Thread by @BretDevereaux

Ok, twitter? We need to have a talk about strategy. How one comes up with a strategy, what a strategy is, and how to assess not just bad strategy, but the *absence* of strategy.

A strategy - in anything, war, peace, daily life, whatever - has three basic parts: 1/20

1) An assessment of current conditions, resources and capabilities
2) A desired goal or situation (= end-state)
3) A set of means to use the resources of (1) to produce the result of (2).

Basically, strategy is "where am I, where do I want to be, how do I get there?"
2/20

That seems super reductive and almost stupidly obvious, but think about how often in life we act without going through those steps. We get mad, snap at a friend not because it will help us achieve our objective - it won't - but because we were angry in the moment. 3/20

States do this too, either b/c the personalities of leaders or b/c public opinion/outrage. See: the feedback loop of nationalist gov't's encouraging jingoism in the people, then being forced by those people to be more aggressive, even when it isn't strategically wise. 4/20

Back to our 3 parts: strategic failures are usually in (2) and (3). (1) - current assessment - is crucial of course. No map will help you if you don't know where you are in the first place. But those are usually intelligence failures, and their own issue. 5/20

The worst problem is a 'strategy' without an end-state (strategy without strategy). That is a sneakier trap than it sounds. Decision-makers on the ground are absorbed by the day-to-day of (3), making it easy to telescope in and lose sight of end-state goals... 6/20

...which can lead to a strategy which is backfilled from operational concerns, rather than leading them. E.g. Pearl Harbor - Japan declaring war on the USA to get oil with which to solve an operational/logistical problem in China. Not a great plan, it turns out. 7/20

...my impression is that USA has fallen into a similar trap at several points in both Afghanistan and the Mid-East. We're *there* and stuck, and we have no path to old end-states, so we keep doing what we are doing without a sense of where it is supposed to lead. 8/20

A related problem is the 'everything's a nail' problem: you have a pre-selected set of means (3), regardless of your end-state (2). E.g. looking to do conventional battles to the problem until it goes away, without ever asking "how does a conventional battle solve this?" 9/20

Sure, if the problem is another uniformed army, conventional battles can solve it. But if the problem is centered on popular support and legitimacy (e.g. Iranian influence in Iraq), trying to 'go kinetic' on it can (emphasis, *can*) be like trying to hammer a screw. 10/20

The other problem is emotional responses, passed off as means, with no connection to ends. As humans, when the 'enemy' hurts us, our instinct is to hurt them back. This is where strategy is essential - if you have an end-state strongly in mind, you can stop and ask... 11/20

"Does retaliation get me closer to my end-state? What *kind* of retaliation would get me there?" The question isn't about 'hurting the enemy' anymore, but about getting to a specific positive goal. But it's easy to get tied up thinking about 'delivering pain' to the enemy. 12/20

Be suspicious of any strategy which assumes that delivering a certain amount of pain will, through no explained mechanism, force the enemy to give up. Pain can just make a people angrier, after all. 13/20

As an ancient historian, I do have to say that there is a certain threshold of violence which will collapse resistance merely by delivering pain, but it is *extremely* high, and with modern weapons, it's likely to leave nothing left worth having in the region... 14/20

'Make a desert and call it peace' is, in nearly all cases, not intended end-state (and also morally wrong), just delivering pain won't get you where you want to go. Strat. bombing falls into this trap easily, with the connection between means (dropping bombs) and ends... 15/20

...ends (surrender, moral collapse) being mostly wishful thinking.

So the next time you see Important Leader Person getting up on a microphone and explaining what they've done, or are going to do, listen for any traces of actual strategy. 16/20

Ask yourself - what is the end-state here? Is it something I want? Are multiple end-states mutually exclusive (e.g. undermine influence of country Y, but also leave region) What are the means intended to produce the end-state? Are they likely to actually do that? 17/20

And are actions being justified on strategic grounds ('this gets us where we are going') or emotional grounds - e.g. 'he was a bad guy' or 'getting them back.'

Clausewitz sets the strategic layer - w/ the political object - in the realm of *reason* deliberately. 18/20

Not that the emotional - will - is pointless in war. It's in that trinity too! Moral grounds matter - a strategy that requires immoral means is bad strategy and unlikely to succeed because it undermines the will to continue.

But strategy is in the head, not the heart. 19/20

And no citizen (or citizen-soldier) in a democracy should accept political leaders who aren't willing to be up-front about what the national strategy is, and how we're trying to achieve it. Something is very wrong if nobody outside DoD/State knows WTF is going on or why. end/20