The conversation about grand strategy and the need for a grand enemy has been underway over at Ink Spots (and here and here). A number of folks including Adam Elkus and Zenpundit have weighed in on the debate. Aside from being well-worth a read, the discussion has helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the topic, and set the stage for this post.
It was actually a post by Matthew Yglesias, not technically related to the grand strategy/grand enemy debate that prompted this post:
The fact of the matter is that there’s a lot of uncertainty about what kind of “hard” security problems we’ll face 25 years from now. The conservative approach to hedging against that uncertainty is to look at the hard security realm and basically say we should do everything. Keep our nuclear arsenal in place and spend more on modernization. And build missile defense. Invest more in counterinsurgency capabilities. Use the present-day military more aggressively. Build every weapons system the engineers can think up. It’s an uncertain world and a lot can go wrong, so let’s do more more more more.
Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union was the perceived primary threat to the US, and grand strategy, strategy, and budgetary priorities stemmed from that widely accepted fact. Roughly twenty-five years ago, the competition for what would become the F-22 Raptor was launched, nineteen years ago the design was selected, and six years ago the planes saw their first official deployment. That’s almost twenty years from defining the requirement in 1986 for a new air superiority fighter to leapfrog Soviet Su-27 Flankers to the first deployment in late 2005.
How radically has the grand strategic and strategic environment changed in the twenty years since the requirement was made? No Soviet Union, and no true immediate threat of air-to-air combat between services equipped with well-matched aircraft. US preponderance is unmatched, and, for the most part, unchallenged in any conventional way. Most of the impetus that drove the requirement for the F-22 Raptor is gone, yet the cancellation of the program at 187 caused a huge uproar and required immense political capital wielded by President Obama and Secretary Gates to get it done.
Absent a grand enemy, the strategic and budgetary logic behind the F-22 (and other Cold War-era procurements) rings hollow. Grand strategy can be understood to frame and inform policy, and policy drives strategy and budget, but the relative grand strategic incoherence of the current moment in the US muddies that process, and has knock-on effects. As I’ve posited elsewhere, a grand enemy is not a requirement to develop a coherent grand strategy, but it is valuable shortcut, particularly when the previous consensus enemy disappeared almost overnight. When you’ve spent forty years defining yourself in opposition to a grand enemy, and building your policies, strategies and budget priorities in opposition to a grand enemy, it becomes a difficult thing to abandon.
Now, I’m aware that grand strategy is different than strategy which in turn is different than budgetary issues. But I can’t help but think that the fact that we have weapons on a twenty-year acquisition cycle is going to make the grand enemy a very attractive, very resilient idea in US national security discourse. “This system was perfect to counter the Soviets, now think of how well it will perform in the inevitable conflict with China!” Fast forward twenty years from today. “The promise of this system helped neutralize the Chinese threat, think of what it can accomplish against [insert enemy here].”
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