Assumptions and Biases: The Foundations of Flawed Strategies

>> H. R. McMaster: So what I'm hoping is, with our discussion today, is to cover a topic that should apply across all the disciplines you've heard from. Because in every area that we work in, we wanna be competent, right? But I think what we should do is develop our own theory for, what is strategic competence?

I think we know what incompetence looks like, sadly. When we look at, I think, our foreign policies recently and the inconsistency in those policies, and especially the assumptions that underpin them. I mean, if you look at today, we're just paying $6 billion to the Iranians to release hostages.

Well, I wonder how that's gonna work out. Is that gonna change fundamentally the behavior of the Iranian regime? Is it gonna change, really, their behavior in terms of the four decade plus proxy war they've been waging against us? Or their pursuit of the most destructive weapons on earth, I don't think so.

We often delude ourselves about the nature of the challenges we're facing. And I think that's really fundamentally why we don't have a higher degree of competence. I mean, think about now on the anniversary this week of the disastrous surrender and withdrawal to the Taliban, right? What were the assumptions that underpinned that approach to Afghanistan, right, that the Taliban was an enemy that would ultimately share power?

That was a relatively benign organization relative to what it had been when it ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. That it would respect women's rights, for example, that it would share power. I mean, really, how'd that work out? So when you look at recent foreign policy decisions and you think about, for example, the reinvasion of Ukraine, right, in February of last year.

When you look retrospectively at that, you think, well, why the heck did we engage in the number of activities and disengage in ways that seem to greenlight the invasion of Ukraine? And I think if you trace that back, it goes back to the assumption that President Biden and maybe those around him made is that Putin is really concerned about his own security.

And what we need to do is allay Vladimir Putin's security concerns. And so what did we do? We listed it prior to the invasion, all the things we wouldn't do to support the Ukrainians, and removed a lot of the ambiguity for Vladimir Putin. We pulled all of our naval assets out of the Black Sea.

We didn't provide any additional defensive capabilities to Ukraine. And ultimately, we actually evacuated all of our advisors and all of our assistants there. We fled from our embassy and scuttled our embassy, causing over $70 million of damage to the building. So if you're Putin and you're looking at that, you're thinking, okay, I guess I've got the green light.

So I think it's really critical for us to examine why we've had the difficulties that we've had and begin to develop our own kind of theory of strategic competence. And so this is a quote from Carl von Clausewitz. Every washed up general man can't give a talk without bringing in the old Carl von Clausewitz.

And he was about your age when he was writing, and he was writing from a perspective of somebody who had been on the battlefield. He was in battle at the age of 14 the first time. And I think what he brought with him to his writing about war was a perspective of understanding what war was like from the battlefield perspective.

And I think that's what's missing a lot of times with those who are in policy positions in Washington, is they don't have experience on implementation. They don't understand what it takes to get something done. And so there's an assumption oftentimes in Washington that if you write it, like in a policy memo, it must be true or it's going to happen.

So what I wanna encourage all of you to think about is, as you begin your careers, how can you get experience on the implementation side first before you really pursue maybe policy positions in Washington DC? What he's talking about here is, what is the role of theory, right?

This theory that you develop about strategic competence isn't gonna solve problems for you, right? And what it's going to do is help you ask the right questions. It might help you avoid pitfalls that others have encountered in the past. And so I think that what you can do with understanding of strategic competence is avoid some of what I've talked about initially, which are these assumptions that underpin fundamentally flawed policies.

So these are just basic definitions of strategy. What does it really mean? I think what's really important is to understand that it's the connection, really, between ends, what you're trying to achieve, and the means that you apply. And then how do you apply those means to get to that end?

So I like the final definition here as well, because strategy also has a moral dimension to it. And I think if you, especially, are talking about war and warfare, it actually, to meet the criteria of just war theory, you have to have a just end in mind, right?

You have to do a good job at defining your goals and objectives, and then developing a strategy, a strategy that will achieve the desired outcome at an acceptable price, right, in treasure, but especially in blood. And so if we're considering, really, what are the pitfalls that we fall into?

I think the most fundamental one for us is a neglect of continuities in whatever challenge we're facing. Whether it's the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party, or by the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, or by North Korea. And we assume that whatever we do is going to be unencumbered by the history of that challenge and how that challenge has evolved over time.

And I think it's immensely important for us to understand what's happening today, to look to the past. How did the recent past produce the present? And that's the first step in making a projection into the future. In one of the great setups, I think, for failure in the 1990s, we actually bought into a theory about future war that was known as the revolution in military affairs.

How many people have heard of that? Or the RMA. And this followed the overwhelming victory over the fourth largest army in the world during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. And the general assumption was that, hey, America's technological prowess, America's military prowess would guarantee our security well into the future.

And that if any adversary even had the temerity to challenge the United States, that war would be waged quickly, efficiently, from mainly standoff range and at low cost, right? They had all these phrases associated with it, rapid, decisive operations, right? They all sounded great. They looked good on PowerPoint.

Who's gonna oppose that? Hey, man, I want ponderous, indecisive operations, right? It all briefed really well. But what this theory of future war didn't consider were continuities in the nature of war. War is political. So if you're to wage war, you have to get to a sustainable political outcome consistent with what brought you into that fight to begin with.

I think in many ways, as you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, the reasons that we had such difficulty there is we took a short term approach to what were long term problems in both places. And as a result, those wars became longer and much more costly. War is human.

Right, people fight for the same reasons Thucydides identified 2500 years ago, fear, honor and interest. And if you don't take into consideration what is driving the conflict from that human perspective, that psychological, that emotional. The ideological perspective, then the actions that you're taking might actually make the problem worse.

I mean, if you think about how we dealt with an insurgency in Iraq, which was initially a decentralized, localized, hybrid insurgency. We took kind of a raiding approach to it, right, to go after what was known as various, the anti-Iraqi forces, the Sunni Arab insurgents, and so forth.

All these names for this group of really former Baathist intelligence infrastructure and those associated with the Special Republican Guards. And we started raiding with imperfect intelligence. And it reinforced the belief on the part of the Sunni Arab community in Iraq that they were beleaguered, right, and they faced evisceration at the hands of a Shia and Iran aligned government.

So that we actually, through our actions, encouraged that insurgency to coalesce over time. And I'm giving a talk later today at a conference on the evolution of the Iraq war, so that's very much on my mind. But also war is uncertain, right? That's a continuity in the nature of war, war is uncertain for a number of reasons.

First of all, the politics of war, the human dimension of war complicates the problem set. But also you have this continuous interaction of opposites, right, between US forces and enemy forces, but other actors in complex environments. So the course of events and war is never linear but if you think about how we've waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We would announce years in advance, hey, here's exactly the number of troops we're going to have, here's what they're going to do, here's what they're not gonna do. I mean, how does that work from the enemy's perspective, which relates to the final continuity in the nature of war these four, is that war is a contest of wills.

And really winning in war means convincing your enemy that your enemy's been defeated. And when you tell your enemy, hey, I'm leaving, and here's my timeline for leaving, but hey, I'd like to negotiate a settlement that's favorable to my interests, I mean, how the heck does that work?

So these are just examples of this lack of strategic competence, and I think one of the real causes is a neglect of continuities, right? And the historian Carl Becker here, he said that memory of past and anticipation of future should walk hand in hand in a happy way.

So of course, hash predictable for an historian to say you have to be aware of history for strategic competence. But it's oftentimes historians who say, I do history, but I don't really try to apply it to the future or to understand where we are today. And I think that that's a disservice, because if historians vacate really, policy discussions, what you're left with are, and I love my political science colleagues, but you're left with theory, right?

You're left with political science theory. And I think the danger associated with various international relations and political science and social science theories, is they create a veneer of understanding. And they encourage us, whether we recognize it or not, oftentimes, to try to fit any kind of situation, any kind of challenge we're facing into that theory.

And so they're dangerous, I think these theories, because they mask the complex causality of events, oftentimes. And because we're approaching a problem with this theory in mind, I think it sets us up for bias. I think the historian's approach of asking first order questions, gathering the evidence may bring people together with interdisciplinary perspectives on that problem.

And trying to answer the question is a better approach if you're concerned about competence. But, of course, you can abuse history, this is a quotation from Margaret McMillan, who I highly recommend, as an historian, to read anything that she's written. She just did a great history of warfare.

But it's also important not to seize on, not to shop around for the history that you want. This gonna give you the answer that you want to fit your particular framing. I'm thinking, in particular, of the graveyard of empire's narrative about Afghanistan and how that convinced a lot of people that a sustained commitment in Afghanistan was futile.

Because look at the track record of the British Empire there, the British there, or the Soviets, when in fact, it was a fundamentally different type of conflict that we're involved in. We could talk more about that if you'd like. And then I think one of the greatest dangers are these implicit assumptions.

When I went into the job as national security advisor, quite unexpectedly, I had been on the receiving end of policies and strategies that were developed in Washington. That had nothing to do with the situation I was encountering in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And one of my friends, Colonel Joel Rayburn, who's a visiting fellow here, this great line.

I said, Joel, how is this possible? We're in the middle of what is now a sectarian civil war, and our policy is to accelerate the transition to the Iraqi government security forces who are part of that civil war. And all we're going to do is actually help them accelerate the cycle of sectarian conflict in a way that strengthens jihadist terrorist organizations as well as Iranian supportive militias.

And he said, well, you understand we're in Iraq, but the strategy is written for Mirac and Mirac can be whatever you want it to be. And so there is this tendency to assume that the nature of the conflict is consistent with the way you would prefer it to be.

The nature of your enemy, even in the case of the Taliban, for example, is how you'd like them to be, remember, also we heard about the Taliban. Hey, there's a bold line between them and other jihadist terrorist organizations, when in fact it's an organization that is utterly intertwined with al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

And then, of course, optimism bias and groupthink are great, are cognitive traps that people often fall in. This is another one of our visiting fellows here, Zachary Shore, who's a phenomenal historian, by the way, and I'd highly recommend anything that he's written. In particular, I think you'd really enjoy a book called Bludder, Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions.

And in this book, he deals with a cognitive trap that we fall into in each of these chapters and then gives a historical example of why we fall into this cognitive trap. He's also just a phenomenal human being, he happens to be blind and has coped with that disability in just an astounding way.

His most recent book is called, This is Not Who We Are, it's about our national character, also a great book. And then another book called, Sense of The Enemy, that I'm gonna borrow from here as we look at really what the remedies are. And then, of course, contrived consensus, right?

In Washington, you always hear the term policymaking process, we can talk more about that. Like, what is that, what does that mean? But oftentimes in Washington, that policymaking process is bottom up. And then officials maybe are, and officers from various departments are convened, maybe across departments and agencies.

And they begin with kind of a, okay, Iran discuss, or whatever the problem is, Russia discussed. And what happens is, without the kind of framing around that topic, you get kind of directionless discussions. But then what people do is they begin to prioritize their own bureaucratic prerogatives over really trying to do something effective and put together an effective strategy to advance to Our interests.

In a bottom up process, you have satisfying behavior, right? You have kind of a lowest common denominator, and then what happens is you get a policy paper that is based on all these compromises, and it's meaningless. I call it policy pablum, right? So it's important for, I think, leaders to really force an effective framing of a particular challenge and then to provide some guidance from the top down based on the conclusions that the team comes to at a senior level.

This is where Scott Atlas had, I'm sure, similar experience in Washington as he was challenging the approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. And then, of course, there's oftentimes in lll Washington, lots of reasons not to do something, right? And there's a bias toward kind of assessing risk at every step.

But oftentimes, what is not assessed is the risk of inaction. But what happens if we don't do something, right? If we don't enforce the red line in Syria in 2014, what happens, right? The Syrian civil war accelerates that cycle of conflict, and we don't create, but we allow to continue a humanitarian catastrophe.

Instead of enforcing that red line with military action, we invited the Russians in, into Syria, who then got Assad back up off the ropes and then worked to empower the Iranians in Syria. There was a refugee crisis, as I mentioned, that affected the countries in the region, but also Europe as well.

It strengthened jihadist terrorist organizations and allowed Iran to pursue this kind of land bridge, to threaten Israel with destruction, and to extend Iran's influence across the region, keep the Arab world perpetually enmeshed in conflict, right? So there are many examples I could give you of inaction that leads to much higher risk than the risk associated with acting.

And this is a great point that Don Kagan makes. And this is another book that I highly recommend. If you're looking to really understand history across time, this is an excellent book that begins with Thucydides and ends with a Cuban missile crisis. Again, a book that will help you kind of mature your own theory of strategic competence.

And in general, I think as you develop your theory for strategic competence, when you read history and you think about history, try to understand history in the way that Sir Michael Howard said we ought to study history in width, depth, and context. Width, so you can understand change and continuity across time, in depth, so you can understand kind of the complex causality of events associated with a particular period of time or a particular problem or a campaign in war.

And the tidy outlines that we try to impose on history that kind of dissolve, and you understand that complex causality, and then to study whatever the issue is in broader context. So I'm gonna wrap this up quickly here, because I wanna hear what's on your minds. So what do you do from, like, a process perspective to try to improve strategic competence?

Well, you wanna come in with your own theory, you wanna avoid the pitfalls that I mentioned, but how about just defining the problem, right? So, when I got into Washington in February of 2017, I brought with me this great gift that the army gave me, which was the opportunity to read, research, and write about how and why Vietnam became an American war.

And I decided, hey, I guess I'm now in charge of the process that I criticized from a historian's perspective run by McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor at the time. And what I found is, when I went through the archives and read the oral histories and listened to phone conversations and minutes of meetings, was, there was very little discussion about, hey, what's the nature of the problem in Vietnam?

There was a rush to action. Hey, well, we could do some covert raids. Okay, well, let's do that, we should do some bombing, right? And there wasn't an examination of the assumptions that underpinned that. I mean, in fact, on the beginning of rolling thunder, the bombing campaign, the strategy documents were written by people who were law professors who had turned strategists, and we're now in the Pentagon.

And what they wrote is that what we have to do is establish a common law pattern of bombing. What does that mean? What they're essentially saying is that Ho Chi Minh is, like, the reasonable man in English common law, and if we bomb him, he'll respond like we would.

And it didn't take into consideration, obviously, what was driving and constraining the Vietnamese communists and the north Vietnamese government and Ho Chi Minh and those around him. So I think you have to understand the problem on its own terms and from the perspective of the other. And this is the title of this talk, is strategic empathy.

And that's a term that I borrowed from Zachary Shore, who I already recommended to you, and that's from his book, one of his other books called a sense of the enemy. And I think when we come into the problems that we encounter are often due to strategic narcissism, the tendency to define the world only in relation to us, and to assume that what we do or choose not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome.

Now that's a problem for a number of reasons, right? First of all, it's like just self referential, and it doesn't grant the agency or the authorship over the future to the other, right? Your enemies, your adversaries, your rivals. And so strategic empathy really is an effort to view the complex challenge that we're talking about.

And we can talk about specific ones, if you'd like, in a couple minutes here, from the perspective of the other, and to pay particular attention not only to what you think their interests are like in negotiation, mediation theory, where you do interest mapping, but to consider what are the emotions and the ideology that drive and constrain the other.

And so if you don't take that step to define the nature of that challenge holistically and from the perspective of the other, you're missing an important step. And then I think it's really important to have a goal, right? I mean, to try to understand what you're trying to achieve and the way you craft that goal is you view that complex challenge right through the lens of your vital interests.

What are you really cared about? Well, the security of the American people and our homeland, our interests abroad. We're concerned about preserving american prosperity, right? We wanna extend ours and our allies influence to counter authoritarian and mercantilist models that are being promoted by China and others, right? So you think about what do we care about?

What are our interests? And then you view that challenge through the lens of your interest, what is the so what? Why do we care about this? And that helps you craft that overarching goal and more specific objectives. In the period in which Vietnam became an American war, McGeorge Bundy argued, hey, enough with this goal stuff.

We don't need a goal or objectives. It's better not to have one, because then if we don't have one, really what we could have is a situation which we lose the war, and the president could say, well, that was never our objective anyway. It would give him, in George Bundy's words, more flexibility in the domestic political arena.

And that doesn't work out to go to war without an objective or a goal, or even it doesn't work out in competitive diplomacy either. And then what we've been talking about largely are assumptions, and the implicit assumptions and how dangerous those are. It's important, I think, in the framing session to make those, to make those assumptions explicit so you can test them, right?

And especially to have an assumption about the degree to which we believe we and like-minded partners have agency and influence over that complex problem, right? Some problems are not solvable, right? Some problems can only be mitigated and then, of course, predictable, again, examined history to foster understanding. So, one of the assumptions that I found when I came into the job as national security advisor was this fundamental assumption that China, having been welcomed into the international community, would play by the rules.

And as China prospered, it would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance. That's really what drove our approach toward the Chinese Communist Party in China, at least since the end of the Cold War. And so what we did is we said, okay, well, that's not true, right?

That's what's been underpinning our approach to China, and that's what's been driving the strategy across multiple administrations of cooperation and engagement. And so I read some excerpts from previous policies to demonstrate that they were based on this assumption when we convened a principal small group framing session with the principals committee of the National Security Council.

And I just noted in that meeting in March of 2017 that we were gonna replace those old assumptions with some new ones. And as a result, we were about to affect the biggest shift in us foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And then that shift occurred and now is carried over across two administrations.

And I'm just putting these new assumptions up here to illustrate the assumptions that we came up with. And actually, all these assumptions, a lot of this work is available because the Trump administration declassified the framing document for the strategy in 2020. And if you just look up the Indo-Pacific strategy, you can find it.

And it's a document that was initially prepared, really in April of 17, and there are sub strategies. Okay, so these are questions I think you might ask yourselves, and we might use these as a jump off points. So I'd love to hear where you'd like to take the discussion.

We could talk more about policy process. We could talk about substantive issues that we're facing internationally. I'd love to hear what's on your minds. Thanks, everybody.