Speaking of idiotic military writing — consider the Army War College's strategic risk report: At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World

© 2017 Peter Free

 

26 July 2017

 

 

If you care about the United States' future and want to depress yourself

 

Read the following meaningless (excerpted) bullet points, taken from a taxpayer-funded Army War College report. The report concerns American national security strategy in 2017:

 

 

Contemporary defense strategy development and risk assessment will occur under post-primacy circumstances.

 

Enterprise-level risk does not exist absent meaningful intentions, strategic objectives, or courses of action.

 

Recommendation. Adopt an objectives-based vice threat-based approach to enterprise-level risk assessment.

 

 

Enterprise-level risk assessment should be an uncomplicated but not unsophisticated dialogue.

 

Recommendation. Build a strategy-focused risk concept around four core principles: diversity, dynamism, persistent dialogue, and adaptation.

 

Recommendation. Pace DoD’s risk assessment against a principal risk portfolio.

 

Recommendation. Issue stand-alone, secretary-level risk guidance as a part of the strategy development process.

 

 

Post-primacy strategic conditions will demand more federated approaches to risk assessment.

 

Recommendation. Integrate interagency insights into DoD risk assessment and then “lead-up” as trusted partners toward a common “whole of government” risk picture.

 

Recommendation. Integrate core allies and partners into the risk assessment process.

 

 

© 2017 Nathan P. Freier, Christopher M. Bado, Christopher J. Bolan, Robert S. Hume, J. Matthew Lissner, Heather Bellusci, John R. Beurer, Ralph Borja, Steven Buelt, Michael Lechlitner, Robert D. Montz, Robert Phillips, Kelsey Smith, At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World (U.S. Army War College, 2017) (at pages 93-100)

 

 

What conclusion does this useless blather lead to?

 

This stunning revelation:

 

 

There is universal recognition as well that the United States and its defense establishment no longer exercise the degree of unchallenged strategic dominance enjoyed from the end of the Cold War through the immediate post-9/11 period.

 

Those engaged in the work of strategy and risk also recognize that they are navigating an era of hyper-competition where standard responses, default solutions, and raw aggregate potential are insufficient remedies for the myriad strategic hazards they now confront.

 

In response, they are also aware that regaining and maintaining an unassailable position of American military advantage will require new perspectives and approaches to strategy and risk. In a word, defense and military professionals understand that they must adjust to profound environmental change and do so persistently based on deliberate strategic choices that are informed by new insights on risk.

 

© 2017 Nathan P. Freier, Christopher M. Bado, Christopher J. Bolan, Robert S. Hume, J. Matthew Lissner, Heather Bellusci, John R. Beurer, Ralph Borja, Steven Buelt, Michael Lechlitner, Robert D. Montz, Robert Phillips, Kelsey Smith, At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World (U.S. Army War College, 2017) (at page 103) (paragraph split)

 

 

Strategic vacuity characterizes the American military establishment

 

Military leadership (generally) parades content-lacking blather as insight and learning in an institution that prominently lacks the ability to generate both.

 

Presented with an opportunity to review the almost uninterrupted stream of American strategic failures since World War II, the Army War College managed to come up with 116 pages of flowery nonsense. The report dodges even the tiniest glimmer of an engaged brain. At Our Own Peril even thoughtlessly assumes that History (since World War II) has not been teaching us that absolute military supremacy is a self-destructively unattainable goal:

 

 

[R]egaining and maintaining an unassailable position of American military advantage will require new perspectives and approaches to strategy and risk. [at page 103]

 

 

I guess that means we should double down on the aggressive strategic foolishness we have continually displayed. Just with more tactical twists.

 

An analysis that assumes the wisdom of unquestioned strategy, rather than examining its assumptions and its real world practicability, is a silly document indeed.

 

 

The moral — We lose strategically because we have become posturing pretenders

 

One need only read the vacuous pomposity embodied in At Our Own Peril to recognize that there is something cripplingly wrong with the Military Industrial Complex.

 

American cultural inanity (with its emphasis on narcissistic self-deception) puts our military institutions beyond reproach. Therefore, unrepentant military stupidity becomes our own.

 

It is difficult to find survival, much less societal success, in that combination.