"We need to think more about strategy..."

While briefing reporters on issues concerning the FY11 defense budget this morning at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Andrew Krepenevich painted a pretty bleak portrait of what he sees as the dearth of real, hard strategic thinking by the Pentagon and among the civilians in the Executive branch.

His comments followed closely the thoughts he put forth in a paper published earlier this month where he complained that the Obama administration’s recently released national security strategy “offers no concrete suggestions on how the administration hopes to achieve [its stated] objectives or how inconsistencies between these objectives might be resolved by establishing strategic priorities.” This morning, he also offered that while the tightening budgets brought about by the current fiscal crisis means that “we need to think about budgets,” it also means that in order to make fully informed budget decisions, “we need to think more about strategy.”

Krepenevich  went on to say that the lack of strategic thinking “is striking to me because if you don’t have that kind of comprehensive strategy when you’re looking across several types of enduring challenges—when you’re looking at shifts in alliance relationships, when you’re looking at declining defense resources—and you don’t have a strong sense of what are the priorities here…the matter of strategy I think has been greatly undervalued.” 

In a paper released earlier this month, Patrick Cronin of the Center for a New American Security also tried to tackle the strategy conundrum that American defense planners have created for themselves. Also taking the financial crisis as a starting point from which to work, Cronin writes that “while the United States stands to remain the world’s preeminent power for some time, the era of boundless commitment and profligacy has passed. To ignore this reality could precipitate decline rather than perpetuate preponderance.” Titled, Restraint: Recalibrating American Strategy, Cronin calls for a less expansive view of American power that must try and stamp out every potential problem that it uncovers in the dustier precincts of the globe.

Instead of calling for an era of isolation, he advocates that in the near-term at least, the United States will need to “think harder before reacting and committing our finite resources, to look for asymmetric responses – those with low costs and high returns – rather than those that deliver high returns at an equally high cost and to get our own house in order.” With a $13 trillion national debt and an economy that is unsteadily digging itself out of what is being termed the “Great Recession,” budgets for both expeditionary military adventures and high-ticket foreign aid packages will be extremely tight, and as a result, Cronin writes, “the United States can best pursue a protracted period of global order by resisting the temptation to solve all the world’s problems. The United States must pursue a strategy characterized by, in a word, restraint. Restraint is not a strategy, but it can help the United States preserve its limited means to focus on essential commitments.” Given the economy and the spiraling national debt, restraint might not be a choice, but rather a necessity.