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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
10. Structure, Agency, and Choice: Toward a Theory and Practice of Grand Strategy
Emily O. Goldman, University of California at Davis
John Arquilla, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
One of the most important foreign policy and national security choices confronting U.S. political and military leaders today, with profound long-term implications for the nation and world, is how to adjust America’s strategic orientation in the absence of a compelling external imperative. Not since the close of World War I have U.S. leaders had to face such ambiguous external threats, such an ill-defined global distribution of power, and fluid alignment patterns. In the absence of a clear threat to anchor U.S. strategy, political and military leaders struggle to redefine the nation’s diplomatic, military, and economic postures to preserve a capacity to respond to future unforeseen dangers and challenges abroad, while meeting more immediate demands at home.
With this contemporary strategic dilemma in mind, the contributors to this volume have examined strategic adjustment at several critical historical junctures in U.S. history: the nation’s awakening as a great power in the 1890s, its ambivalence toward accepting the mantle of world leadership after the First World War, and its new found primacy, bestowed upon it by the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Few scholars have systematically studied strategy in peacetime. The work that exists tends to focus on periods immediately preceding conflict, when significant threats coalesce. This volume examines strategic adjustment during lengthier periods of peace when no major wars seem likely for the foreseeable future, and when external pressures are weak relative to those that emanate from internal political, social and cultural forces. By so doing, the volume develops a deeper understanding of strategy in both peace and war.
Military historians Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley observe that while “the main lines of a state’s strategy are frequently easy to discern.... the process by which that strategy has evolved is often extremely complex, and the Mahanian notion that sound strategy might spring forth by the discovery and application of eternal principles falls short of reality. Strategic thinking does not occur in a vacuum....” 1 This volume unpacks the domestic side of grand strategy, the facet traditionally black-boxed by realist interpretations. It develops the notion of strategy as “process” rather than only outcome. Strategy can be understood as a flow through time of the choices agents make given structural constraints and opportunities they perceive. Any analysis of process thus consists of assumptions about structure, agency, and choice. Structure has social, political, organizational, bureaucratic, ideational, and technological dimensions. Agents include political elites, bureaucratic actors, the media, and a whole host of societal actors. Choice can be a process of maneuvering within social constraints or among competing political and organizational interests. It often means forging consensus and building coalitions. Frequently it involves innovation and institutionalization. Collectively, the contributions to this volume have developed a rich interpretation of strategy which challenges its dominant portrayal as a process of aligning means with ends to cause security for the state, attuned above all to the external balance of power, and carried out by agents of the state in pursuit of the national interest. The multidimensionality of strategy can be seen by examining how contributors characterize structure, agency, and choice.
The Structural Context for Strategy
At the height of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington characterized military policy as both domestic and foreign:
Major changes in military policy reflect changes in the relations of the government to its domestic and foreign environment. If the external balance of power changes and the government sees opportunities to expand its territory and power abroad, these changes in its external environment will be reflected in its military policy. The changes in military policy, in turn, may require changes in aspects of domestic policy. Similarly, changes in the domestic environment—such as rapid industrialization of the country, or a change in its form of government—may lead to alterations in its military policy and its foreign policy...
At any given time, military policy thus reflects the interactions between the external environment and goals of the government and its domestic environment and goals. 2
The interconnectedness of internal and external factors in strategy remains underexplored. Scholars only recently have taken up the challenge of developing strategy’s internal foundations. 3 Grand strategy is usually cast as a response to the outside world. Paul Kennedy subscribes to the very broadest definition of grand strategy as an endeavor by national leaders “to bring together all of the elements, both military and non-military, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests,” 4 yet describes the task more specifically as “structur[ing] the armed forces, and the economy and society upon which they rest, to be in a good position to meet contingencies.” 5 Even in peacetime, strategic planning will focus on the external world, on future contingencies and adversaries that may threaten the nation’s security.
This volume has problematized the structure agents of strategymaking attend to, challenging its external systemic characterization. For Nincic, Rose, and Gorski, the constellation of social forces and preferences provides the critical structure within which strategy is made, particularly in democratic states where policy legitimacy rests ultimately on popular support or at least acquiescence. In peacetime, popular opinion defines the limits of defense spending, the burden of international military operations the nation will choose to carry, and the conditions under which force can be legitimately employed as a method of statecraft. Leaders attend first to cues from the public. With no consistent cues from the outside world, politicians look inside by default, even if those cues provide little consistent concrete guidance. Electoral considerations are never too far in the background. The authors place public opinion in its broader domestic context, noting other forms of social identity, such as lobbies, political parties, and economic classes. Collectively, these form the social setting to which the agents of strategy attend. Rhodes makes an even more forceful case for the preeminent position of societal factors, but of a different sort. He stresses the importance of social consensus for binding the nation together. The agents of strategymaking must consider cultural and social foundations of national identity, which structure a society’s role and purpose in the world.
Sparrow also highlights the critical role of the public for structuring strategy when he observes ways public attitudes in the 1890s provoked a national outcry over Cuba, which political leaders could not ignore, and produced a broad and popular crusade for imperialism. Sparrow, like Nincic, Rose, and Gorski, concedes the power exerted by social context depends upon the public’s political attentiveness and level of information. In the 1890s, there was a nearly 90 percent literacy rate in the country and Americans read and granted credibility to their newspapers. Nincic, Rose, and Gorski add that politically aware citizenry are likely to adopt elite and media views if the elites are united in their position. In the 1890s, the federal government was ill-equipped to assemble basic information on government policy and transmit it to the public so the press became the conduit for elite opinion to the public on matters of foreign policy. In 1898, the “yellow press” was united in its position that the sinking of the Maine meant war. Nincic, Rose, and Gorski, however, qualify that the poorly informed and politically inattentive majority are not easily molded from above. As literacy rates have declined in the United States, the societal structure the agents of strategymaking confront has become more unwieldy.
For Trubowitz, the structural context for strategymakers is more directly political. Agents of strategy must operate against a backdrop of regional and party competition. Political leaders seeking electoral advantage respond to the interests of geographically defined constituencies. The international interests of constituents reflect differential rates of economic development and integration into the world economy. In Trubowitz’s account, regional economic differentiation structures strategic adjustment by producing territorial identities that shape, constrain, and influence behavior of politicians at the national level.
In Smith’s account, organizational context shapes strategymaking. His chronicle of the Navy’s process of drafting its white paper, “...From the Sea,” charts the service’s efforts to balance community viewpoints and build consensus around tasks it was likely to be called upon to undertake. His analysis resonates with Nincic, Rose, and Gorski’s by demonstrating how in peacetime, when threats are low, consensus is crucial to developing vision as a basis for action. For Smith, however, an organizational consensus must be forged. His analysis logically suggests the dynamics of intraorganizational consensus-building apply also to the challenge of interorganization consensus-building. In the post-World War II era, interservice controversy replaced traditional service-civilian conflict as a matter of emphasis. There had been earlier opportunistic efforts by the services to pursue their own agenda (e.g., Pacific War strategy), but it was during the Cold War when interservice rivalry came to the fore. Though development of new weapons and a new role for the United States in world affairs altered the functions and activities of the services, the unity and complexity of modern warfare, built into the very structure of the Defense Department, has made interservice rivalry a mainstay of the strategic adjustment process. With passage of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 (the Goldwater-Nichols law), jointness became the watchword, but has hardly eliminated the impact of interservice rivalry on peacetime policy.
Smith implicitly adopts Stephen Rosen’s view of military organizations as complex political communities. Rosen writes, “the central concerns [of the military] are those of any political community: who should rule, and how the ‘citizens’ should live.” 6 Services are not monolithic but rather composed of subunits with their own interests and subcultures. At any one time, but particularly in peacetime, competing theories about strategic priorities exist. Strategic adjustment is played out against a political backdrop of intraorganizational competition. Smith’s account parallels Trubowitz’s political coalition-building perspective. Both conceive the structural context to which agents of strategymaking must attend as intensely political.
Goldman’s interpretation of strategy formation highlights the structure created by bureaucratic rivalry and budgetary constraints. She, however, emphasizes the context of knowledge and experience. Her accounts of strategic adjustment in the interwar Army, Navy, and Marine Corps show how agents of strategymaking are influenced by the experiential base available to them, weighing the feasibility of strategic options against the limits and capabilities of technologies. Experiences of the past and growth of knowledge over time structure the way strategy unfolds.
The structural context created by technology is explored extensively by Breemer. In his account of U.S. strategic adjustment in the 1880s and 1890s, the agents of strategy were responding to a technologically induced system of insecurity. Rapid technological change created an environment of tremendous uncertainty for military planners. Weapons of mass destruction— battleships—portended annihilating sea battles, while rapidity of technological change threatened block obsolescence for first-rank sea powers and chances that second-and third-rank powers might leap-frog ahead.
Breemer’s analysis directs attention to changes in technology and warfare that stimulate strategic adjustment. His thesis resonates loudly with contemporary military planners striving to adapt U.S. military strategy and foreign policy to warfare in the information age. In the century covered by this volume, the technological context of warfare has shifted several times. By one account, there have existed three war forms in the twentieth century: an early modern pre-Cold War form dating from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; a late-modern Cold War form dating from the mid-twentieth century to the early 1990s; and a post-modern post-Cold War form which is presently emerging. 7 With the transition from one to the other, perception of the threat has shifted from enemy invasion, to nuclear war, to subnational and nonmilitary threats. In concert, force structure emphasis has shifted from the mass army, to the large professional army, to the smaller professional army with reserves sharing missions. Each war form has also affected public attitudes toward the military, from support, to ambivalence, to apathy or skepticism.
Yet military revolutions, be it the current information revolution or the industrial revolution to which Breemer refers, are not mere artifacts of technology. Changes in military organization, strategy, and ways of making war typically reflect large-scale changes in social organization. As the Tofflers argue, the way a society makes war reflects how it makes wealth. 8 The information warfare revolution is a logical outgrowth of the knowledge-based economies upon which modern society rests, just as the industrial warfare revolution depended upon not only industrial weaponry, steam transport, and the dreadnought, but also the full mobilization of societies for war and the rise of nationalistic and often popular states. Political and social innovations like seventeenth-century statism and eighteenth-nineteenth&-;century democratic revolutions have been critical to transformation in modes of warfare as much as developments in metallurgy, cavalry, gunpowder, transport, and communications. 9 By focusing on the technological dimensions of military change, however, Breemer’s analysis complements the social, cultural, and political foundations of strategic adjustment emphasized by other contributors.
The structure to which the agents of strategymaking attend is multidimensional. It is not simply a question of responding to or anticipating external threats and challenges. Diverse and potentially competing pressures emanate from social, political, and organizational environments. This interpretation resonates with the contemporary environment for U.S. strategy characterized by an independent and resourceful mass media with more avenues to influence public perceptions, increasing party competition, widespread public skepticism about U.S. activism abroad, and continuing rivalry among and within service organizations that interpret jointness as a way to protect service turf and budget share.
Agents of Strategy-Making
Interpretations of strategy in this volume engage a broad cast of actors inside and outside government. If strategic adjustment is viewed as a question of choice, who does the choosing and what are their incentives? For Trubowitz and Nincic, Rose, and Gorski, the agents are political leaders interested in garnering public support, electoral advantage, and votes. Trubowitz’s strongest case for strategic adjustment is linked to politicians driven by narrow political self-interest. His analysis is predicated on the assumption that politicians are entrepreneurs striving to benefit their constituents in order to assure reelection.
Not addressing agency directly, Rhodes’s strategymakers seem guided by a public interest to bind the nation together so that cultural, ethnic, and economic divisions do not undermine the ability of the state to act decisively when required. Rhodes raises the importance of national cohesiveness for strategic action, an enduring theme throughout history. Even the ancient Israelites, a loose confederation of twelve tribes, recognized they lacked the central leadership and unity to prevail over their Philistine and Amorite enemies, who consistently defeated them in battle—to the point of capturing the sacred Ark of the Covenant. Seeing this, tribal elders went to the prophet Samuel and asked him to “make us like other nations.” Samuel created a monarchy to optimize Hebrew power, and the enemies of Israel were soon put on the run. 10 In peacetime, Israel’s devotion to centralized power and political cohesiveness waned and the country split in two. Thereafter, one kingdom lost its independence to outside invaders, followed not long after by the other.
Social dislocation and ethnic diversity are not likely to threaten U.S. national survival today, though they are having such an impact in ethnically ruptured states in Eastern Europe facing the twin challenges of marketization and democratization. The assault on national identity and cohesiveness by a multicultural society, however, weakens the ability of the United States to act with assuredness and purpose in the world. The United States has never been an ethnically homogeneous society, but in the past, large influxes of immigrants were accompanied by what James Kurth describes as a “massive and systematic program of Americanization.” 11 Today, a coalition comprised of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and feminists subscribe to an ideology that champions America as a multicultural society rather than a leader, or even member, of Western civilization. This multicultural ideology threatens the ability of the United States to operate as a national state, to defend the values of liberalism, consitutionalism, rule of law, and free markets the nation fought for in two bloody hot wars and one long cold war in the twentieth century. 12 In the 1890s, American leaders had to struggle with the question of what gave the American nation purpose and identity, and what made the nation a nation. American leaders confront that daunting challenge again today, but this time accompanied by an increasingly powerful political and intellectual elite, new agents of strategymaking, bent on deconstructing America and Western civilization.
Shulman and Sparrow direct our attention to the influence specific societal actors wield in directing strategic change. In Shulman’s account, the agents of consequence were a cohesive political group that reflected an intellectual movement dedicated to promoting a particular vision of national mission. In his words, “navalists” were “effective agents of the dramatic shift” in U.S. strategy in the 1890s. They were individuals with diverse backgrounds, from disparate parts of the country, civilian and military, both inside and outside government. They were united in a belief that America must take its leading role among nations. They were the decisive actors who institutionalized the ideas that undergirded the new navalist strategy at the end of the nineteenth century. Cohesive special interests continue to play a role in directing U.S. strategic adjustment. Ethnic voting groups have encouraged foreign involvement, i.e., the Congressional Black Caucus lobbied for firm coercive diplomatic efforts in Haiti; American Poles have voiced vigorous support for Poland’s inclusion in NATO.
Sparrow focuses on the media as a decisive agent in strategic adjustment. Newspaper publishers of the day transformed their medium to popular entertainment in order to transcend gender, class, and ethnic divisions, appeal to the widest possible audience, and boost sales. He details how through sensationalist accounts, journalists, not politicians, set the political agenda for U.S. policy toward Cuba. They were able to do so because the press dominated communication with the public and could give its “spin” on political issues. In Sparrow’s words, it was “the press, rather than the President, the Republican party, or the State Department, [that] incited the United States to go to war” with Spain. It was this war that accelerated and consolidated the emergence of the United States as a world power. He shows how government spending actually followed the reports of the “yellow press.”
Sparrow’s account of the agents of consequence resonates with contemporary concerns about how the press can drive policy in the absence of clear threats to anchor strategy. We know, for example, U.S. intervention in Somalia was impelled by televised graphic pictures of starving children; that pictures of dead and splayed U.S. Army Rangers not only prompted U.S. withdrawal, but also transformed the administration’s orientation toward the use of force in general. Nor is “foreign policy by CNN” 13 unique to Somalia. Policy toward Bosnia has in many instances been a response to televised crises of the day, whether of the April 1993 siege of Srebrenica that brought ethnic cleansing home and heralded the new policy of lift and strike, or of the siege of Sarajevo three months later, which reopened the question of deploying U.S. ground troops. Sparrow’s account traces the impact of the press on public perceptions and the subsequent indirect impact on elite perceptions. Photographers waiting to film an amphibious assault on the beaches of Somalia cause one to ponder the power of the press to directly influence elite perceptions.
Goldman, Smith, and Breemer direct our focus to the military organization as an agent of consequence, based on the implicit assumption that in the rational state, bureaucracies can wield immense influence. Breemer traces how military planners struggled to come to grips with new technologies. U.S. strategic adjustment flowed directly from their attempts to manage the devastating power of new weapons. Smith documents how the Secretary of the Navy directed the organization to develop an entirely new strategic concept to guide U.S. naval forces into the twenty-first century. It was the Navy itself that declared its primary business to be projection of power ashore, a landward focus that represented sharp departure from Mahanian tradition and from the historic role of navies in general. Strategic adjustment was begun and sustained from within the institution, a product of self-conscious self-examination. Smith summarizes, “the entire process is a testimony to the institutional capacity of military organizations to undertake non- evolutionary and truly innovative strategic adjustment....the Navy’s move to adopt a littoral focus occurred despite the absence of strong domestic political inducements, much less civilian intervention, and despite the absence of an immediate or highly visible strategic vulnerability... .”
Smith’s contemporary case validates insights from Goldman’s historic reading of military organizations as originators of innovative approaches to providing security, rather than as passive recipients of new ideas or reactionary obstructionists. In the most compelling interwar case, she shows how the Marine Corps of the 1920s and 1930s, like the Navy of the 1990s, transformed its core mission to one of amphibious assault, despite Presidential ambivalence, Congressional distaste, Navy neglect, and expert consensus worldwide that assault against defended shores was impossible.
Smith’s, Goldman’s, and Breemer’s analyses confirm the characterization of service organizations as guided by narrow institutional self-interest to be misleading. The military can be guided by motives higher than immediate bureaucratic goals, by the public interest. As a participant in that process, Smith asserts military officers saw their task as one of ensuring the country’s ability to respond to future threats and challenges. The prospect of lives that might be lost weighed heavily in their deliberations.
Contributors to this volume, each in their own way, cast doubt on the statist characterization of agency. The actors involved are diverse, their motives variegated. Over time, agents of consequence have evolved, transformed, gained and lost resources and influence. The “yellow press” disappeared entirely. Ethnic interest groups have emerged on the scene in new and influential ways. Powerful economic interests, many the legacy of the “military-industrial complex” that grew out of the economic mobilization planning for World War I, continue to have large stakes in the military establishment and constrain strategic adjustment.
The services’ abilities to influence public perceptions and play in the public as well as bureaucratic arena have risen since the end of World War II along with the military’s importance in American society. The services expanded public relations activities, developed public information offices and legislative liaisons, and increased the number of and membership in backstop organizations like the Navy League and Air Force Association. They have been increasingly active at the grassroots level in order to reach public opinion, for example using the reserve structure to build support among local constituencies. 14
The evolving structure of the American state has influenced strategy in peacetime by introducing new actors and shifting the power among existing institutions. A new agent, the National Security Council, was created in 1947 to promote political-military consultation and bridge the gap between civilian policymakers and military strategists. Since its inception, an elaborate system for coordinating the views of the various agencies involved in policy formulation has developed. 15 Greater institutional coordination between military and civilian elites means more strategic coherence, even though in peacetime, civilian politicians will always be prone to respond more directly to societal pressures, and military elites to bureaucratic incentives.
The continual evolution in the balance of interbureaucratic power in the American state has altered the share of resources among bureaucracies and changed the locus of strategic decisionmaking. The Departments of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, and Interior were privileged in the pre-World War II American state. In the immediate post-World War II years, State and Treasury dominated a government organized around the economic agenda of promoting international trade and investment. By 1949, the U.S. government took on a wartime complexion as military-security concerns moved to the forefront. The military establishment became transcendent, the intelligence communities mushroomed, and NSC shouldered aside State.
Reflecting this continual evolution, the Clinton administration created a National Economic Council, a cluster of economic agencies co-equal collectively to the NSC, designed to open up strategymaking to a broader array of actors, particularly economic ones. The move to include economic players in what have been traditionally considered military affairs reflects the importance of economic, trade, and competitiveness considerations in the current U.S. strategic outlook. Creation of the National Economic Council, along with the proposed reorganization of the Department of Defense to address new national security problems like the environment, counter-narcotics, peacekeeping, and humanitarian assistance, resulted from a belief that the Cold War bureaucratic balance was ill-suited for the current international environment.
Over time, the balance of influence among the services has also changed, spurred as much by technological change as by resources. The Navy, until the 1940s traditionally the first line of defense, now had to share resources and influence with an independent Air Force that claimed to be purveyor of strategic offense. Nor has Congress’s role been static. Congress as an agent of consequence in military and strategic policy has grown over time. Congress always had the power of the purse and responsibility for raising an Army and equipping the Navy. In the post-Vietnam era, it took a far more active role, micromanaging defense and using the purse strings to influence debates on military strategy.
Structure is dynamic, and so is agency. The formation, implementation, and evolution of strategy has been shaped by shifting sets of actors and institutions, whose influence wax and wane with resource capacities, the ability to communicate with the public and shape popular conceptions of strategic needs, and power vis-à-vis other state institutions. As state institutions, state- society relations, civil-military relations, and the balance of power among political institutions evolve, so too does the strategic adjustment process. Each individual chapter in this volume has examined the United States at one historical turning point. There are drawbacks to adopting the single- country longitudinal approach, but the virtues are greater and they cannot be gleaned from analyses of strategic adjustment that look at multiple states at a single point in time, 16 or multiple states at different points in time. 17 Collectively, by examining strategic adjustment in one state over time, this volume permits us to explore how agency, structure, and process evolve.
Strategic Choice
This volume has also advanced multiple interpretations of strategic choice. Some contributors cast strategic adjustment as a process of responding to or mediating among competing interests. Nincic, Rose, and Gorski characterize strategic choice as a process of maneuvering within constraints created by societal interests. They recognize that ultimately the public must foot the bill, and so must be convinced of the appropriateness and desirability of any strategic endeavor. Adjustment means framing policies to mobilize support, and rallying segments of the political establishment together, all the time recognizing the limits societal preferences impose on the ability of leaders to impose consistency. Even nondemocracies pay dearly for failing to generate support for strategic endeavors in peacetime. The early Romans, achieving only a limited victory in a bitter twenty-year war against Carthage, shifted their continental strategic outlook to a balanced mix of land and naval forces. Their resolute pursuit of naval power over the twenty-year interwar period enabled Rome to enter the Second Punic War with an unchallengeable navy, giving it a war-winning edge. But this strategic adjustment succeeded only because Carthage failed to compete in the naval arms race with Rome, in part because of the disinclination to bear the costs of such a competition. 18
For Trubowitz, strategic choice is a politicized process of coalition-building, logrolling, and vote-trading. Strategymaking involves mediating among competing political and commercial interests. Similarly, Smith characterizes the process as mediating among organizational constituencies and balancing differing community viewpoints. He details how in the second phase of the Naval Forces Capabilities Planning effort process, the initial core working group was expanded to include a full spectrum of operational expertise from every warfare community, with representatives from the fleets and Navy theater commanders. They were tasked to deal directly with questions that affected the services’ internal constituencies—questions at the heart of the roles and missions controversy that has exacerbated interservice rivalry since the end of World War II and led to unnecessary duplication in U.S. force structure.
The Royal Navy’s response, a century ago, to the need for political support to sustain budgetary levels in a low-threat era can be understood with reference to Trubowitz’s and Smith’s coalition-building models. Initially, the Admiralty simply reported its internal debates about the future of sea power to Parliament, which resulted in “politicians of both parties keep[ing] naval budgets low.” The Royal Navy remedied this negative situation by fostering a navalist school of thought from both within and outside its ranks, apotheosized through the work of Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond. In Germany, Britain’s emerging rival for naval mastery, a similar institutional response to the need for political coalition-building arose in the form of Admiral Tirpitz’s sponsorship of the Flottenverein (“Fleet Professors”) whose job was to expound the virtues of a German strategic shift toward greater sea power. 19
Goldman’s account shares Smith’s focus on consensus-building and his view of strategic adjustment as a process of articulating new roles and missions, of a service reinventing itself. Building on a rich body of learning theory, she models strategic choice as military innovation, emphasizing the role of simulation and testing as a conduit for evaluating new ideas and reducing uncertainty. Strategic adjustment involves developing new options based on observations and interpretations of experience.
Rhodes also views choice as creating new options and developing new paths that heretofore did not exist. Strategic adjustment means forging a new myth of national identity to consolidate society in the face of social and cultural dislocation. This need resonates today in contemporary Russia. Evolving social and economic experiments with democracy and capitalism have produced social, cultural, and economic dislocation, tearing society to its core. Russia’s identity as the vanguard of communism, bulwark against the capitalist West, and strategic superpower in a global bipolar competition has disintegrated. No new identity has been forged. A redefinition of national identity, however, need not be a response to societal need. It may stem from the goals of a particular leader and it may ultimately undermine social cohesion. Russian strategic adjustment, when viewed through the prism of the last 400 years, reflects a shift from a principally north-south axis, featuring Swedes and Turks as key opponents, to an east-west axis, featuring competition with continental European great powers in the west, and a long cold (and sometimes hot) war in the east, against, variously, China, Britain (the Great Game) and Japan. This shift in Russian strategic identity was begun by Peter the Great, who was driven by the idea of Russia becoming a great military power and a modern European state. Victory in the Great Northern War over Sweden (1700–1720) and a continuing rollback of the Turks from the Ukraine made the shift practicable. But it was Peter’s ideas about “Europeanization” and his overall view of Russia’s status in the world that impelled him to reorient his nation to the West. 20 Paradoxically, the Petrine reforms undermined national cohesion, deepening the gulf between the Russian masses and elites that had heretofore been bridged by shared religious beliefs and cultural assumptions. 21
Other contributors conceive strategic adjustment as a process of institutionalization. For Shulman, strategic adjustment in the 1890s succeeded because the navalists institutionalized their ideas through intellectual, institutional, and political means. Navalists altered popular discourse by reinterpreting history to lay the intellectual framework for a new navy. They reformed and modernized the Navy, improving its image as a more efficient service. They galvanized the financial and institutional support necessary to fund a blue-water naval establishment. Navalists also reorganized the service’s educational system, creating a way to transmit and sustain the vitality of the battleship philosophy. The navalists were so successful in institutionalizing new ideas, according to Shulman, that the nation has paid the price ever since in the form of an institution—the Mahanian navy—that is the single most expensive organization ever.
For Sparrow, the legitimation of existing naval institutions and creation of new ones was indispensable for the momentous shift in U.S. strategy witnessed in the 1890s. He shows how a lasting shift in committed government funding, in essence institutionalizing a new balance in the allocation of state resources, was requisite for great-power status. Relatedly, Breemer describes how the rapidity of technological change in the Victorian age made the systematic collection and analysis of intelligence a vital activity in peacetime military planning. The United States, as did other naval powers, formalized its intelligence-gathering activities by establishing an Office of Naval Intelligence and maintaining permanent naval attaches abroad.
Goldman and Smith further develop the argument of strategic adjustment as institutionalization. For Smith, broad transformation of the Cold War Navy requires that the new ideas contained in ...From the Sea, and later Forward...From the Sea, be institutionalized within the Navy and Marine Corps. Goldman’s account suggests how that might be achieved. Crucial to redirecting the Marine Corps’s roles from colonial infantry and afloat security to amphibious assault was theoretical overhaul of instruction at Marine Corps schools. Similarly important to the emergence of carrier doctrine was the institutionalization of realistic war gaming at the Naval War College which continues to this day. Finally, the establishment of the Army Industrial College, which delivered instruction on logistics and mobilization planning, was crucial to the transition of Army thinking about modern war. The notion of strategic choice as one of maximizing national interests, or as a process of aligning means with ends to cause security is only one of many ways to characterize the strategymaking process.
Conclusion
The interpretations put forth in this volume reveal it is not axiomatic who the agents of strategy are, what environment they are attending to, or what the process of choice looks like. As we consider the issue of American strategic adjustment in the coming years, we should look closely at the various frames of reference suggested by the contributors to this volume. For example, the U.S. military, both a complex organization and a powerful bureaucratic actor—whose subcomponents pursue interests that are competitive as often as they are complementary—clearly needs to craft a set of ideas about the future of military power that will help to build and sustain political support for defense spending, and will provide it with the possibility for renewed freedom of action. Seen from this perspective, thinking about the current revolution in military affairs (RMA) may be a 1990s counterpart to 1890s navalism.
The RMA may also play neatly to the need both to shape and to react to public opinion, as some views of the future of armed conflict suggest the possibility that wars may be fought more cheaply and less bloodily—both factors having great inherent appeal to the American mass public and the increasingly powerful media. In this respect, the drive for “information dominance” echoes closely Mahan’s call for naval mastery a century ago. Indeed, the fact that the U.S. military has sponsored much of the research into the RMA deepens the similarity to nineteenth-century navalism.
In closing this volume, we urge that any doubts about the greater explanatory power of the levels of analysis developed in preceding chapters—vis- à-vis the rationalist systemic frame of reference—should be dispelled when the near-term future is considered. For the United States faces a world system that poses much less threat than it did ten years ago. Russia has clearly ended its global competition with the United States, focusing inwardly on its own retrenchment and need for strategic adjustment. Its efforts at social and economic renewal, the foundations of any military resurgence, have been halting, riotous, and chaotic—and may ultimately fail. China, a popular source of speculation and concern, remains many decades away from wielding military influence beyond its local environs—and even near to home it is surrounded by smaller states with robust capabilities for balancing against the PRC (e.g., Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea). How can system level theory, in the face of such diminished threat, explain the continued American expenditure of approximately a quarter trillion dollars annually on defense? Quite simply, it can not. To understand the continued high levels of spending on defense, and the frenetic efforts at institutional redesign and doctrinal and strategic adjustment, one must look to the role of ideas, the play of domestic and bureaucratic politics, and the many other indicators of the fundamentally internal sources of strategic adjustment.
Endnotes
Note 1: Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, eds., Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. Back.
Note 2: Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 482. Back.
Note 3: Richard Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 4: Paul Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition,” in Grand Strategies in War and Peace, ed. Paul Kennedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 5. Back.
Note 5: Paul Kennedy, “American Grand Strategy, Today and Tomorrow: Learning from the European Experience,” in Grand Strategy, ed. Kennedy, 184. Back.
Note 6: Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 19. Back.
Note 7: Charles C. Moskos and James Burk, “The Post-modern Military,” in James Burk, ed., The Military in New Times: Adapting Armed Forces to a Turbulent World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 141–62. Back.
Note 8: Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 34. Back.
Note 9: Brian R. Sullivan, “What Distinguishes a Revolution in Military Affairs from a Military Technical Revolution?,” Paper prepared for The Revolution in Military Affairs Conference, sponsored by the Joint Center for International and Security Studies and Security Studies, Monterey, California, August 26– 29, 1996, 3. Back.
Note 10: This story is nicely exposited in 1 Samuel, Chapters 6–9. Back.
Note 11: James Kurth, “The Real Clash,” The National Interest 37 (Fall 1994), 13. Back.
Note 13: “This Time We Mean It,” Time (February 21, 1994). Back.
Note 14: Samuel P. Huntington, “Inter-service Competition and the Political Role of the Armed Services,” in Total War and Cold War: Problems in Civilian Control of the Military, ed., Harry L. Cole (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), 178–210. Back.
Note 15: Mahan first began to preach the idea of closer civil-military coordination in the late nineteenth century. Changes began to appear, however, only after the war with Spain. Each service established separate bodies for planning and coordination. The Navy created the General Board, the Army created the General Staff, and in 1903 the Joint Army-Navy Board was formed. Additional reforms in the post-World War I years included the Rogers Act of 1924, which established a professional staff of foreign service officers in the State Department, the reorganization of the Army General Staff, and the gradual evolution of the Office of Naval Operations. Finally, a new and stronger Joint Board of the Army and Navy, the logical precursor to the Joint Staff, was created to promote interservice cooperation. In the last year of World War II, the need for military government directives and surrender terms led to the creation of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, the immediate predecessor to the NSC. See Ernest R. May, “The Development of Political-Military Consultation in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly 70 (June 1995), 161–80 and Louis Morton “Interservice Co-operation and Political-Military Collaboration,” in Total War and Cold War, ed., Coles, 131–60. Back.
Note 16: Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, vol. 2, The Interwar Period (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988). Back.
Note 17: Kennedy, ed. Grand Strategy and Rosecrance and Stein, eds., Domestic Bases. Back.
Note 18: The most comprehensive scholarship on the origins and conduct of the First Punic War is J. F. Lazenby, The First Punic War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Also, see Hans Delbrueck, Warfare in Antiquity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press [1920]1990), 301–7. Back.
Note 19: On this point, see D. M. Schurman, The Education of a Navy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 2–5. While the organizational response to the need to create political support brought such theorists as the Colomb brothers and Julian Corbett to the fore, the Royal Navy’s own analysts did first-rate work. See, for example, H. Richmond, The Navy in the War of 1739– 48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). Back.
Note 20: On the power of Peter’s ideas over policy, see Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great (New York: Ballantine, 1984), the principal theme of which is that his visit to Western Europe in the late seventeenth century shaped his overall view of Russia’s place in the world. Pares, A History of Russia (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), 183–215, makes a similar argument, noting especially the importance of the expatriate Swiss Lefort, who lobbied the young czar to travel to Europe in order to “bring back to Russia teachers of all those arts of which his country was most in need” (p. 187). Back.
Note 21: David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 39–40. Back.
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