Tag: Low Countries

The lessons of World War I are many and varied for those who study warfare. But Schlieffen's strategy was disastrous as well, because it minimized the importance of violating Belgium’s sovereignty, something diplomats and politicians would have understood would trigger British involvement. The mindset that strategy is separate from politics also allowed Germany’s military to rationalize their defeat on the battlefield as a “stab in the back” by politicians’ lack of support, which shaped how the German military and society viewed the rise of fascism. This delegitimized the political class and kept the military from exercising institutional restraints as Weimar collapsed. But as Sir Lawrence Freedman demonstrates in his magisterial “Strategy: A History,” strategy divorced from politics leads either to irrelevance, because the strategy will not be employed, or disaster, when political leaders are confronted with the unexpected costs and consequences. It is the job of elected political leaders to determine which wars to fight, and what proportion of national effort to commit to the undertaking. Political leaders aggregate societal preferences, and there is simply no substitute for political judgments to guide strategy—no matter how much such a substitute is yearned for or what superior outcomes excluding that political judgment might provide. Thus do strategists propose technical solutions like “a Goldwater Nichols for the interagency” to streamline the cacophony of policymaking in a government created expressly to prevent consolidation of power, even though streamlining policy in the way the 1985 defense reform legislation did internal to the Defense Department would reduce the ability of Congress, think tanks, journalists and departments from influencing policy outcomes. The crafters of President Trump’s National Security Strategy heroically attempted to do just this, harnessing the president’s campaign agenda in developing the 2017 strategy. But their effort may now be judged a failure on the grounds of both irrelevance and potential disaster.