Complexity, strategy and the national interest

Abstract

In 2010, and in anticipation of a controversial and contested Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the UK House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) issued a stinging critique of strategy making in the UK, accusing the government of having ‘all but lost the capacity to think strategically’ (PASC 2010, p. 3). Two years later, in 2012, it was still lamenting ‘the government’s inability to express coherent and relevant strategic aims’ (PASC 2012, p. 38). These criticisms have been echoed in the strategic studies and foreign policy analysis literature, including calls for a revival of grand narratives of national interest to drive strategic practice (Layton 2012, pp. 59–60), for a new relationship between political decision-making and professional expertise in strategy making (Strachan 2006, pp. 77–80) and the reinvigoration of institutional capacities for strategic thinking and action in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and elsewhere (Cornish and Dorman 2010, pp. 408–409). Related themes are apparent too in the burgeoning literature on risk, which identifies distinct challenges of strategic practice associated with contemporary patterns of complexity, uncertainty and interdependence and calls for better strategy making in response (Rasmussen 2006, pp. 203–206).