Strategy is intelligent design and willful, intended action

I've recently become acquainted with a principle of constitutional law called the rational basis test. When a questionable law is subjected to legal challenge, it must first clear this very low hurdle: the court must be able to conceive of a plausible way in which the law's enactment could serve a legitimate interest of the government. The government isn't required to testify as to the legislature's purposes, and the law need not even be effective in serving the stated interest—it simply needs to be a plausible attempt. In short, the court must find that the government has behaved rationally; whether or not it has behaved intelligently is a separate – and for the purposes of the rational basis test, irrelevant – question. This strikes me as a good place to kick off a conversation about strategy and tactics.

Strategy is intelligent design: the reasoned application of available resources in a rational way, offering a plausible, logical path to the accomplishment of our goals. Clausewitz defined it narrowly as "the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war," but in the modern era its use has broadened to apply at nearly every level; "strategy" now essentially means something like the willful use of activity and resources to accomplish specified ends.

By this standard, strategy can be applied at all levels of war—not just the strategic. (Bear with me; I know this gets a little confusing.) One can have a generalized strategy for success in certain types of tactical engagement; this is frequently manifest as a set of procedures, the sort of thing that immediate action/battle drills are intended to perfect—performance of the required actions for tactical success. But to call this a "strategy" is a little misleading, if only because it obscures an important reality: at the tactical level, we're talking not about the reasoned, case-sensitive, tailored administration of resources and performance of planned actions to meet unique objectives, but a somewhat more mechanical application of accepted prodedures and best practices. This is the stuff of doctrine, which sets down a military organization's authoritative, collective view of how it conducts specific missions or types of operations. Doctrine's value is that it can be considered and codified in the abstract, as its tenets are presumed to be somewhat generalizable across a range of roughly similar conditions.

Moving up the levels of war, one can also have a strategy for operational or campaign success: how various tactical engagements will be combined to achieve campaign objectives. There is, of course, more art to this than at the tactical level simply because there is more uncertainty and more choice. No two tactical engagements are precisely the same, but it's much simpler to identify general "rules" for success when confronted with an L-shaped ambush than to prescribe methods for translating battlefield success into operational progress. No two campaigns are the same. It is at the operational level that strategy begins to take on the meaning with which we're familiar: a general idea of how we hope to use operational mobility and battle in phased, sequential actions to achieve goals within the broader framework of the war, while accepting the need for flexbility and adaptability in response to the enemy and war's fundamental unpredictability.

And then we come to the familiar strategic level of war, where campaigns are sequenced and combined to achieve the political objectives of the combatants. Here we see strategy from a slightly different angle: as the ways that the means of military action are applied to achieve the ends set out by policy. Let me explain this a little more.

The various levels of war are overlapping and nested within one another, and within the overarching framework of policy. Often the ends of the lower level serve as the means of the next-higher level: that is, tactical success is a means (to be combined with other means along various lines of effort) to achieve operational objectives, which are then used as means to be translated through operational art into strategic success. This means-ways-ends construct – reasoned activity conducted to produce conditions which are manipulated and exploited by yet more reasoned activity as we ascend the levels of war – is the very essence of strategy. Planning is strategy worked in reverse—beginning with a desired end, identifying objectives that will enable and facilitate this end, planning campaigns and operations to attain those objectives, and allocating resources, capabilities, and tactical actions in line with those plans. This construct can be extended even further into the development of capabilities: an armed force can have a strategy for manning, training, equipping, organizing, and so on to deliver the capabilities required for tactical, operational, and strategic success.

Effective tactical actions must be combined in rational ways to achieve operational ends.

Successful operations must be combined in rational ways to achieve campaign objectives.

Meaningful campaigns must contribute in rational ways to the satisfaction of strategic goals.

And the accomplishment of strategic goals should rationally lead to the enactment of policy's ends.

The fabric that holds all of this together is strategy. And it follows that strategy must always involve what we call a theory of victory: at every level, the actions we choose to take must form a plausible narrative that leads to the accomplishment of our objectives and enables the next element of the overarching plan. The strategist must continually ask himself not only to what end?, but how?

As I noted above, the so-called theory of victory is more empirical – almost mathematical – at the level of tactical action. My forces will do X, Y, and Z to produce effects A, B, and C. Operational-level doctrine, too, suggests a certain institutional confidence in an accepted way of doing business, how tactical actions can be combined to create successful campaigns. But it is at the strategic level that procedures and doctrine mostly lose their value, giving way to operational art and strategic theory. Just the same, the strategist must begin with a clear idea of how it is that he hopes to achieve his goals through directed action—a theory of victory.

To come to the point of all this: Jason wrote a post earlier this week in which he considered the validity of Gian Gentile's repeated claim that counterinsurgency as practiced in Iraq and Afghanistan is a "strategy of tactics." Carl is right to point out in the comments that the good colonel did not invent this construction, though there's a ring of sophistry to his claim that it "predates Gian Gentile by decades and has been bandied about by a Who's Who of strategic savants."

The phrase did indeed originate with Andrew Krepinevich, whose 1986 book The Army and Vietnam described Westmoreland's approach as a "strategy of tactics." This went hand-in-hand with the argument that the U.S. fought that war in line with the "Army concept"—a set idea of how war ought to be fought that springs not from strategic logic but rather organizational imperative: what the Army mans, organizes, and trains to do. LTC D.W. Beveridge paraphrased Krepinevich's argument (enormous pdf) in asserting that "the upshot of viewing the war in terms of the Army Concept was a preoccupation with 'grand tactics' rather than strategy, resulting in a perpetuation of the search and destroy operations imposed on the ARVN [South Vietnamense Army] during the earlier advisory period" (89).

This complaint is reflective of the flaws of the incrementalist approach in Vietnam: as the U.S. commitment increased and the correlation of forces (between U.S., ARVN, North Vietnamese Army, and VC/NLF) shifted, American commanders failed to re-assess the strategy being employed and consider a change in the role of U.S. forces. Westmoreland had been convinced that large NVA formations posed the greatest threat to South Vietnam, so he built a strategy focused on the use of American firepower and mobility to find, fix, and destroy them. In short, he misperceived the political nature of the war and suffered the consequences.
But Krepinevich's complaint about Westmoreland's "strategy of tactics" in Vietnam rings slightly hollow. A more accurate description would recognize that Westmoreland had a rational strategic plan and a sense for how American forces could be tactically employed to achieve it, but lacked a theory of victory: that is, he had no concept of how tactical action by U.S. forces could create strategic success because he permitted an essential element of his campaign plan – pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside, which was left to the ARVN – to exist outside his control. He seemed not even to recognize that the effective accomplishment of this mission was essential to strategic success. Westmoreland had too much strategy and not enough sense of how it would be accomplished. After the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, he had effective, proven tactics with which to destroy the NVA in the South but no concept for how those victories could be translated into political success.

The story with COIN (specifically in Afghanistan) is quite different: the campaign plan there has plenty of "theory of victory," but there's room to question whether or not it is plausible—that is, whether or not the tactics prescribed will actually produce the effects they're meant to. U.S. commanders have a clear idea of what they mean to accomplish and how, but there is far less certainty over whether the available tools are suited to this approach. It is plausible that the pacification of towns and villages, expanding territorial control in the countryside, reductions in violence, and increasingly effective Afghan governance and security forces will create an environment that is inhospitable to insurgents, one in which the enemy cannot sustain himself, and eliminate the possibility of extremist safe havens. This is a rational concept. The problem is that we're not sure our tactical actions can actually produce these effects—that is, we're not sure our resources, personnel, units, and capabilities can be combined along the lines of effort specified in doctrine to actually do the things that need to be done. This is the very opposite of Krepinevich's problem with Vietnam strategy.

As a peripheral but related note: it strikes me as very unlikely that Gentile adopted the "strategy of tactics" construction from Gray, whose use of the term is limited to approving references to Krepinevich. (The same is true, I think, of Owens.) In fact, the argument that Americans are or were ineffective counterinsurgents owing either to an unsuitable strategic or military culture (Gray) or misdirected doctrinal emphasis (Krepinevich) is one that Gentile rejects. He reads Brian Linn's The Echo of Battle as describing a "better way of American war" in the historical culture of the Army, one that is defined by "improvisation and practicality." (This has is apparently being thrown out, Gentile tells us, in favor of "the American Army's new way of war, otherwise called population-centric counterinsurgency.")

COL Gentile's fundamental inconsistency is here exposed: he rejects Krepinevich's critique while mirror-imaging it. He asserts that doctrinal bias and intellectual inertia have determined our strategic course in Iraq and Afghanistan while rejecting the very idea that our Vietnam strategy was shaped similarly. Gentile has cribbed Krepinevich's phrase while rejecting the very substance of what it means; this, he seems to be telling us, is actually a strategy of tactics. What Krepinevich was describing was a failure of strategy, but not the same kind!

I happen to share COL Gentile's conviction that both the Vietnam and Afghanistan (at least post-2002) wars were and are strategically senseless, which is part of the reason I'm so troubled by his insistence that the deus ex machina of "the American Army's new way of war, population-centric counterinsurgency" is what's responsible for our national foolishness. The strategy may be a poor one, and I think that it is. That's not because it lacks a theory of victory, though – i.e., because it's simply an assemblage of uncoordinated tactics – but because we aren't sure that the tactics are effective. If I developed a campaign plan to liberate Syria from the Asad regime by the destruction of its military through happy thoughts, text messages, and pictures of rainbows, the appropriate criticism would not be that I had employed a "strategy of tactics" but rather that my strategy was dependent on unproven and ineffective tactics. And don't get me wrong, COL Gentile levels this criticism at modern COIN doctrine, as well. "COIN doctrine directs an operational method based on uncertain causality and tactical actions of questionable effectiveness" may not roll off the tongue quite so easily, but it's much more accurate than this "COIN is a strategy of tactics" trope.

Is John Nagl on the New York Times editorial board?

The Defense Department just announced that our NATO allies are falling short in their commitment to deliver more institutional trainers to Afghanistan, necessitating a stopgap deployment of about 150 U.S. Marines and a U.S. Army battalion through the end of the summer. The Times weighs in with an op-ed decrying this development:

NATO agreed that non-American members would provide half of the 5,200 trainers.
Since December, those capitals have pledged to send only 1,000 trainers, and they have been very slow to deliver. Mr. Gates is now expected to send Americans to cover 600 of these slots for 90 days.

While the Americans are close to complement, General Caldwell also had to fight hard to secure enough troops to fill the American slots as well as management positions on his staff. For all of the talk about new missions and new thinking, there are still a lot of brass — and those who want to become brass — who don’t consider training a warrior’s job or a path to promotion. That culture needs to change.

American and NATO officials also need to look seriously at creating a standing corps of combat advisers who are trained and equipped to develop indigenous national security forces in overseas conflict zones.

That last couple of paragraphs are the most interesting for me. There's obviously merit to the idea of institutionalizing a training and advising capacity in the American land forces, but there's a lot of debate about the best way to do this. Nagl has been calling for the establishment of a 20,000-troop standing advisor corps for the last several years, and the Army has dismissed his suggestion for a whole host of sensible reasons. It's interesting to me that the New York Times wakes up one day to an advisor shortfall and suggests that "American and NATO officials... need to look seriously" at this problem, as if the Defense Department and the Army haven't been doing exactly that for the last four to six years.

So what do you think? Permanent advisor corps (pdf)? Modular brigades augmented for security force assistance? Bifurcated, Krepinevichian army (pdf) with separate forces for the different points of the spectrum of conflict?

Welcome to the party, David, even if you're like three years late

Did you know that America's global competitors are focusing on the development of anti-access technologies to counter U.S. power projection and expeditionary capabilities? Oh, you did? Yeah, me too. I heard from Andy Krepinevich like a year ago. And Bob Gates even before that. David Wood just caught on, apparently from "Pentagon strategists." But, I mean, that's cool -- keep getting the word out!

The United States, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. Potential target countries and even some lukewarm allies are figuring out ingenious ways to blunt American power without trying to meet it head-on, using a combination of high-tech and low-tech jujitsu.

At the same time, U.S. naval and air forces have been shrinking under the weight of ever more expensive hardware. It's no longer the case that the United States can overwhelm clever defenses with sheer numbers.As Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the problem this month, countries in places where the United States has strategic interests -- including the Persian Gulf and the Pacific -- are building "sophisticated, new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace.''Those innocuous words spell trouble. While the U.S. military and strategy community is focused on Afghanistan and the fight in Marja, others – Iran and China, to name two – are chipping away at America's access to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and the increasingly critical extraterrestrial realms.

On the bright side, Wood links to Krepinevich's new study Why AirSea Battle?, which focuses on DoD's efforts to develop a counter-anti-access operational concept. It's worth a read. While you're at it, you might also take a look at Gunslinger's Document of the Week: The U.S. Navy's Vision for Confonting Irregular Challenges (or as Bernard Finel described it on Twitter, "fascinating document. Shows the power of the COIN/hybrid war junta inside the building." Um, right).

I probably wouldn't highlight this Wood piece on any other day, but I have a case of the redass about an appearance he made on the Diane Rehm Show the other night, in which he said some frankly idiotic things about what's going on in Afghanistan. (My favorite part is where he says that U.S. forces are pursuing "in essence a conventional, industrial-age strategy in Marja, not unlike one you saw in the American Civil War 150 years ago.") I would really encourage you not to listen.