Reconsidering the American Way of War: US Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan

2. American Strategic Culture: An Elusive Fiction

2 American Strategic Culture An Elusive Fiction [All interpretations of culture are] fictions in the sense that they are “something made,” “something fashioned”—in the original meaning of fictiō—not that they are false [or] unfactual. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973 If the American way of war is a history of contending interpretations, the story of American strategic culture is one of elusive fictions. This is true not only because the concept of strategic culture has been too variously and too broadly defined, but also because it rests on contradictory and as yet unresolved tensions between continuity and change and between uniqueness and commonality. Put differently, if strategic culture is likened to the glue that holds patterns of war together, then interpretations of American strategic culture lack the power to adhere. They are at best what Clifford Geertz said all interpretations of culture must be: “fictions in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned.’”1 They are not necessarily false as such. However, they have yet to be reconciled with the historical record, and as this chapter argues, it is not likely they can be. Problematic Origins The concept of strategic culture was originally advanced by Jack Snyder in a monograph titled The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Op‑ tions, which was published in 1977.2 Snyder used the concept to challenge the core assumption underpinning the US policy concerning “limited nuclear options”—namely, if deterrence failed, both sides would still act with restraint by selecting targets and weapons that would minimize damage. As a counter to that assumption, Snyder argued that the Soviets “may be more favorably inclined toward unilateral damage limitation strategies than toward coopera- American Strategic Culture 33 tive ones.” American and Soviet strategic thinking, he said, “had developed in different organizational, historical, and political contexts, and in response to different situational and technological constraints.” Mirror-imaging, in other words, was risky.3 It is worth noting that Snyder’s monograph was published by the RAND Corporation, and as was typical of its products at the time (and still is), his piece addressed a specific policy issue—in this case, potential vulnerabilities in US nuclear flexibility doctrine. It is also worth noting that an underlying theme in Snyder’s study was the credibility of “game theory,” a widespread but controversial analytical approach that tended to represent opponents as “generic strategists” who were “culture-free and preconception free.” Snyder’s concept of strategic culture was one way of highlighting the vulnerability of that theory. In his view, Soviet responses might well surprise American strategists because the two sides could be thinking along different lines or from within different belief structures. Moreover, these differences might possess a quality of “semipermanence” that placed them on the level of “‘culture’ rather than mere ‘policy.’”4 Snyder’s theory was, in retrospect, more useful not as a separate field of study, which it inadvertently became, but as a means to expose the limitations of mirror-imaging in strategic analyses. The tone of his monograph is tentative: It discusses strategic culture as a theoretical counterweight rather than as an established fact. The theory itself was based on two broad but ultimately indefensible assumptions. The first of these was that historical circumstances and experiences are, by definition, unique, and they thus lead to distinct concepts or ways of thinking. However, this assumption overlooks the fact that many historical experiences are shared, such as wars fought by alliances against common enemies or intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment or economic and technological transformations such as the Industrial Revolution. To be sure, shared experiences would in some respects have to pass through separate cultural filters, but those filters also expand in the light of shared experiences. In contrast, Snyder’s assumption of cultural uniqueness inclined too far in the direction of impermeability or insularity. While all cultures are surely unique in some respects, the historical record shows that their modes of thinking are not necessarily insular. Russian and Western cultures, for instance, interacted over many centuries and influenced each other in various ways, despite many obvious differences .5 As a result, both cultures developed methods of understanding each other, however imperfect. A search for cultural differences will in fact yield cultural differences, in other words. Still, the resulting picture will be a distorted one. 34 Preludes Snyder’s second assumption was that substantial continuity persists despite significant change. Indeed...