Strategic Thought and the Military Officer

"The officer functions as strategist in one of three roles: as commander, as staff officer, and as adviser. Most officer-strategists are staff officers. Among commanders, only the very senior, at the three- or four-star level, are usually considered to be functioning as strategists. Although junior, tactical leaders should also understand strategy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior American unformed officer, is the president’s principal military adviser. Officers’ strategic roles may appear to be straightforward and well-delineated by statute and table of organization, but they are in fact defined by personal, cultural, and organizational factors. Strategic thought involves and often demands a multiplicity of voices, of competing concerns and outlooks. This often-discordant chorus can both inform and impede the strategic process. At times strategic thought and direction, overwhelmed by competing demands, has come to a halt, opening a fatal gap in the transmission of policy into military action. This breakdown often leaves operational, and in many instances even tactical commanders the task of wrestling with strategic issues that should have been worked out for them. In these cases, officers can become strategists by default, the task of strategic direction having been abdicated by those above who were nominally entrusted with it. Historical examples of this failing are almost too numerous to mention. The example of Vietnam has already been discussed. Korea may offer another. U.S. strategy regarding Korea turned quickly from indifference to commitment to World War II-style decisive victory. Shaped by the experience of victory in the recent war, it took U.S. planners some time to acknowledge Korea was a different kind of war in which there might be a different kind of victory. Sometimes absent clear strategic guidance, commanders in the field from MacArthur to Van Fleet flirted with and sometimes danced attendance on the idea of decisive victory, reuniting all of Korea at the point of the sword, and punishing or even openly warring with mainland communist China. Aiming sometimes for victory, the U.S. and its allies achieved stalemate, or status quo ante bellum. It might be useful to contrast Korea with Vietnam, a war shaped by the previous experience of Korea, in which aiming at a stalemate produced defeat."