Michael C. Davies is a Ph.D. candidate in Defence Studies at King’s College London. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
National Security Situation: The United States of America has a near-perfect record of not winning wars since 1945. Regardless of the military prowess displayed, failure is the usual end. This is the inevitable outcome of a broken national security system, inappropriately applied strategic concepts, and a lack of strategic acumen. In a time of great power competition, it is of vital interest to end America’s path dependence towards strategic failure if it is to have any hope of prevailing.
Date Originally Written: January 29, 2025.
Date Originally Published: February 8, 2025.
Author Point of View: The author’s Ph.D. thesis focuses on the theory and practice of victory. He has expertise in the Wars of 9/11 lessons discipline and American national security reform agendas. The article is written from the perspective of someone who can describe why America constantly loses wars across a multitude of themes and variables.
Background: Two forces stand out in combination that help guarantee strategic failure for the United States of America. The first is that America progressed through multiple strategic failures since the end of the Cold War in 1991 without any meaningful reform. Every attempt was stifled, rejected, or mistreated upon implementation. This means that genuine change is unlikely without extraordinary intervention. The second is that the strategic policy documents created by the U.S. Government are meaningless exercises that do little to create and execute good strategy. Taking the view that the theory and practice of strategy is an iterative combination of policy, execution, and resources, these documents rarely meet that test and are best described as policy wish lists and signaling devices. These documents become even less meaningful as the policy documents of the U.S. Government’s various agencies and departments are published, Congress begins to debate budgetary outlines, and the military services make outlines for their own procurements. Each entity waters down, ignores, vacillates on, or pays lip service to anything that is incongruent with their existing preferences.
Simply put, bureaucracy just does its thing, failure occurs, nothing changes, and the process is repeated.
Significance: A small bureaucratic maneuver should be attempted at least once to try and create some space for a genuine strategy to emerge as a means to arrest the slide towards grand strategic failure. This maneuver also satisfies the existing laws that requires these documents to be produced and provides a functional document to the U.S. Government to follow. Two options for implementation of this idea are presented at different magnitudes:
Option 1: Unify all strategic documents into a single strategy document.
All national security strategy documents from the Executive branch of U.S. Government, their theorization, creation, writing, and publication, would be placed under the control of a single unifying body. This body, under the control of the National Security Advisor, would create a single strategy document. In practice, this genuine National Security Strategy would be comprised of publicly released versions of the following, mandatory documents:
- The National Security Strategy
- The National Defense Strategy
- The U.S. State Department and USAID Joint Strategic Plan
- The Integrated Country Strategies
- The National Military Strategy
- All Defense Reviews
- All Joint and Service Capstone and Warfighting Function doctrines
- The DHS Strategic Plan
- Regional strategies
- Applicable sectoral strategies
- Applicable departmental strategies
- A draft budget.
Risk: By unifying these documents under a single bureaucratic mechanism, it can create, or even exacerbate, the space for strategic myopia. Moreover, it might not even fix the problems it hopes to address because of the depth of operational monism already existing in the executing agencies and departments of the U.S. Government. The number of writing teams could also become unwieldy, with so many decisions, choices, and requirements to be constantly juggled, leading to executive decision paralysis, confusion, and delayed publication.
Gain: By merging the writing teams under a single roof, each element must contend with the other in real time, unable to ignore, mask, or bureaucratically outmaneuver each other. It also forces each to argue their preferences in real time, requiring real strategic decisions to be made. In turn, this forces all other elements to adapt in real-time, to show the weaknesses of existing force structures, doctrines, budgets, and strategic policy goals. This creates the space for new elements to emerge that will actually fix the problems in American strategic acumen of the past generations. Finally, by having a single unified document, it is easy to trace when strategic logic fails its own tests long before publication.
Option 2: Unifying all primary strategic documents into a single strategy document.
Like Option 1, this version would retain the idea of unifying the strategy documents, but a smaller, more focused number of them. In this case:
- The National Security Strategy
- The National Defense Strategy
- The U.S. State Department and USAID Joint Strategic Plan
- The National Military Strategy
- Applicable sectoral strategies
- Applicable departmental strategies
- All Joint and Service Capstone doctrines
- A draft budget.
Risk: By not including several other documents, particularly those related to execution, the unified strategy might just become a larger version of the existing policy documents and all their existing failures. This, in turn, would require greater effort on the part of agencies and departments to adapt them accordingly and would limit the viability of the unified strategy and its intended effect. This truncated unified strategy could provide space for components to fall back on existing institutional preferences and to push back on undesired changes.
Gain: Along with the benefits stated earlier, a smaller set of policy development teams would be easier to manage, would allow for greater discussion between teams, and would allow changes to be more readily promoted and agreed upon. It would also enable closer social relations between the teams. By enabling a document to be created sooner, this option would also provide timely direction to the government, America’s allies, and industry earlier.
Other Comments: US strategic thinking has failed so fantastically there is little any one could do to make it worse than it is currently. This small bureaucratic maneuver would at least provide a chance to create a genuine strategy for once.
Recommendation: None.
