1987), pp. 224-226. 16. Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990), chap. 6; and B.H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914-1918 (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1930), pp. 143-174. Churchill was also less responsible for the land operation at Gallipoli than for the naval attack in the Dardanelles. Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli (London: Hamish Hamil- ton, 1956), pp. 45-47; Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 2 (New York: Scribner's, 1923), chaps. 2, 7-8; Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian's Journal (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 56-58; and Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: B.T. Batsford, 1965), p. 41. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 16 lems and constraints, realism is quite underdetermining. It prescribes objec- tives like security, wealth, and power, but does not prescribe what strategies work best to attain them.17 For insight into which strategies work, it is neces- sary to resort to hindsight. CRITIQUE 2: RANDOMNESS VERSUS PREDICTION Strategy is an illusion because results do not follow plans. Complexity and contin- gency preclude controlling causes well enough to produce desired effects. Hindsight re- veals little connection between the design and denouement of strategies. The problem before the fact appears to be estimating risk (probability of failure), but the record after the fact suggests that the real problem is pure uncertainty (insufficient basis for esti- mating any odds). To skeptics, the odds against a strategy working are very high. First, half of all strategies-the losers'-must fail by definition. Second, many strategies in the other half do not work either. Some win not because of their strategies, but because of their superior power; contending strategies may cancel each other's effects more easily than an imbalance of capability can be overcome by strat- egy. Third, some win their wars but lose the peace, or they achieve acceptable outcomes, but not ones they set out to achieve through the war. Either case in- validates strategy, because the purpose of strategy is to achieve stipulated aims. Without believing in some measure of predictability, one cannot believe in strategic calculation. For strategy to have hope of working better than a shot in the dark, it must be possible to analyze patterns of military and political cause and effect, identify which instruments produce which effects in which circum- stances, and apply the lessons to future choices. Unless strategists can show that a particular choice in particular circumstances is likely to produce a partic- ular outcome, they are out of business. Disenchantment with all prediction im- plies the darkest view-a strategic nihilism that should make war morally indefensible for any but powers so overwhelmingly superior that they could not lose even if they tried. Historians suspicious of theory and generalization are more susceptible to skepticism about prediction and control than are social scientists. One example 17. "Defenders of realism might argue that the theory is intended to be probabilistic rather than determinative.... Nevertheless, when the range of possible outcomes extends from appeasement to preventive war, one is justified in asking whether alternative approaches might do better." Mat- thew Evangelista, "Internal and External Constraints on Grand Strategy," in Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 167. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 17 is Tolstoy's sweeping view that individuals cannot control events, that history is "a succession of 'accidents' whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable."18 Ronald Spector sees a dismal record in history: Rulers and politicians have a difficult time in making war or preparation for war serve the ends of statecraft. For every case of England under Pitt or Ger- many under Bismarck where success is achieved through careful orchestration of military and political means, there are a dozen other cases of countries, such as Spain in the seventeenth century, Russia in 1904, and Austria-Hungary in 1914.... Even more common are those governments who find that having fought a harrowing and costly war, and having strained and distorted their economies to achieve a military success, they are scarcely better off than be- fore. Spain and France in the sixteenth century, Britain and Holland in the sev- enteenth century, France and Britain in the eighteenth century.19 There are numerous variations on the theme. Thoughtful strategic initiatives sometimes fail, whereas thoughtless ones sometimes work. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were seen as consummate strategists, but the grand strategy of detente with Moscow that they crafted carefully crumbled within a few years and gave way to a reborn Cold War. Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Samuel Berger, on the other hand, were widely regarded as bunglers when they launched a limited air war against Serbia, with no strategic rationale sup- ported by historical experience, and were enveloped in a catastrophe for which they were unprepared. Yet in the end, they did achieve their primary objective. Berger was even proud of his nonstrategic cast of mind.20 Some strategies prove successful in the short term, only to prove counter- productive soon afterward. The United States armed and trained Afghan guer- rillas fighting against Soviet forces in the 1980s, but after the Soviets withdrew, the Taliban took over and gave the country a government more oppressive and unfriendly to the West than the Marxists had been, and mujaheddin veterans such as Osama Bin Laden turned against the United States in acts of terrorism. 18. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York: Clarion, 1970), pp. 18-19; see also pp. 13, 17. Tolstoy believed "there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than those of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexo- rable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what oc- curs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them 'great men"' (read, great strategists). Ibid., p. 27. 19. Ronald Spector, "Discussion," in Richard Shultz, Roy Godson, and Ted Greenwood, eds., Secu- rity Studies for the 1990s (New York: Brassey's, 1993), p. 109. 20. "In 1991, he said... that most 'grand strategies' were after-the-fact rationales developed to ex- plain successful ad hoc decisions. He said in a recent conversation that he prefers to 'worry about today today and tomorrow tomorrow."' R.W. Apple, "A Domestic Sort with Global Worries," New York Times, August 25, 1999, p. A10. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 18 The opposite sequence, losing the war but winning the peace, is also possible. In the 1970s U.S. strategy failed in Vietnam, and the long bloody war that had been fought in large part to contain China was lost. Yet soon after Saigon fell, Southeast Asia was more stable than it had been for half a century and Wash- ington was in a cordial entente with Beijing. In other cases, strategy has no certifiable impact independent of the prewar balance of power. One of Sun Tzu's alluring differences with Clausewitz is his relative emphasis on stratagem and strategy as substitutes for mass, frontal as- sault, and artless attrition. But how often in modern war is the outcome more attributable to strategic wizardry than to superiority in money, men, and materiel? The side with the big battalions usually wins.21 In the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln lost faith in ingenious strategy and won by letting grinding attrition take its toll. Generals and the public "'have got the idea in their heads that we are going to get out of this fix, somehow, by strategy!"' Lin- coln fulminated. "'That's the word-strategy! General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the rebels by strategy.... ' Lincoln had developed a contempt for what he scornfully called 'strategy.' What he thought was needed was not more maneuvering but assault after assault on the Confederate army."22 Ulys- ses S. Grant did not shrink from that conclusion and led the Union-enjoying more than a four-to-one superiority in manpower and industrial production over the Confederacy-to victory. Doubts about governments' capacity to cause intended effects through strat- egy are reinforced by chaos theory, which emphasizes how small, untraceable events produce major changes. Weather forecasting captures this in the But- terfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly's flapping wings in Brazil can trigger a tornado in Texas.23 Analysts typically look at war as a linear system and as- sume that outputs are proportional to inputs, the whole is the sum of the parts, and big questions can be solved by solving the component parts. Chaos theory, in contrast, sees war as a nonlinear system that produces "erratic behavior" through disproportionate relationships between inputs and outputs or syner- 21. Only at first glance do Vietnam and Afghanistan contradict this notion. The Vietnamese com- munists won only after American forces left the country and Saigon's forces were outnumbered. The Soviets never committed more than a tiny fraction of their army to Afghanistan, and withdrew without being defeated on the battlefield. Attrition worked for the victors in these cases, not tacti- cally, but by sapping the will of the more powerful adversaries to persevere. 22. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 389, 499. In his docu-novel about Gettysburg, Michael Shaara has his favorite Confederate general put it this way: "'God in heaven,' Longstreet said... 'there's no strategy to this bloody war. What it is is old Napo- leon and a hell of a lot of chivalry."' The Killer Angels (New York: McKay, 1974), p. 267. 23. Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp. 181-184. See also James Gleick, Chaos: Making a Nezv Science (New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 8-31. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? I 19 gies "in which the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts."24 In reality, most systems are nonlinear, but scientists have psychologically trained themselves "not to see nonlinearity in nature."25 Skeptics believe that a healthier apprecia- tion of chaos reveals what Barry Watts sees as the "Laplacian" foolishness of trying to analyze war with enough mechanical precision to predict its course.26 Robert Jervis emphasizes many other ways in which pervasive complexity and unintended consequences frustrate the purposeful use of action.27 To some the connection between intended and actual outcomes over time seems nearly random. Experts' predictions prove scarcely better than those of amateurs. (At the outset, how many strategists would have predicted better than non-experts the length of the Korean War, the outcomes of the wars in Vietnam or Kosovo, or the number of U.S. casualties in the Persian Gulf War?) Some strategies seem to "work" in some cases and not others; evidence about efficacy is too mixed to command enough consensus on a verdict to qualify as proof; or there are too few comparable cases to provide lessons applicable to future choices. To some skeptics in this vein, the illusion of strategy is abetted by the ten- dency of observers to confuse acceptable results with intended results, and to overestimate the effect of deliberate strategy as opposed to luck. Wars consid- ered successful may turn out in ways quite different from initial strategic ex- pectations. War turned out better for Churchill than for Hitler not because Churchill's strategic choices were wiser, but because of events and influences that neither understood better than the other and simply turned up on the roll of the dice. In this view, military strategy is like the "random walk" theory of the stock market: Despite mythology, and all the expertise and analysis brought to bear, those who pick stocks by strategy do no better on average than those who pick them randomly.28 A few fund managers outperform the market consistently, but they present only the illusion of brilliance and control because statistically their streaks are really luck as well; when thousands of players continually spin a roulette wheel, a few of them will win a dozen times 24. Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War," International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992/93), p. 62. 25. James Gleick and J. Franks, quoted in Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Or- der in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 138. 26. Barry D. Watts, "Ignoring Reality: Problems of Theory and Evidence in Security Studies," Secu- rity Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1997/98), pp. 119-122, 125-127. See also Watts, Clausezvitzian Fric- tion and Future War, McNair Paper No. 52 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1996), chap. 10; and Roger Beaumont, War, Chaos, and History (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994). 27. Robert Jervis, System Effects (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 28. Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods (New York: Wiley, 1996), pp. 144-150. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 20 in a row. With such statistical knowledge in mind, the best investment strategy is no active strategy, rather it is an index fund. RESPONSE 2 Chaotic nonlinearity is common, but neither absolute nor pervasive. Some- times there can be enough method in the madness to make resort to force a means likely-in some measure-to achieve a given goal. If chaos theory really meant that no prediction is possible, there would be no point in any analysis of the conduct of war. Those who criticize social science approaches to strategy for false confidence in predictability cannot rest on a rejection of prediction al- together without negating all rationale for strategy. Yet critics such as Watts do not reject the possibility of strategy. Any assumption that some knowledge, whether intuitive or explicitly formalized, provides guidance about what should be done is a presumption that there is reason to believe the choice will produce a satisfactory outcome-that is, it is a prediction, however rough it may be. If there is no hope of discerning and manipulating causes to produce intended effects, analysts as well as politicians and generals should all quit and go fishing.29 Jervis mitigates the thrust of his own argument against prediction by noting, "As Albert Hirschman has stressed, straightforward effects are common and often dominate perverse ones. If this were not the case, it would be hard to see how society, progress, or any stable human interaction could develop."30 No model succeeds in forecasting weather two weeks ahead, but near-term fore- casting can often work.31 Some phenomena are linear, but predictability de- clines with complexity and time. So effective strategy is not impossible, but complex strategies with close tolerances are riskier than simple ones with few moving parts, and strategies that project far ahead and depend on several phases of interaction are riskier than ones with short time horizons. This lim- ited confidence comports with the tension in Clausewitz between his emphasis on the prevalence of chance and unpredictability and the folly of faith in calcu- 29. "Watts asserts... that there are no meaningful regularities in social events. If this were true, it would render all efforts to study social events-including war-futile.... if we really had no abil- ity to predict consequences of our actions with some degree of confidence better than mere chance, then no intelligent choices could be made in any realm of social behavior.... there would be no point in studying history, and there could be no such thing as meaningful expertise, including mil- itary expertise." Robert A. Pape, "The Air Force Strikes Back," Security Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1997/98), pp. 196-197. 30. Jervis says of his own work, "Books like this select a biased sample of cases; when things work out, we do not study or even notice them." System Effects, p. 68. 31. Lorenz, Essence of Chaos, p. 183. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 21 lation in war, on one hand, and on the other, his stern warning of how impera- tive is "the need not to take the first step without considering the last."32 Clausewitz recognized nonlinearity, but he still believed in strategy. Attrition is comparatively simple in concept, so if simplicity is important, its status as strategy should not be brushed aside. How attrition is accomplished matters. First, the actions needed to get an inferior force to expose itself to attri- tion are not artless. Grant did it by initiatives such as threatening Richmond. Commanders facing agile guerrilla forces are sometimes never able to do it. Second, even when clear superiority in the balance of forces foreordains vic- tory, efficient exploitation conserves lives and resources. In many wars, it is not clear before the fact that one side has superiority. In- deed, if it were, there would be fewer wars, because the weaker would more often capitulate without a fight.33 Where capabilities are nearly even, strategy provides the only alternative to stalemate. There are cases in which countries that lack clear superiority do use strategy to gain the edge; for example: Israel against the Arabs in 1967; Arabs against Israel in 1973; Britain against Argen- tina in 1982; North Vietnam against the United States, 1965-75. And although Northern mass did wear down the Confederacy, the South held out and ac- tively threatened the North for several years. Had higher political and diplo- matic components of Southern grand strategy worked (the hope to induce war weariness in the North and British intervention), Southern military strategy would look brilliant. The "random walk" analogy is limited as well. In one sense it misrepresents the structure of the problem. The evidence supporting the random walk view comes from interactions in a market price system, where sellers and buyers naturally converge toward an equilibrium. Military strategy, in contrast, seeks disequilibrium, a way to defeat the enemy rather than to find a mutually ac- ceptable price for exchange. War is more like the contest of two firms to domi- nate sales. One cannot invest in war, or dominate a particular market, without any strategy. For combat, in this sense, there is no counterpart to an index fund. In a different sense, as a general view of how to cope with risk or uncertainty when strategizing, the random walk notion suggests that attrition may be the analogue to an index fund. Complex strategizing is like active stock picking: It 32. Clausewitz, On War, p. 584. 33. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp. 109-114; and James D. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 379-414. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 22 is risky, offers high potential return, but requires exceptional people-a Warren Buffet or a Bismarck-to work. Attrition is like indexing: It works slowly but surely if the underlying trend-a rising market, or a superior military power position-is favorable. Avoiding war, in turn, is like staying out of the market: the right decision if one is not a Buffet or Bismarck, and the underlying trend is adverse. Deflecting Calculation The conventional Western standard of rationality is a universal economistic calculus based on conscious maximization of benefit relative to cost. Military strategy does not operate with a single currency of exchange to make goods and prices clear to all parties of a bargain. Unconscious emotions and unclear motives, cognitive problems, and cultural biases prevent strategy from inte- grating means and ends. CRITIQUE 3: PSYCHOANALYSIS VERSUS CONSCIOUS CHOICE Strategy is an illusion because leaders do not understand what motives drive them, and delude themselves about what they are really trying to do. They use war not for manifest political purposes but for subliminal personal ones, so the link between politi- cal ends and military means is missing at the outset. The rational standard assumes that the strategist at least tries to select instru- ments and plans that will work toward a selected goal, that logic will drive choice. To keep the logic disciplined, assumptions of rationality apply "the cri- terion of consciousness," whereby "a non-logical influence is any influence act- ing upon the decision-maker of which he is unaware and which he would not consider a legitimate influence on his decision if he were aware of it."34 In real life, strategic decisions are awash in nonlogical influences. The deepest of these is the individual's emotional unconscious. To psycho- analysts who emphasize mental displacement of motives, strategic analysis cannot even get off the ground in applying military means toward higher po- litical ends because statesmen deceive themselves about what their real goals are. Military grammar cannot be summoned by political logic because policymakers start from pseudologic. Not realizing that they are really driven by subliminal concerns of personal security, they pretend to be grappling with 34. Sidney Verba, "Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the International System," in Klaus Knorr and Verba, eds., The International System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1961), pp. 108, 94. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 23 national security. Their emotional imperatives are psychically displaced into war, and consciously articulated national aims are but a metaphor for personal urges. From this perspective, strategy can be the opposite of economistic ratio- nalism. Franco Fornari presents an extreme version of this argument: [War] serves to defend ourselves against the "Terrifier" as an internal, absolute enemy similar to a nightmare, through a maneuver which transforms this terrify- ing but ultimately unaffrontable and invulnerable entity into an external, flesh-and- blood adversary who can be faced and killed.... [War's] most important security function is not to defend ourselves from an external enemy, but to find a real en- emy.... outward deflection of the death instinct.... war could be seen as an at- tempt at therapy.... Conflicts connected with specific historical situations reactivate the more serious conflicts which each of us has experienced in in- fancy, in the form of fantasies, in our affective relationships to our parents.35 Fornari's explanation of the origins of war verges on a caricature of Freudian interpretation, but Fornari is no fringe figure (he was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and director of the Institute of Psychology at the Uni- versity of Milan). Although it seems ridiculous to most political scientists, and psychoanalysis is out of favor within psychology, this sort of approach persis- tently resonates with intellectuals. One recent popular example traces the ori- gins of war to primordial ritual sacrifices reenacting "the human transition from prey to predator."36 Even some sober observers of military affairs take highly subjective explanations seriously. Bernard Brodie wrote respectfully of the Freudian notion of "filicide": "the reciprocal of the well-known Oedipus complex.... the unconscious hatred of the father for the son.... And what better way... of finding expression for filicide than by sending the youth out to die in a war?"37 John Keegan embraced anthropological interpretations of primitive war as ritual, the continuation of sport by other means, or symbolic activity rather than a political phenomenon. If war serves latent psychic func- tions rather than manifest policy, strategic rationalizations must be phony.38 Psychoanalytical interpretations support the critical view of Churchill's stra- tegic thinking. Anthony Storr diagnoses Churchill as clinically depressed dur- 35. Franco Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, trans. Alenka Pfeifer (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 1974), pp. xvi, xvii, xxvi (emphasis in original). 36. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 22. See also Vamik Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1988); and Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Machine Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), chap. 15. 37. Brodie, War and Politics, p. 311. 38. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993), especially chaps. 1-2. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 24 ing much of his public life, an "extraverted intuitive," a "cyclothymic temperament" with extreme mood swings, suffering from compensatory ag- gressiveness and a compulsive sense of mission caused by being deprived of love in childhood. "Although he had brilliant ideas, he was hardly susceptible to reason and could not follow a consecutive argument when presented to him by others.... He was never good at looking at all the implications of any course he favoured."39 After the fall of France, Churchill could hope that som thing would turn up to let England prevail, but there was no solid reason to bet the country's survival on such hope. He did so, in Storr's view, because of an irrational optimistic streak: "When all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.... in 1940, [Churchill's] inner world of make-believe coincided with the facts of external reality in a way which very rarely happens to any man.... In that dark time, what England needed was not a shrewd, equable, balanced leader. She needed a prophet.... his inspirational quality owed its dynamic force to the romantic world of phantasy in which he had his true being.... England owed her survival in 1940 to.... an irrational conviction independent of fac- tual reality."40 RESPONSE 3 Much in this critique is simply wrong because of naYve psychologism-a common but erroneous assumption that politics is nothing more than individ- ual impulses writ large.41 Because strategy is made by humans, psychology cannot help but affect it. It is hard to know, however, whether this happens in ways more often deranging than constructive because it is difficult to pin down evidence of the independent effect of subjective factors on decisions or interactions. There is also confusion of psychological expertise and political opinion in many diagnoses. Much psychological literature on war betrays a bias about policy that depreciates the significance of conflict of interest in international relations.42 (In a 1932 letter to Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud admitted the 39. Anthony Storr, "The Man," in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Churchill Revised (New York: Dial Press, 1969), pp. 231, 234-235, 240, 247, 250, 239. 40. Ibid., pp. 230, 274, 251. 41. On deficiencies in psychological explanations, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), chaps. 2-3. 42. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 4. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 25 pacifist bias in his own thinking.)43 The resilience of psychoanalytic interpre- tations reflects more than anything the premise that war itself must be irratio- nal, so strategy must be rationalization rather than rationalism. Few analysts can bring themselves to differentiate what they consider foolish political stances from irrationality, or correct political views from psychic health and logical calculation. Consider John Foster Dulles. Was he the rigid, ideologically blinded, obtuse Calvinist moralist portrayed by Townsend Hoopes, or as Mi- chael Guhin argued with comparably respectable evidence, a flexible, crafty re- alist who only pretended to be unsubtle and who posed U.S. policy in deliberately simplified terms precisely because he feared subtlety could cause misperception in Moscow and Beijing?44 Either diagnosis would be more per- suasive if it did not happen to coincide with the biographer's partisan identity (Hoopes being a Democrat, Guhin a Republican). How easy is it to know when we see evidence of psychology rather than ideology? Keegan's dismissal of Clausewitzian rationality falls of its own weight. It simply confuses what politics, the proper driver of strategy, is. Consider his as- tounding statements that "politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning," or that although Balkan wars "seem to have as their object that 'territorial displacement' familiar to anthropologists.... they are apolitical."45 Keegan is a respectable historian of military operations, but a naif about politics, so he cannot render a verdict on the strategy that connects them. CRITIQUE 4: COGNITION VERSUS COMPLEX CHOICE Cognitive constraints on individual thought processes limit strategists' ability to see linkages between means and ends, or to calculate comprehensively. Psychoanalytic psychology suggests that leaders do not know what urges really drive their choices. Cognitive psychology suggests that even if they do, conscious calculation can be nonrational. Even if aims are not displaced within the mind, strategic selection of appropriate means is still deformed by the physiology of perception. Normal mental functions cause false rationalization, because the mind imposes consistency on observations to maintain the stability of existing belief structures. The mind resists facing trade-offs among conflict- ing values by convincing itself that the values really go together. (In this view, 43. Sigmund Freud, "Why War?" in Freud, Civilization, War, and Death, ed. John Rickman (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), p. 97. 44. Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1973); and Michael Guhin, John Foster Dulles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 45. Keegan, History of Warfare, pp. 21, 58. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 26 even detached analysts observing irrational decision processes convince them- selves that they are not.)46 Cognitive biases also predispose strategists to see their adversaries' behavior as "more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is," and to assume that their own benign intentions are obvious to the adversary.47 Whereas the rational model of calculation implies that "complexity should breed indecisiveness," cognitive mechanisms allow confidence by filtering complexity out of perception. Whereas the rational model handles unknowns by probabilistic inference, cognitive processes respond to uncertainty with firm, categorical, either-or beliefs. Thus the Hitlers, Churchills, and Mac- Arthurs do not explicitly estimate odds, but simply forge ahead with confidence once they have decided what should be done. The refraction of ob- served information through cognitive biases allows it to be seen as consistent with expectations even when it is not.48 In short, strategists tend to see what they expect to see. RESPONSE 4 Cognitive theory runs into problems outside of laboratory experiments. As with other psychological explanations, it proves hard to distinguish cognitive pathologies from differences of political opinion. Whereas psychoanalyst crit- ics may confuse their professional diagnosis with their normative political views, cognitive critics may confuse the psychological diagnosis with their em- pirical analysis of strategic logic. Analysts who attribute errors in calculation to misperception necessarily use a standard of objectivity against which to mea- sure the deviation. In politics, however, it is seldom possible to differentiate 46. Critics charge that rationalist theorists "lapse into tautology to prevent this everyday experi- ence [of irrationality] from becoming compelling evidence against the notions. The result is to iden- tify the fact of adaptation with the notion of rationality and to further anchor that notion in our habits of mind. The only evidence against rationality thus becomes behavior which seems obvi- ously maladaptive. Since adaptation is so closely related to survival itself, maladaptive behavior is perforce a rare event." John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 50, n. 5 (emphasis in original). Rationalists argue that critics rely on sim- plistic or dated conceptions of rationality, and that Graham Allison's model is now "seriously out of date." Jonathan Bendor and Thomas Hammond, "Rethinking Allison's Models," American Polit- ical Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 302-307, 319. A revised edition has updated the model since Bendor and Hammond wrote, but does not address criticisms in recent literature of ra- tional choice theory head-on. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1999). 47. Robert Jervis, "Hypotheses on Misperception," World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (April 1968), p. 475; and Jervis, Perception and Misperception, chap. 4. 48. Steinbruner, Cybernetic Theory of Decision, p. 89 and chap. 4. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 27 such a standard from what analysts themselves consider to be the real logic of value trade-offs. For example, John Steinbruner illustrates his models with a case study of policy on nuclear sharing in NATO, arguing that the strategy promulgated ig- nored the contradiction between the values of alliance solidarity and deter- rence. This apparently assumes, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did, that deterrence required centralizing control of nuclear release in the hands of the American president, but this assumption was not universally shared. The civilian leadership of the Defense Department in the early 1960s was promoting a doctrine of graduated escalation, which theoretically re- quired carefully orchestrated control of nuclear strikes, rather than independ- ent capabilities to launch nuclear forces. That doctrinal ambition of a coterie of theorists was never fully accepted within the American government, less so by other NATO countries, and was soon even rejected by McNamara himself. In- deed, many believed that diffusing the option to initiate escalation would be more logical for deterrence, because it coped with the danger that a rational Washington would renege on the commitment to escalate if conventional de- fense failed, and thus raised the credibility of the principle that escalation would occur one way or another if a Soviet attack on Western Europe suc- ceeded. Were proposals on nuclear sharing evidence of cognitive distortion in handling a "two-value problem"? Or normal political compromises in a situa- tion where interests and beliefs diverge? Or the least irrational strategic choices available for a problem that had no attractive rational solution? The real "two- value problem" was the combined U.S. and West European interest in deter- rence as an end, and their divergent interests in using conventional, tactical nuclear, and intercontinental nuclear forces as means-divergence imposed by the geography that protected only the United States from the consequences of conventional or tactical nuclear war.49 That case study does not necessarily validate a diagnosis of psychological dysfunction in policymaking more distinctly than it reflects the author's own particular strategic judgment. If a policymaker resists the logic and supporting evidence of the argument that forms the analyst's standard of rational strategy, is she evincing cognitive dissonance, or is the analyst suffering from hubris about his own logic? What should give analysts confidence that they can assess value trade-offs more objectively than the officials whose cognitive facility they are judging? As Sidney Verba says, "When faced with a decision made by 49. Richard K. Betts, "Compound Deterrence vs. No-First-Use: What's Wrong Is What's Right," Orbis, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 697-718. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 28 an individual or group as highly trained and sophisticated as he is, the outside observer is probably no more able to judge whether the resulting decision meets the criteria of rationality than are the actual decision-makers. Their frailty is his frailty too."50 CRITIQUE 5: CULTURE VERSUS COERCION Coercive strategies aimed at an adversary's will depend on communication. Cultural blinders prevent the common frames of reference necessary to ensure that the receiver hears the message that the signaler intends to send. Even if psychology does not prevent leaders from understanding them- selves, the collective personality traits of a culture may prevent them from understanding their adversaries. Strategic calculations can be logical within their own cultural context, but founder on the difference in the opponent's mind-set. Thus even if both parties are rational in their own terms, strategic interaction becomes a dialogue of the deaf. Soon after U.S. bombing of North Vietnam began in 1965, Thomas Schelling discussed its logic in terms not of effects on North Vietnamese capability but on Chinese perceptions: "America's reputation around the world... for re- solve and initiative, was at stake.... the military action was an expressive bit of repartee. The text of President Johnson's address [to the nation] was not nearly as precise and explicit as the selection of targets and timing of attack."51 Schelling said nothing, however, about whether or why the Chinese should assess the signals the way he did. Indeed, the foundation of his thinking on strategy was that "the assumption of rational behavior is a productive one" be- cause "it permits us to identify our own analytical processes with those of the hypothetical participants in a conflict."52 Since then research by a bicultural scholar has shown how American and Chinese statesmen utterly misread each others' aims, calculations, and tactics in Cold War confrontations because of societal differences in values and axioms. The American concept of crisis saw it only as a danger, which led to methods of crisis management aimed only at re- solving crises rather than exploiting them, while the Chinese concept empha- 50. Verba, "Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality," pp. 109-110. Verba does neverthe- less argue that detached research is more objective. For a good example of psychological interpre- tation that recognizes the difference between political judgment and mental dysfunction, see Barbara Rearden Farnham, Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 51. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 142, 171ff., 186-188. 52. T.C. Schelling, "The Retarded Science of International Strategy," Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 4, No. 2 (May 1960), p. 108. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 29 sized that crises are also opportunities; U.S. officials considered "military killing capacity as the key to deterrence," while the Chinese emphasized the masses who operate the weapons, and social cohesion rather than weapons themselves; and American leaders saw the prospect of human casualties as in- herently negative, while the Chinese saw the sacrifice of lives as a necessary price for progress and evidence that political gains were being achieved.53 RESPONSE 5 This critique of cultural biases effectively indicts sophisticated signaling strate- gies meant to induce compliance without forcing it. The response does not con- test that indictment. The argument against subtle signaling, however, does not necessarily negate strategies aimed at destroying enemy capabilities to resist. Nor does it preclude all effective signaling between adversaries. Many mes- sages can be transmitted and understood across cultures, especially if they are stark rather than subtle-for example, "Surrender or die." Culture, like psychology, can matter in strategy without discrediting it. lain Johnston defines strategic culture as "historically imposed inertia on choice that makes strategy less responsive to specific contingencies."54 This represents an impediment to efficiency, not a denial of efficacy. Deflecting Implementation Critiques 3-5 are about how individuals misunderstand what is at issue in a war-what their own or their adversaries' objectives are-and thus cannot choose strategies that optimize their aims. The three critiques in this section are about barriers to applying means effectively even when policymakers are clear about what is at issue. Critique 6 concerns constraints on coercive com- munication imposed by operational problems in coordinating decisions and implementation. These problems can block timely orchestration of signals even if the executing organizations are attuned to higher strategy. Critique 7 con- cerns constraints that emerge from preoccupations and professional interests within those organizations. Critique 8 adds to the mix the effects of feedback from war, the interactive dimension of strategy after plans are put in motion and the adversary counters them. 53. Shu Guang Zhu, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949-1958 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 279-282. 54. Alastair lain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 2. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 30 The critiques in this vein complement Critique 5 to argue against subtlety or sophistication in strategy, making game-theoretic schemes designed to influence an opponent's will seem inevitably too clever. In this view, because subordinate organizations prove unable or unwilling to do what strategists at the top direct, and schemes for affecting the adversary's calculations go awry because the variables in play are more complex than those in the strategists' model, the only strategies that work are unsubtle and blunt ones that conform to the traditional military KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). But while simplicity may increase the controllability of a strategy's execution, simple strategies will be no more effective in achieving an objective if the objective or the target is not simple. CRITIQUE 6: FRICTION VERSUS FINE-TUNING Even if cultural blinders do not foreordain a dialogue of the deaf when coercive signals are sent, normal operational friction delays execution of plans and decouples signals from the events to which they are meant to respond. Strategy that depends on coupling then collapses. Consider again the bombing of North Vietnam. Even if different mind-sets would not have prevented mutual understanding, limitations of organiza- tional agility did. Actual as opposed to intended coupling of events in the the- ater made U.S. policy seem more provocative than political leaders meant it to be at some times, and more timid than intended at others. In the 1964 Tonkin Gulf crisis, the patrol in which the U.S. destroyer Maddox was attacked while collecting electronic intelligence coincided by happenstance with an attack on two North Vietnamese villages by Laotian aircraft and covert paramilitary op- erations against North Vietnamese territory in the vicinity of the Maddox; when there was a strategic interest in not having the North Vietnamese believe these actions were coordinated, they probably believed they were. Later in the year, in contrast, intended links were obscured. Washington warned Hanoi against provocation but then did not respond to an attack on Bien Hoa air base (in- deed, the B-57 aircraft that had made Bien Hoa a target were withdrawn), and after that did not retaliate for the bombing of the Brink officer quarters. Meanwhile, interagency contingency planning in 1964 pitted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Air Force against the State Department and the Pentagon's Office of International Security Affairs. The military favored a quick, massive bombing campaign (the "94 Target Plan") aimed at capitalizing on simultane- ity to smash North Vietnamese capabilities. The civilians favored a "slow squeeze" approach that sounded as if it was plagiarized from an early draft of Arms and Influence. Abstemious bombing was to signal U.S. resolve, remind the This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 31 North Vietnamese of what they had left to lose from further attacks, and in- duce them to desist and negotiate. Bombing began in February 1965 with the "Flaming Dart" raids, conceived as tit-for-tat reprisals for communist attacks in South Vietnam.55 Careful correlation of events in Hanoi, Washington, and South Vietnam demonstrates how the rationale for "Flaming Dart" was negated by its imple- mentation. Timing problems, prior context, and technical complications in the theater made it impossible to convey the message that U.S. policymakers had in mind. If any message was read in Hanoi, it was probably the opposite of what Washington intended. When threatened retaliation did occur after the February 1965 raid on Pleiku, it was weak: "The mildest attack option (three targets) was selected, but bad weather forced many sorties to abort, with the result that only one target... was struck in force." Later U.S. strikes in the "Flaming Dart" raids were not coordinated with the provocations to which policymakers in Washington meant to respond, thus vitiating the intended sig- nal. "In situations in which members of the target state's government have been arguing that the coercer will not intervene in strength, a coercive strategy based upon 'graduated pressures' may serve only to 'convince' the opponent that low-level pressures are all that will be attempted."56 Wallace Thies's recon- struction discredits elaborate signaling strategies by showing that "there may be significant discrepancies both between the actions intended by senior officials on Side A and the actions undertaken by A and between the message intended for transmission to B by A's leaders and the message read into A's ac- tions by senior officials on Side B."57 RESPONSE 6 There is no good counter to this critique. Cultural and operational complica- tions simply compound each other in raising the odds against tacit bargaining through symbolic combat. One might conclude simply that policymakers chose the wrong bombing strategy in 1965. There is no reason to believe, how- ever, that the Air Force's preferred 94 Target Plan, aimed at capabilities rather than will, would have fared better in inducing North Vietnam to stop support- 55. The Senator Gravel Edition: The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 106-115, 269-271, 299-306, 315, 342, 628. 56. Wallace Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964- 1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 42-44, 56-57, 77-82, 85-89, 124-127, 144, 265. Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), extends this criticism to discredit nearly all attempts to use strategic bombing for po- litical coercion. 57. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 392 (emphasis deleted). This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 32 ing the ground war in the South. Heavy bombing in the 1972 "Linebacker" campaigns, often credited with making Hanoi accept the Paris peace accords, did not do that either; those accords permitted the North Vietnamese Army to remain in South Vietnam. CRITIQUE 7: GOAL DISPLACEMENT VERSUS POLICY CONTROL Organizational processes deflect attention from policymakers' priorities ing organizations' habits of operation and institutional interests. Means may be ap- plied effectively toward goals, but to instrumental goals of the operators rather than the higher ends meant to govern strategy. Critique 6 showed why organizations trying to implement strategy may fail because of problems in the operating environment (such as weather delays). Professional guilds also have built-in tendencies to resist direction from politi- cal leaders, and thus in effect not even to try to implement chosen strategies. Cybernetic and organizational process models liken behavior to working ac- cording to a recipe. Decisionmakers operate from a limited repertoire, in a pre- scribed sequence of previously rehearsed actions, and monitor only a few reactions. In contrast to the rationalist model, which assumes that actors face constraints but try within them to optimize results with explicit calculations, cybernetic and organizational theories presume that decision processes sim- plify the problem to make it amenable to the repertoire and avoid dealing with unfamiliar aspects on their merits. Organizations become oriented not to the larger political aims they are enlisted to pursue, but to their own stability. In- stead of engaging in comprehensive search, weighing of alternatives, and ana- lytical selection, they pay attention to a few variables and shunt most incoming information aside.58 The chronic result is goal displacement: "Rules originally devised to achieve organizational goals assume a positive value that is independent of the organi- zational goals."59 Organizations shift attention from original missions to inter- nal methods and instruments developed as means to pursue those missions. The means become the organization's ends, even when they cease to be consis- tent with the larger purposes of the political leadership.60 Individual military 58. Steinbruner, Cybernetic Theory of Decision, pp. 55-56, 64-66, 74-75; and Allison and Zelikow, Es- sence of Decision, chaps. 3-4. 59. James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, with collaboration of Harold Guetzkow, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958), p. 38. 60. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 12, 74-76; Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 19, 100; and Perry McCoy Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace: 1943-1945 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970). See also Robert Merton, "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality," in Robert K. Merton, Ailsa P. Gray, This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 33 services, which normally provide components for a transservice combined arms strategy, tend to identify their own instruments and priorities with strat- egy as a whole, and identify whatever military task they can accomplish as the achievement of strategic goals. Elements of the military may in effect subvert overall military strategy to maximize their parochial priorities. For example, in the Persian Gulf War the allocation of air power assets was centralized in the daily Air Tasking Order (ATO) of the Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC), Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Horner. The ATO allocated Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft to various missions in accord with an overall strategic plan. This cre- ated tensions between JFACC and the service components, who worried about covering targets of special concern to their forces. "Some Marines would later say that their planners 'gamed' the ATO by overbooking it with sorties to give them flexibility.""6 The effect of overbooking would be to reduce resources available for higher strategic purposes in order to increase them for lower tacti- cal purposes. Civilian strategists may take a nonpartisan approach to integrating service priorities for a combined strategy, but very few know enough about operations and logistics to be as informed about the underpinnings of strategy as military professionals. When civilians override service objections, they risk promoting strategies that prove tactically insupportable. If not thus made militarily unre- alistic, national strategy remains hobbled by organizational parochialism, inflexibility, and incremental change. Leaders can disturb organizational be- havior but can rarely control it.62 The ground war in Vietnam illustrates the problem. U.S. Army operations were never as encumbered with civilian tinkering for purposes of diplomatic signaling as were Air Force and Navy air operations. In the Harry Summers view popular within the postwar U.S. Army, however, strategy failed because ground forces concentrated on the wrong operations-counterinsurgency- rather than conventional warfare against North Vietnamese regular units.6 More convincing is Andrew Krepinevich's opposite argument: Strategy was Barbara Hockey, and Hanan C. Selvin, eds., Reader in Bureaucracy (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952); Herbert Simon, "Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning," Organizational Science, Vol. 2, No. 1 (February 1991); and Charles Perrow, "Goals in Complex Organizations," American Sociologi- cal Review, Vol. 26, No. 6 (December 1961), pp. 854-866. 61. Lt. Gen. Royal Moore, cited in Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? Air Pozwer in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 131. 62. Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, p. 143. 63. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 85. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Security 25:2 | 34 too conventional, as the Army hewed to institutionally preferred operational concepts designed for its primary mission in Europe. This approach unleashed punishing firepower against the very South Vietnamese population whose loy- alty was what was mainly at stake in the war.64 The operational standard of ad- vantageous attrition ratios substituted for strategy, despite the fact that communist Vietnamese demography allowed them to keep replacing losses and stay in the field, while the asymmetry of interests ensured that they would be willing to keep bleeding longer than the United States would. RESPONSE 7 Cognitive, cybernetic, and organizational barriers to rational plans imply that wise strategists should limit their choices to options provided by predictable standard operating procedures (SOPs). This would let the tail wag the dog. Such extreme conclusions are unnecessary, however, where the strategy's sub- tlety and built-in potential for faulty implementation and misperception are less extreme than in the air war against North Vietnam, or where the obstacles to success of any plausible strategy are lower than in the ground war in South Vietnam. Organization theory points in more than one direction. Bureaucracies are not always as irresponsible as implied by literature that assumes "institutions to be dumber than their members"; indeed, they can be smarter. Even a rational in- dividual free of cognitive blinders can focus on only one thing at a time, whereas organizations can multiply centers of attention, focus on numerous parts of a problem at once, and alleviate the limitations on information pro- cessing that cognitive theory cites as blocking rationality in a single mind.65 Di- vision of labor fosters deeper expertise. Critics worry about parochialism, but compared to high-level decisionmakers who discipline them, experts can rely "less on ordinary folk heuristics, with their attendant biases, and more on scientifically based inferences, with their lower rates of error."66 This more positive Weberian view of bureaucracy as a rationalizing force is consistent with the erosion of data that used to be cited from the Cuban missile crisis to support the more negative view. Several of the examples that origi- nally illustrated the antistrategic impact of organizational processes have not held up. Subsequent research does not support suggestions in the first edition 64. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See also Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 65, 80-87, 218-230, 251, 270-273, 277-278. 65. Bendor and Hammond, "Rethinking Allison's Models," pp. 309, 312. 66. Ibid., p. 312 (quoting Robin Hogarth). This content downloaded from 128.220.159.210 on Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:22:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Is Strategy an Illusion? | 35 of Graham Allison's classic that: the U.S. Navy disobeyed orders to tighten the blockade line and delay interception of Soviet ships; aggressive antisubmarine warfare was undertaken without the knowledge of the secretary of defense (in- deed, it turns out that McNamara himself directed the Navy to implement new tactics, ad hoc, that were more aggressive than normal procedures); the Tactical Air Command deceived the president in arguing that a "surgical" air strike was infeasible; or the bureaucracy failed to implement an earlier presidential order to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.67 (These points, however, do not mean that SOPs produced no dangerous events in the crisis-other chilling ex- amples have turned up.)68 Trying to make strategy realistic by gearing it to predictable SOPs that limit organizational actions in cybernetic fashion could be as wrongheaded as as- suming frictionless implementation of subtle schemes. The internal logic of Allison's organizational process model does not lend itself to predicting mili- tary interactions, because chaos theory demonstrates how a handful of simple rules can yield a pattern of behavior "so complex as to appear random, even though the rule itself is completely deterministic." Allison likens the con- straints on leaders' choice of options to working within the limited rules of a chess game, but "chess is a paradigmatic example of a choice situation that involves only a handful of basic rules yet exhibits truly Byzantine strategic complexity..., when we compare chess to the strategic maneuverings of two real military forces... the odds are that chess is simpler."69 Another limitation of cybernetic and organization theories is that they help to explain continuity, but not innovation. Yet strategic innovations do occur. They may happen despite the conservatism of professional organizations, in which case the organi

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