Is Strategy an Illusion?

Is Strategy an Illusion? Richard K. Betts Strategy is the essential ingredient for making war either politically effective or morally tenable. It is the link between military means and political ends, the scheme for how to make one produce the other. Without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure. Without strategy, power is a loose cannon and war is mindless. Mindless killing can only be criminal. Politicians and soldiers may debate which strategic choice is best, but only paciªsts can doubt that strategy is necessary. Because strategy is necessary, however, does not mean that it is possible. Those who experience or study many wars ªnd strong reasons to doubt that strategists can know enough about causes, effects, and intervening variables to make the operations planned produce the outcomes desired. To skeptics, effective strategy is often an illusion because what happens in the gap between policy objectives and war outcomes is too complex and unpredictable to be manipulated to a speciªed end. When this is true, war cannot be a legitimate instrument of policy. This article surveys ten critiques that throw the practicability of strategy into question. It pulls together many arguments that emerge in bits and pieces from a variety of sources. Some are my own formulation of skepticism implicit but unformed in others’ observations; few analysts have yet attacked the general viability of strategy head-on. The notion that effective strategy must be an illusion emerges cumulatively from arguments that: strategies cannot be evaluated because there are no agreed criteria for which are good or bad; there is little demonstrable relationship between strategies and outcomes in war; good strategies can seldom be formulated because of policymakers’ biases; if good strategies are formulated, they cannot be executed because of organizations’ limitations; and other points explored below. Unifying themes include the barInternational Security, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 5–50© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 5 Richard K. Betts is Leo A. Shifrin Professor and Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. For comments on earlier drafts the author thanks Yael Aronoff, Robert Art, David Baldwin, Eliot Cohen, Timothy Crawford, Scott Douglas, George Downs, Annette Baker Fox, Charles Glaser, Arman Grigorian, Michael Handel, Robert Jervis, Ronald Krebs, Alan Kuperman, Peter Liberman, Charles Miller, Allan Millet, Andrew Moravcsik, Rebecca Murphy, Barry Posen, Cynthia Roberts, Gideon Rose, Stephen Rosen, Scott Sagan, Warner Schilling, Randall Schweller, Mark Sheetz, Jack Snyder, Stephen Van Evera, Kenneth Waltz, Dessislava Zagorcheva, Philip Zelikow, and Kimberly Marten Zisk. Space limitations preclude dealing with many good points they raised. Betts is also grateful for comments by participants in a conference on scholarship inspired by the work of Samuel Huntington held in Cambridge in 1995, and, in 1999, seminars at Columbia’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the University of Chicago ’s Program on International Security Policy, and MIT’s Security Studies Program. riers to prediction and control imposed by political and military complexity; the pervasive undertow of goal displacement in the behavior of governments and militaries that reverses the canonical relationship between ends and means; and the greater difªculty of strategies of coercion, which aim to change adversaries’ policies, as compared to strategies of control, which impose the objective by destroying capabilities to resist. In this article strategy is deªned as a plan for using military means to achieve political ends, or as Clausewitz put it, “the use of engagements for the object of the war.”1 If effective military strategy is to be real rather than illusory , one must be able to devise a rational scheme to achieve an objective through combat or the threat of it; implement the scheme with forces; keep the plan working in the face of enemy reactions (which should be anticipated in the plan); and achieve something close to the objective. Rational strategic behavior should be value maximizing, choosing appropriate means according to economistic calculations of cost and beneªt. These general descriptions...