Strategy (III): an elite few, and you can tell when they’re young

So Tom, you are a disciple of Krepinevich? His ideas on the oil spot analogy has merit. But using the Malayan Emergency as conducted under Templer to describe this may be misleading.

Unfortunately, what may be lost or unknown to the retired LtCol. is the brutality of forcefully relocating ethnic Chinese towns and destroying any growing food stuffs left, thereby starving the MNLA into having no choice but to enter zones controlled by the British - who killed those that didn't surrender or had already starved to death, unlike the trans-national Pashtun who can high-tail it over the border. In addition, Templer demanded the utmost in operational intelligence - something that I've my doubts we'll ever have in Afghanistan.

My point? Some people don't know as much as they think they do or figure others don't, and offer forward ideas, though having merit, also don't contain the whole picture why a previous strategy worked.

Seeing the end game and planning backward to the start is a good indication of someone that grasps strategic thinking. But understanding how that end game came about is important also. And presenting or omitting selected facts is not a trait of a strategic thinker.

Personnel policies, in part, discourage strategic thought by those in command.

The Army has a functional area for strategists. But here's the catch: you'll enter the functional area as a captain or major, and you'll serve on a division or corps staff for the rest of your career. Forget about battalion or brigade command.

As much as the Army pushes the "Pentathlete" model of leadership, it still won't happen unless personnel policies are changed. Despite the fact that I'd probably get a good school on the Army's dime if I entered the strategist field, I doubt I'd do it, as I'd never command again, and I can forget about ever flying again also.

A few miscellaneous thoughts regarding strategy--the Army needs to somehow incentivize thinking in strategic and political terms. We certainly have financial incentives for ensuring commanders pay attention to every little widget on their property books, but there's no incentive to even exercise basic strategic thought.

I found this comment in the report also interesting--especially since the actual footnote stated that the source is based on an assessment of operational level (designing and executing campaigns) competence. Krepenivich and Watts then make the assumption that strategic and operational qualities are the same. It may seem esoteric and I don't have any evidence to disprove this correlation, but neither do they offer any real proof themselves.
While I thought the report had some good information, I thought the historical baseline was sort of thin. I didn't see proof of a decline in US strategy, as much as the authors' assertion that we had it right in WWII and the Eisenhower administration--what about the rest of our 200+years?. Their recommendation seems to be nothing more than replicating the Eisenhower approach.
To me, successful strategy, the result of strategic ability, can only really be measured in relative terms. How good do we have to be? Is it enough to be better than others? What is the measure of "success"? It would seem that our assessment of strategic success for any decision or event changes over time (similar to our judgement of Presidents). What seems inept today, appears brilliant in 10 years, and inept again in 20 years.
I'm not making the case against strategic competence, but I do beleive that our form of government allows us to get it mostly right, most of the time, over the long haul.

Given the fuss today about Tom Friedman's column praising authoritarian political systems like China's b/c of their capacity to steamroll over domestic opposition when making tough choices I thought the Krepinevich/ Watts insight was important-- one massive advantage of democracies is that the need to get approval for major decisions, even in a buraucracy, prevents bad ideas from taking hold as much as they do in other systems. Obvious there are exceptions (the decision to invade Iraq) but it generally holds up.