Strategic Uncertainty, the Third Offset, and the US Grand Strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article demonstrates the usefulness of rethinking our understanding of uncertainty and how that might affect the course of the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and US grand strategy in general. In the foreword to the 2015 national military strategy, General Martin E. Dempsey, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unequivocally states: Today's global security environment is the most unpredictable I have seen in 40 years of service. (1) This bold statement fits the narrative of strategic discourse in Washington, DC, and other Western capitals during the past 25 years: today's international system is dominated by high uncertainty and unpredictability. (2) Despite the lip service paid to uncertainty, the Washington policy community and many academic experts have a narrow understanding of the concept. Emily Goldman describes the most common view of uncertainty in the strategic studies community well: is present when the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable. (3) But is this simple definition of uncertainty really useful for guiding foreign policy strategic planning in today's highly unpredictable global environment? This article presents a more nuanced way of defining uncertainty and shows how separating different levels of uncertainty leads to more effective strategic planning. The world of business strategy consulting offers a more sophisticated understanding of uncertainty than foreign policy and national security scholarship. Borrowing from this management literature, a middle way that avoids the two extreme views dominating national security scholarship on this topic materializes. As the next paragraphs show, foreign policy experts either regard the international security environment as inscrutable and unpredictable as Chairman Dempsey does, or they believe it is much more predictable and benign than the US national security community claims. Conceptualizing different levels of uncertainty, however, offers a more useful way to plan strategically for a range of foreign policy challenges, as detailed in the second section of the article. The article defines four levels of uncertainty, along with the recommended strategy tools associated with each one of them, and then applies these new concepts to a few examples of uncertainty encountered in national security planning. To demonstrate how this framework provides the US government with a useful perspective, the article uses examples of policy and strategic uncertainties from the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report, and discusses them through the prism of the four levels of uncertainty. (4) The Global Trends report, the most comprehensive and sophisticated effort of the US government to analyze long-term strategic uncertainty, showcases how some business ideas on uncertainty can improve planning for unknowns in the national security arena. The article applies this framework to the contentious debates on the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and to the debates on America's grand strategic course. Before proceeding to this analysis, the article sketches the contours of the strategic studies community's current debate on uncertainty. Cult of Complexity: The Binary View of Uncertainty How do national security experts and academic students of international relations think of uncertainty? Broadly speaking, the academic and policy debates on uncertainty in the international system reveal two schools of thought, one of inscrutable uncertainty and complexity and one of overhyped threats. Most scholars and practitioners in the national security bureaucracy rely on the distinction that risks can be estimated using probabilities, while uncertainty cannot. (5) Since today's security environment is seen as increasingly complex and uncertain, it is also considered increasingly less predictable and more dangerous. …