Ends+Ways+Means=(Bad) Strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Within the US defense community, strategy making has become a narrow-minded exercise rooted in the concepts of ends, ways, and means and the whole-of-government approach. Strategic thinking can be improved by defining strategy as a theory of success and understanding that the purpose of strategy is to create advantage, generate new sources of power, and exploit weaknesses in the opponent. This analysis of the 2009 Afghanistan policy review and strategy-making process illustrates an approach to overcoming dysfunctional strategic practices. Over the past two years, American military leaders have repeatedly highlighted the need to develop leaders with strong critical and creative thinking skills who will enable the United States to field a superior joint force over the next decade. These efforts imply the US defense community has failed to develop and utilize these skills over the past 15 years. General Martin E. Dempsey, the recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for agile and adaptive leaders with the requisite values, strategic vision, and critical thinking skills to keep pace with the changing strategic environment. (1) General Joseph Dunford, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told National Defense University graduates: is no substitute for leadership that recognizes the implications of new ideas, new technologies and new approaches and actually anticipates and effects those adaptations. (2) These are praiseworthy goals; however, the challenge of achieving them is profound. The military leaders quoted above generally focus on the need to educate up-and-coming officers to be better strategic thinkers. They do not seem to grasp the reality of fundamental flaws in the dominant way of conceptualizing strategy in the US defense community. Far too often strategy is an exercise in means-based planning; it is inherently uncreative, noncritical, and limits new and adaptive thinking. Our strategic problems have two main causes: a formulaic understanding of strategy and a simplistic understanding of means or resources. First, the US defense community has a literal formula for strategy: ends + ways + means = strategy. There is some value to conceptualizing strategy in this manner; however, this model has become a crutch undermining creative and effective strategic thinking. Like any crutch, the supportive structure of the formula originally served an important purpose of avoiding an ends-means mismatch. This approach has become counterproductive because it has the effect of neutering the ways. Second, the concept of a comprehensive or whole-of-government approach to solving strategic problems fosters an overemphasis on simplistically applying resources--the means. By this logic, whatever the problem is, simply apply all the elements of national power--diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement (DIMEF1L)--and the problem is solved. Under this approach, the strategist simply fills in each box or, better yet, creates a diagram showing each element of national power as a line of effort directed at an enemy center of gravity or critical vulnerability. This is the stuff of PowerPoint nirvana but encourages strategists to avoid thinking creatively and precisely about resources and power. In sum, the ends + ways + means formula interacts with a simplistic notion of means to create a situation where strategy is reduced to a perfunctory exercise in allocating resources. This approach is an excellent way to foster policy stability, but it is not a recipe for critical and creative thinking. The remainder of this article elaborates on the main failings of the American way of strategy, suggests how a new definition of strategy can overcome those failings, and discusses US strategy in Afghanistan to illustrate these points. The Lykke Model In the decades following its publication in Military Review, the so-called Lykke model of military strategy has become widely influential among members of the US defense community, particularly those in the US Army. …