Introduction, and a response

I'd like to thank Stilicho for the chance to write here-- it's been a while since I've put my thoughts down, and I'm excited to be a part of the debate. I'm a youngster currently working at a defense contractor in Washington, DC. As a new cog in the military-industrial complex, I enjoy reflecting on the balance between maintaining my progressive values and understanding that all change is gradual. Is the principled view from the outside more ethical than the pragmatism it takes to effect real change? Does my compensation inherently lead towards a compromised worldview? What does it mean to call myself a 'liberal' as I take part in the greatest concentration of power in history and live in a sanitized bubble? I try to ask myself these kinds of questions when the conversation turns to drone strikes and troop levels.

I've been following this protracted debate at Ink Spots and elsewhere. On this blog, Stilicho convincingly argued that the 'grand enemy' is usually just a shortcut to a grand strategy, a shortcut that in the United States has become "a difficult thing to abandon." I'd go one step further and argue that the political structure of the United States precludes any kind of grand strategy but one focused on a grand enemy.

No matter how beautifully articulated, a grand strategy still needs to be implemented by individuals. Just as a sports team's manager needs to align a season's strategy with the aspirations of his players, a national leader must ensure that the interests of critical power brokers fall in line with the chosen grand strategy. In other words, individual incentives need to support the net effort.

Successful grand strategies include a domestic element part and parcel. Byzantium's themes relied on the ambitions of individual generals, and China's "harmonious world" line isn't much more than a caution against internal dissent. The character of the Spanish empire's growth stemmed directly from its religious and class identities, while North Korea controls its foreign policy by simply quashing all non-governmental actors. A grand strategy must reflect the realities of domestic decision-making as much as any foreign policy challenges.

The United States will never have a grand strategy without a grand enemy for the same reason we're stuck with a two-party system. In a political system that rewards binary policy positions, forces winner-takes-all politicking, and always carries the chance for a drastic change in leadership, there is simply no room for anything but the simplest, clearest, and most sloganistic grand strategy. There is hardly any mechanism within the USG that rewards the kind of subtle, long-term planning and execution required by all but the most elementary foreign policies. Can we develop outstanding bilateral relations through a tireless DoS? Sure. Do we develop and implement advanced, far-sighted military policies through the USD for Policy? Absolutely. But will we ever be able to form a meaningful grand strategy centered around anything but a clear and present danger, one so obvious that it rewards a Congressman at the ballot box? No way. That' s not how our democracy works.

Grand Strategy, Grand Enemies, and Acquisition Cycles (Oh My)

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].”