Volume 4, Issue 1, Summer 2014
Infinity Journal
Page 10
Strategy is the business of military professionals, but, far too
often, they practice it improperly out of ignorance and lack
of experience. The US military continues to struggle with
matriculating ready strategic leaders fromamongst their most
successful tacticians. Adroit responses to the circumstances
on the battlefield have not been accompanied by
equally savvy responses to the policy logic driving US-led
campaigns at the theater-strategic and national levels. As a
consequence, operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan have
drifted amongst ad hoc measures which have largely been
sound tactically but bereft of strategic coherence.
Too many officers failed to discern
the proper contribution of functional
experts and to not mistake the
experts’ mastery of facts
for strategic understanding.
Evenas theUSunexpectedlybegan twoextendedcampaigns,
the focus remained on optimizing our means and methods
on the ground, getting our inputs right, instead of reassessing
our governing strategies. American military leaders became
enamored with the promise of experts as a lifeline to escape
indecision regarding the battles it found itself tangled in.Too
many officers failed to discern the proper contribution of
functional experts and to not mistake the experts’ mastery of
facts for strategic understanding. For at least two decades,
US military strategy has been adrift because senior leaders
have not understood strategy in theory as well as in practice
and thus have not put expertise in its appropriate role.[i]
The Bush Administration’s response to 9/11 created
operational imperatives in the form of two wars that allowed
senior leaders to abrogate their strategic responsibility of
ensuring operations solved the necessary problem, not just
those problems that were merely relevant to the national
interests at stake.The counterinsurgency doctrine articulated
in US Army
Field Manual 3-24
encouraged such behavior
and eventually subsumed strategy by articulating a rationale
for open-ended campaigns. It ultimately proved to be an
incomplete guide for the coalition campaigns, precluding
serious introspection at the highest levels about the direction
of those military adventures and the wisdom of continuing
them. The US military’s infatuation with new ways of war and
fervent acceptance of uncertainty as the great menace of
our time is an extension of the underlying logic behind
Field
Manual 3-24
. Such reckless modernism reflects a collective
failure to apply strategic thought. It would be too strong to
call this ongoing failure to be a dereliction of duty, but it is a
problem that demands an intense discourse amongst military
professionals about the substance of strategy malpractice
and solutions for reducing it, if not to eliminate it.[ii]
That strategy malpractice occurs at all should be of great
concern to everyone. Errors in judgment are forgivable
given the dynamism and complexity of war, but blunders
in practice stemming from theoretical ignorance and
analytic ineptitude are less so.The US military, in the tradition
articulated by Samuel Huntington, prides itself in providing
expert advice to policymakers on the application of military
power. Huntington argued that military professionals should
be granted autonomy within their areas of expertise in
exchange for apolitical behavior. His seminal work on the
subject,
Soldier and the State
, was embraced by American
military professionals as the authoritative articulation of their
status in society. Huntington’s book defends the professional
sovereignty of uniformed experts to advise and manage
the development, articulation, and conduct of tactics and
strategy. While such autonomy is a rational basis for civil-
military relations, the mediocrity of strategic advice should
Robert Mihara
U.S.Army’s 10th Mountain Division
Fort Drum, New York
Major Robert Mihara is a strategic planner currently
serving with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Maj.
Mihara holds a B.S. in International/Strategic History from
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a M.A. in US
History from Texas A&M University. From 2007 to 2010, he
served on the history faculty at West Point.Maj.Mihara has
published several articles and blog posts on strategy and
international policy with Infinity Journal, E-International
Relations, and The Bridge. He can be found on Twitter @
mihara99.
To cite this Article:
Mihara, Robert,“Strategy Malpractice and the False Hope of Experts,”
Infinity Journal
,Volume 4, Issue 1, summer
2014, pages 10-12.
Strategy Malpractice and the False Hope of Experts
