1. Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1988 [1911], p. 16.
2. Funding for Special Operations has not recently faced the same scrutiny as funding for the Army and Marines; however, debates about the core identity of Special Operations—between those who favor “direct” tactics like targeted raids and those who favor “indirect” tactics like building partner nations’ militaries—
are more intense now than perhaps ever before. On this and re-lated debates, see in particular Linda Robinson, The Future of U.S.
Special Forces, Council Special Report No. 66, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, April 2013. For considerations of how the Army and Marines might coordinate with Special Operations, see Fernando Luján, Light Footprints: The Future of American Military Intervention, Washington, DC: Center for a New American Secu-rity, March 2013; and John Nagl, Institutionalizing Adaptation: It’s Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps, Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, June 2007.
3. On the varied worldviews and priorities of U.S. military branches, see in particular Carl Builder, Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1989.
4. For this formulation, see John Lewis Gaddis, “What is Grand Strategy?” Lecture delivered at Duke University, Febru-ary 26, 2009, available from tiss.sanford.duke.edu/DebatingGrand StrategyDetails.php.
5. For lamentations of the absence of U.S. grand strategy, see the Gaddis lecture cited previously and the sources collected by Daniel Drezner’s article on the theme. See Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy? Why We Need Doctrines in Uncertain Times,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 4, July-August, 2011, pp. 57-68, especially p. 57.
6. John Mearsheimer, “Imperial By Design,” The National Interest, Vol. 111, January-February, 2011, pp. 16-34.
7. For the Obama administrations two grand strategies, see Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?” p. 58. For the United States’ four grand strategies, see Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, New York: Routledge, 2002.
8. John Quincy Adams, “Speech to the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives on Foreign Policy,” July 4, 1821, available from miller-center.org/president/speeches/detail/3484. One might compare Ad-ams’ notion of the exemplary power of American liberty to more recent iterations of the theme. Immediately following the passage quoted, Adams argues that the United States can “recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the be-nignant sympathy of her example.” The 2010 National Security Strategy claims that the United States promotes “universal values abroad by living them at home, and will not seek to impose these values through force,” pp. 5, 10, 36.
9. For a study of military and strategic reforms in the wake of Vietnam, see for instance Andrew Krepinevich et al., Strategy in Austerity, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2012.
10. In The Soldier and the State, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1957, Samuel Huntington describes this period of reform in some detail.
“The withdrawal of the military from civilian society at the end of the 19th century,” he argues, “produced the high standards of professional excellence essential to national success in the strug-gles of the 29th century,” p. 229.
11. For versions of this dual identity in the study of American political thought, consider the difference between Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1991 [1957]; Rogers Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz:
The Multiple Traditions in America,” The American Political Sci-ence Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, September 1993, pp. 549-566; and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, New Ha-ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. One might also consider the distinction Mead draws between the Jacksonian and alternative strategic traditions in Special Providence, and Huntington’s evolu-tion from American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983; and Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
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12. The 2010 National Security Strategy lists “the security of the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners” as the first of America’s enduring interests, p. 7.
13. The second, third, and fourth of 2010 National Security Strategy’s enduring interests have to do with the economy, uni-versal values, and the international order, p. 7.
14. On the “pivot” to Asia, see in particular Hillary Clinton,
“America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, November 2011; and
“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” Washington, DC: DoD, 2012.
15. On Air-Sea Battle, see Andrew Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle? Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary As-sessments, 2010; and Jan van Tol, AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Depar-ture Operational Concept, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010.
16. As the military entered its last major period of budget stringency in the 1990s, for example, International Security, the leading academic journal in security studies, published a wealth of work in a single edition recommending new policies, but few works that attempted to evaluate a period of stringency after the fact. See, for example, Gordon Adams and Stephen Alexis Cain, “Defense Dilemmas in the 1990s,” International Security, Vol. 13, No. 4, Spring 1989; Robert F. Ellsworth, “Maintaining U.S. Security in an Era of Fiscal Pressure,” International Security, Vol. 13, No. 4, Spring 1989, pp. 16-24; Cindy Williams, “Strategic Spending Choices,” International Security, Vol. 13, No. 4, Spring 1989, pp. 24-35.
17. Quality historical works do examine specific periods of stringency, but even in these works, stringency itself is not the key
“study variable,” and works, such as Williamson Murray and Al-lan Millett, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996, rarely focus exclusively on the Army as an organization.
18. Michael Meese, “Defense Decision Making Under Budget Stringency: Explaining Downsizing in the United States Army,”
Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2000.
Meese examines three periods of budget stringency: the interwar period between the World Wars, the post-Korean War period, and the post-Vietnam period. He measures the effectiveness pro-duced by Army policy during this period across a range of areas, including personnel, force structure, leadership, readiness, mod-ernization, sustainability, and doctrine.
19. Note that these inclinations fit well with Carl Builder’s characterization of Army culture in The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
20. Meese, “Defense Decision Making Under Budget Strin-gency.” Until 1940, the Army had little training at the large unit (Corps) level at all, while small scale training sometimes required uniting multiple companies under a single commander to pro-vide a large enough force to maneuver. Compare Ronald Spec-tor, “The Military Effectiveness of the US Armed Forces, 1919-1939,” Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Volume 2: The Interwar Period, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 92.
21. The Pentomic Army was a success in breaking the tradi-tional mold of Army culture. Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor cre-ated a significantly smaller force structure, but one fully manned and functional without augmentation. More importantly, the Army dramatically shifted focus from personnel to technology.
If this change was successful, however, due to the Army’s need to remain relevant in the nuclear era and the force of personal-ity of war hero Taylor, it was a failure in terms of effectiveness, sacrificing personnel and leadership for technology. The Army quickly abandoned the Pentomic concept after Taylor’s departure as Chief. See Andrew J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam, Washington, DC, National Defense University Press, 1986; Meese, “Defense Decision Making Under Budget Stringency,” pp. 113-184.
22. For this argument, see Suzanne C. Nielsen, “Preparing for War: The Dynamics of Military Reform,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003.
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23. Importantly, Meese, Nielsen, and Stephen Rosen all find that the most important agent for (or obstacle to) change is senior Army leadership. On the role of the executive decision maker, consider James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agen-cies Do and Why They Do it, New York: Basic Books, 1989, Chaps.
10-12. Contrast Barry Posen’s classic The Sources of Military Doc-trine, in which Posen argues that militaries are largely incapable of innovation or significant change in peacetime. Posen finds that Allison’s organizational process model best explains militaries in peacetime and require intervention by political leaders in war-time to force change. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doc-trine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
24. On the role of generational experience in military leader-ship, see Edward Cox, Kent Park, Rachel Sondheimer, and Isaiah Wilson III, “Growing Military Professionalism Across Genera-tions,” Military Review, Special Edition, September 2011.
25. Even containment during the Cold War, often considered U.S. grand strategy par excellence, was marked by tremendously costly, unexpected deviations such as Korea and Vietnam, which perhaps distracted policymakers from the goal of containing the Soviet Union.
26. For a compelling treatment of these and related questions, see Isaiah Wilson III, “Educating Holistic Warriors,” Chap. 10, Thinking Beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. See also Gaddis, “What is Grand Strategy?”
27. For a strong version of this claim, see Huntington, “The Military Mind: Conservative Realism of the Professional Military Ethic,” Chap. 3 in The Soldier and the State.
28. Sun-tzu, The Art of War, John Minford, trans., New York:
Penguin Books, 2002, p. 14.
29. Following the publication of the SDSR in 2010, the Brit-ish Ministry of Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Department for International Development jointly published the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) in 2011. This strategy emphasizes preventing war by addressing the socio-political,
eco-nomic, and natural drivers of conflict. It envisions three means to this end: early warning, rapid crisis prevention and response, and investment in upstream operations, such as resilient institu-tions within fragile societies. While the BSOS is in every sense of the word a “government-wide” strategic planning framework, all three pillars, especially the second and third, rely heavily upon a flexible, adaptive, and responsive Landpower component.
30. The reaction force will be comprised of a division head-quarters, three mechanized infantry brigades, and an air assault brigade. Seen as the British government’s main source of land-power deterrence, the reaction force will be trained and equipped for “very high readiness” missions. The adaptable force will be comprised of division headquarters and up to seven UK region-ally-based infantry brigades. In addition to the tasks mentioned in the text, the adaptable force will meet enduring security com-mitments in Cyprus, Brunei, the Falklands, and ongoing UN mis-sions. The force troops, like the adaptable force, will be composed of regulars and reserves, and will include multiple brigades.
31. A recent publication explains the logic informing the UK Army 2020 concept. See The British Army, Transforming the Brit-ish Army, July 2012: Modernising to Face an Unpredictable Future, London, UK: Ministry of Defence, July 2012, p. 13:
Army 2020 is an imaginative and practical response to an extreme challenge: that of confronting an era of strategic un-certainty, exacerbated by economic austerity, with smaller land forces. It will provide a range of capabilities that can be adapted to the nation’s security needs at home and over-seas, resetting the Army to meet the unexpected and deal with future contingencies.
32. Chief of the Australian Army Staff Lieutenant General D.
L. Morrison has addressed the relation between whole-of-govern-ment approaches and the security threats Australia faces: “The Defence White Paper 2009 allocates tasks to the ADF according to a scale of priorities,” he says.
All of these tasks make heavy demands on the Army. The thread binding all these tasks together is the direction that the ADF implement a maritime strategy in the Defence of
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Australia. In order to execute this strategy the ADF requires a comprehensive understanding of, and an ability to con-duct decisive operations within, the Primary Operating Environment, the archipelagic approaches to Australia. This necessarily requires a focus on joint, inter-agency and whole of government operations, concepts.
33. Army’s Future Land Operating Concept, Canberra, Australia:
Australian Army Headquarters, 2012, p. iv.
34. The name “Beersheeba” refers to a World War I battle in which Australian troops were victorious over Ottoman forces in Palestine, owing in no small part to changes in technology, tactics, and doctrine in the months leading up to the battle.
35. On the use of military-to-military engagement in Asia as a strategic tool, see in particular Isaiah Wilson III, “Countering the Terrorism Threat, Preemptively, through Peacetime Military En-gagement,” Bryan Lee Cummings, ed., Beyond the Campaign, New York: Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, 2004. Wil-son argues that foreign arms sales and transfers have helped to maintain U.S. reputation, influence, and access in strategic Asia, and might in the future be used to U.S. advantage in this and other theaters.
36. With respect to Latin America, the last significant use of ground forces in combat was the invasion of Panama in 1989. Af-ter control of the Panama Canal passed from the United States to the Panama Canal Authority in 1999, the American troops stationed at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras have represented the largest deployment in the region; these troops number in the hundreds. These data are available from www.vetfriends.com/US-deployments-overseas/.
37. In Africa, the last significant use of ground forces in com-bat was the peacekeeping mission to Somalia in 1993.
38. Comments by then-Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Ryan Henry at a Meeting of USAID’s Advisory Com-mittee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, ACVFA, May 23, 2007, cited in Lauren Ploch, “Africa Command: U.S. Strategic Interests and the Role of the U.S. Military in Africa,” Washington, DC: Congressio-nal Research Service, July 22, 2011, p. 6.
39. On the question of how to involve U.S. Army forces in missions traditionally reserved for Special Forces, see the sources cited in Endnote 2. On the potential uses of heavy arms in “light footprint” operations, see Irvin Oliver, “Cavalry in the Future Fight: An Environment for Cavalry Forces,” Armor, Vol. 122, No.
1, January-March 2013, pp. 19-22.
40. “Publius” [Hamilton], “Federalist Paper No. 8,” available from thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_08.html.
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