Transformation and Strategic Surprise

📖 The Scoop

Though discounted by Clausewitz in the circumstances of his era, strategic surprise has enjoyed considerable popularity over the past century. The possibility of achieving decisive results from attacks launched on short, or zero, warning has appeared to improve greatly with advances in technology. It follows that surprise has been recognized as offering what seem to be both golden opportunities and lethal dangers. Since surprise is an ironbound necessity for the tactical success of terrorism, it is understandable that it attracts a major degree of attention today. There is no real novelty about this. After all, for 40 years the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organizatiion (NATO) allies perpetually worried about surprise attack on the Central Front in Europe, as well as about a surprise first strike designed to disarm the United States of its ability to retaliate with its strategic nuclear forces. As a general rule, this monograph does not repeat or attempt to second guess the existing scholarship on how to correct bureaucratic and other pathologies in the world of intelligence. Furthermore, it does not contest the declared purposes or the details of the Army's radical transformation plan, both of which it judges to be admirable. It is not that kind of analysis. Instead, this discussion takes an unusually broad view of the problem, actually the condition, of strategic surprise, and relates it to the process of military transformation that currently is still in its early stages. The analysis has a strong thesis and conclusion. Specifically, it argues that in period after period, and with few exceptions in war after war, the kind of strategic surprise to which the United States is most at risk, and which is most damaging to U.S. national security, is the unexpected depth and pervasiveness of the connection between war and politics. Americans usually are superior in making war: they are far less superior in making the peace that they want out of the war that they wage. The monograph argues that the current military transformation, though certainly welcome, cannot itself correct the long-standing U.S. weakness in the proper use of force as an instrument of policy. The discussion claims that, notwithstanding its probable virtues in the enhancement of military prowess, the current military transformation bids fair to be irrelevant to America's really serious strategic problem or condition. What the global superpower needs is a military establishment that it can use in ways conducive to the standards of international order it seeks to uphold, and with the political consequences that U.S. policy intends. Whether that establishment is more, or less, network-centric, or has, more or less, on-call precision firepower, truly is a matter of less than overwhelming importance. Politics rules! More accurately phrased, perhaps, policy should rule! War is political behavior that must serve policy. Since the conduct of war should not be a self-regarding apolitical activity, preparation for it in peacetime, as well as its exercise in anger, needs to be suffused with the sense of purpose that is provided only by the realm of policy. To summarize: this monograph has taken no issue with the grand design of the transforming Army, rather the salient topics are the use made of the Army by American policymakers, and the way that the Army chooses to behave, both in combat and afterwards. The argument unfolds cumulatively with seven points presented in all but self-explanatory, descriptive language.

Genre: Political Science / General (fancy, right?)