COIN and Grand Strategy

Zenpundit throws down the gauntlet to COIN theorists:

"Operational doctrine is not enough. It is untethered. It will float like a balloon in a political wind. It is crisis management without a destination or sufficient justification for expenditure of blood and treasure. If these blanks are not filled in, they will be filled in by others."

Counterinsurgency isn't the only operational doctrine that has reached prominence. Counterterrorism, which has largely guided American grand strategy, is itself a kind of operational doctrine that was transmuted to the level of grand strategy. The larger issue, as Joseph Fouche suggests, is that America has never been very good at creating grand strategies. Grand strategies are abstract and complex, difficult things to be instrumentalized by a constitutionally divided government governing amid a chaotic landscape of various forms of interest politics. They also, as Fouche argues, tend to be produced by exemplary individuals rather than industrial bureaucracies.

What we as Americans excel at are technical solutions and innovations. Modern counterinsurgency doctrine is an brilliant technocratic solution, a factor that largely explains its bipartisan popularity. Abu Muquama, after all, regularly guests on Rachel Maddow. Modern counterinsurgency was instrumentalized as a solution to irregular conflict, drawn from British and French military intellectuals of the 60s and 70s and enhanced by modern social science and the bitter experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is, as Zenpundit noted, a purely operational doctrine and has never pretended otherwise.

The fact that counterinsurgency become so celebrated is a commentary on the American love of technocratic solutions and innovations and the problems we face in creating and implementing abstract and complex long-term visions. The American narrative is one of progressive innovation and triumph over adversity. This is a helpful narrative and we should celebrate our talent for innovation. But Zenpundit rightly argues that operational innovation isn't enough.

What's the solution? Lots of ink has been spilled about creating grand strategy based on both present and future geostrategic conditions. Thomas P.M. Barnett, on the other hand, is correct to look at American identity instead as the source of grand strategy. Ultimately a grand strategy is a shared vision that originates from a dream of a nation's place in the world--and a nation's vision of itself. Yet few are looking at identity as a source of strategy. We should expend more energy conducting this kind of analysis instead of purely geopolitical or threat-based analysis.

Comments

[Eddie]

"Thomas P.M. Barnett, on the other hand, is correct to look at American identity instead as the source of grand strategy."

Isn't that something that Mark himself laid out in "Threats in the Age of Obama"? Your favorite liberal hawk Anne-Marie Slaughter did much of the same on a lesser scale in her "networked civilization" piece in Foreign Affairs last year.

[A.E.]

Yeah, Mark did too. And that was a good piece by Slaughter, along with her book "the idea of America." Of course the best person who wrote on constructions and identity is Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics.

[A.E.]

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson also has another good one in writing about German identity and the Cold war in "Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West."