The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning

“Strategy is the future of present decisions”- Garry Kasparov

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”- Savielly Tartakower

Strategy and defense planning belong to the realm of the unknown. There is nothing as certain as the uncertainty of the future and yet all polities depend on their safety and survival by striving to meet the challenge of uncertainty. All nations must attempt, in the words of the late British strategist Colin Gray, “to get the biggest issues right enough” and to “seek good enough answers to the right questions.”[i] As such, strategy necessitates a rigorous and often uncomfortable examination of potential threats, no matter how improbable they may seem. It involves moving beyond the conventional wisdom and exploring scenarios that stretch the boundaries of our current understanding of, and hope for, the world. It requires navigating a delicate balance between caution and creativity, with deep roots in history, where planners must envision not just the likely developments but also the wild cards that could disrupt the status quo. In other words, it requires that strategists and defense planners think about the unthinkable. This particular aspect of the strategic flame is dwindling. The current war in Israel and the discussions surrounding the looming conflict with China over Taiwan should serve as warnings for what might occur if we completely extinguish the strategic imperative to think about the unthinkable. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to identify this unfortunate trend in strategic thinking, describe an approach to defense planning called “strategic prophylaxis” and offer a few potential remedies to the malady.

The Decline in Thinking About the Unthinkable

During the Cold War, much of American strategic thought was dedicated to “thinking about the unthinkable” in the context of nuclear war. The famed “Wizards of Armageddon” did not merely postulate and stipulate on geopolitical threats and then shrug their shoulders at the magnitude of the problem; they attempted to articulate clear and actionable strategies as best as one can about events that had not happened and might never have happened. To name but a few examples: Colin Gray and Keith Payne argued that “Victory Is Possible” in a nuclear war, Bernard Brodie detailed the interplay between tactical nuclear weapons and conflict escalation, Herman Kahn, perhaps the most creative of the Wizards, delineated separate rungs on an “escalation ladder” that led to general nuclear war.[ii] Thank God, we can never know how well any of their theories would have worked in the advent of nuclear war. But if, as the Cold War nuclear theorists insisted, there is value in nonuse, there is also value in thinking about the unthinkable. Should general nuclear war have occurred, there would have been some thinking about how it could have been managed. The United States would not have stumbled into calamity totally blind. Following the Cold War, however, this type of creative strategic thinking, especially about “unthinkable” problems, significantly declined.

I first noticed this decline in creative strategic thinking when I was researching my master’s thesis on Israeli counterterrorism strategy. I noticed that none of the literature (with one singular passing reference) mentioned the prospect of the Israeli Defense Forces retaking the Gaza strip and ousting Hamas from power. This struck me as odd. The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005 was always a risky endeavor and the Israeli political and military establishments knew then that the power vacuum created by the disengagement might very well be filled by Hamas. Could no one have thought that the situation might become untenable? Did no one really plan for such a contingency? Had anyone considered whether or not Israel could, in the event that it needed to, reestablish unilateral control over the Gaza strip? And if so, at what cost? With its military alone or with the resettling of Israeli citizens? Dumbfounded, I contacted scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, including members of the IDF, and asked: had anyone thought about recapturing the Gaza strip if the situation there became untenable and unmanageable? Not only was the answer a resounding no—I was laughed it. The general consensus among scholars and soldiers was that Hamas was the only group that could ever rule in Gaza following the disengagement, so no one had bothered to consider any alternative geopolitical reality. The general sentiment I received was one of astonishment that I was even asking such “outlandish” questions.

And then the October 7th Massacre happened, prompting Israel’s just war against Hamas in Gaza. Shortly thereafter, calls for what would happen “the day after” began. What has become apparent since 10/7 is that the Israeli defense and political establishments are thinking about this question on the fly.[iii] They are attempting to manage and wage a tricky and contentious urban war while also contemplating the larger strategic picture that the war fits into. Israel will surely win at the operational and tactical levels of the war in Gaza, but it needs to win at the strategic level for lasting stability. It is a tragedy that it had not considered what that might look like until it was forced to. Perhaps in 2005 the prospect of recapturing the Gaza strip was unthinkable. But one must think about the unthinkable, especially when it comes to inherently risky geopolitical behavior.

The American defense establishment seems to be on track to suffer a similar fate as the Israelis when it comes to preparing and thinking about a war with China, ostensibly over Taiwan. Whether one believes that the United States should completely and utterly pivot to the Indo-Pacific or whether you think that deterring China goes through Ukraine in its fight against Russia, war with China is the topic on everyone’s mind in the US defense world. If current declassified wargames are to be believed, the United States hardly has a “one-war military” and its weapons stockpiles are so low that the United States would run out of all critical munitions within eight days in a conflict with China.[iv] One would therefore hope to see a bounty of thinking and writing about how to deal with a war against China within these restraints. Yet, shockingly, much of the intelligentsia has instead insisted on arguing for solutions to the problem that take years to fulfill: prioritizing and expediting multi-year procurements of munitions, establishing and widening defense coproduction, a rearranging of American strategic priorities and commitments, etc. These solutions, all good and right, are thinkable solutions if one assumes that war with China is still far enough away that we might have time to prepare somewhat adequately for it. But what about the unthinkable, say, a scenario that sees China making a move against Taiwan before the US presidential election?

Perhaps, therefore, the right questions to ponder are: in the event that war breaks out with China before anyone expected, how should the US military achieve the defense of Taiwan given its constraints? If naval power, a likely flashpoint in any war over Taiwan, runs the risk of being put out of commission early on in any conflict, should/could/can airpower become the prime US military arm? Can one attempt to defend and control territory with some semblance of air power? Should the US nuclear capability play a more prominent role in defending Taiwan? Might the US consider a tactical nuclear strike as a way to inflict great damage with minimal munitions and capability? In other words, how might the United States actually fight a war against China over Taiwan? What limited military means achieve US strategic ends if the military is simply not equipped to take the fight to the end or to its greatest liking? And if is it completely certain that any war with China before massive defense industrial base measures or re-posturing are complete would end in calamity, should the US even engage militarily at all? If not, what are its grand strategic objectives vis-à-vis China that account for their aggression and expansion in the Indo-Pacific? These are the types of unthinkable questions strategists and politicians should be thinking about.

Strategic Prophylaxis

This type of thinking and approach to strategy, what I call “strategic prophylaxis,” has been the type of thinking that characterizes the best chess players and games at the highest level. Prophylactic thinking in chess, explains Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson, “arises naturally from viewing chess from an inter-subjective perspective. Once you start to look at positions with an awareness of your opponent’s perspective, you are already thinking prophylactically to an extent.” Furthermore, “prophylaxis is every bit as important in attack as it is in defense” for “the attackers who are most likely to succeed are those who acknowledge the opponent’s right to defend himself. They strive to work around these defenses that they have seen ahead of time, and always make plans for themselves with reference to the opponent (emphasis added).”[v] This is sound advice for any strategic planner, advice the strategic community must quickly heed, and it is no wonder that former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov became a wise strategic analyst.

Moreover, what makes top-level chess so exciting is bearing witness to players thinking the unthinkable. Especially before the advent of computer chess engines, what made chess particularly beautiful and inspiring was seeing its top practitioners play wild, unthinkable moves that led to decisive victory. One might normally never consider intentionally losing a piece of value, let alone a queen. But considering the unthinkable move is what made the likes of Kasparov, Mikhail Tal and others so powerful (I have often thought that this mind-boggling video of Kasparov calculating a famous piece sacrifice in a world championship match is a great lesson in strategic thinking, particularly the acute awareness of the balance of power and the long term consequences of his “unthinkable” sacrifice of a full knight). To be great at chess, one must consider the moves you expect and the ones you don’t. That is also how one must do great strategic planning.

What Caused the Decline in Creative Strategic Thinking?

I suspect that there are two main catalysts for the decline in creative, prophylactic thinking about strategy and defense planning. The first is the advent of the digital age and the ubiquity of the internet and social media. Digital technology has had its most pernicious effects on our attention spans and sense of time. Social media has the dual effect of making the immediate story or news both incredibly relevant and urgent and terribly ephemeral. As the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay notes, “when information has become an overwhelming flood, when our awareness is constantly drawn to and involved in everything occurring to the world’s nervous system, the only way to get by is to skim the surface (emphasis added).” Moreover, writes Barba-Kay, “Online writing does not reward attention – nor is it meant to, since its claim to attention is precisely that it is happening now. Following what’s going on at the moment serves as the main criterion of what merits notice (emphasis added).”[vi]

The ubiquity of social media and the internet means that the average person is “intimately” aware of foreign policy events, thus fomenting domestic pressure on government and defense officials to “react” to the current moment. Because we can see the horrors of war from our devices that seem always to be at arm’s reach, the strategist feels compelled to “do something now,” even if that something has hardly been thought through. The “urgency” of foreign policy in the digital age does not readily lend itself to long term, creative thinking about the unthinkable. If the now is the only timeframe that matters, one must not waste time thinking about all the alternate possibilities of tomorrow.

The second and related catalyst is the hesitation to swim against the current of fashionable thinking in foreign policy, especially in an environment that values experience over thinking and knowledge.[vii] In the essay that arguably launched the entire discipline of strategic studies, the dean of American strategists Bernard Brodie warned about “the aphorism or slogan which provides the premises for policy decisions.” He noted that “the military profession is by no means alone in its frequent recourse to the slogan as a substitute for analysis… but among the military we find some extreme examples of its ultimate development.”[viii] Today’s national security establishment, much like the one Brodie was lamenting, is still awash in buzzwords and slogans: deterrence, strategy by denial, escalation and more. These slogans have, in Brodie’s words, “induce[d] rigidity of thought and behavior in a particular direction.” There is a pressure to work within the fold, to think in accordance with what everyone else is thinking and to be “policy relevant”[ix] (I suspect that part of the reason that history has been replaced by political science in strategic education is because traditional historical inquiry is wrongly understood to not be as relevant or au courant as political science). Perhaps no one wants to be the outlier that was Herman Kahn, but strategists of his creative nature are desperately needed.

Some Ways Forward

Reflecting on the strategic failure of the Vietnam war, Brodie issued an important warning to the strategic community: “we need people who will challenge, investigate, and dissect the prevailing dogmas of international relations and of our foreign policy rather than merely echo them.”[x] Now, more than ever, we need creative, prophylactic thinking about the unthinkable events that just might occur. The impossible is only impossible until it happens. To inspire a renaissance in this type of strategic thinking, perhaps two suggestions. First, the schools that teach strategy, be they universities or the professional military educational (PME) establishments, must also incorporate into their curriculums the study of historical counterfactuals. Counterfactuals ask the “what if?” questions about history that can inspire forward thinking, creative defense planning. For instance, Sir Niall Ferguson’s edited volume Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals should be required reading for all strategists.[xi] Second, Congress might consider establishing a nonpartisan working group that draws on a wide variety of scholars and practitioners from outside the DC foreign policy establishment with the sole purpose of creatively thinking through unthinkable problems. This type of interdisciplinary working group would work long-term, high-risk strategic issues free of the groupthink of bureaus and bureaucrats, a sort of non-government Office of Net Assessment.

We are already two decades into a bloody 21st century. The prospect that our century turns bloodier, risking even nuclear war, is not far-fetched, and might happen very soon. And it might become bloodier in ways we might not expect. The strategic discipline has never been more important, the stakes have never been higher. We need a renaissance of strategic thinking, one that particularly focuses on creative strategic prophylaxis of threats thinkable and unthinkable. The world might depend on it.