Beyond Defense Planning

Abstract

When the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists and more than three thousand people died, old notions of defense planning collapsed as well. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted, the United States’ defenses were not designed to protect an American city from a civilian U.S. airliner that departed from a domestic airport. He might have said, with equal veracity, that one cannot “plan” for the unimaginable. The term “defense planning” evokes two misconceptions. The first of these conceptual problems lies in the notion of “planning,” while the second concerns the idea of “defense.” To begin to address these misconceptions means putting an end to our inability to envision alternative defense planning systems that could be public, transparent, and plural. To plan is to outline, conceive, prepare—all of which connote static assumptions about future scenarios. Herein lies one problem with the notion of defense planning, since any effort to anticipate anything beyond the most proximate threat scenarios is fraught with uncertainty. Defense planning qua “defendology”—a compulsive devotion to, and de facto ideology of, preparation for war—is often equated with the processes of modernizing and westernizing armed forces.2 Yet, at the core of early 21century defense planning lies the real dilemma of whether or not “defense” is what defense planning in this age is all about. In the following pages, such a conceptual dilemma is discussed, after which some of the implications of this intellectual debate are considered. In brief, I argue that NATO —and other alliances, ministries, or other large organizations generally—are preoccupied, almost to the point of compulsiveness, with the “Maginot Line mentality” of planning, and have great difficulty grasping the notion of “de-planning.” Such a mentality focuses on what is already in place, and therefore must be supported. Even if a particular element of strategy or an item