Phillip Dolitsky
“Strategy is the future of present decisions”- Garry Kasparov
“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”- Savielly Tartakower
Strategy and defense planning belong to the realm of the unknown. There is nothing as certain as the uncertainty of the future and yet all polities depend on their safety and survival by striving to meet the challenge of uncertainty. All nations must attempt, in the words of the late British strategist Colin Gray, “to get the biggest issues right enough” and to “seek good enough answers to the right questions.”[i] As such, strategy necessitates a rigorous and often uncomfortable examination of potential threats, no matter how improbable they may seem. It involves moving beyond the conventional wisdom and exploring scenarios that stretch the boundaries of our current understanding of, and hope for, the world. It requires navigating a delicate balance between caution and creativity, with deep roots in history, where planners must envision not just the likely developments but also the wild cards that could disrupt the status quo. In other words, it requires that strategists and defense planners think about the unthinkable. This particular aspect of the strategic flame is dwindling. The current war in Israel and the discussions surrounding the looming conflict with China over Taiwan should serve as warnings for what might occur if we completely extinguish the strategic imperative to think about the unthinkable. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to identify this unfortunate trend in strategic thinking, describe an approach to defense planning called “strategic prophylaxis” and offer a few potential remedies to the malady.
The Decline in Thinking About the Unthinkable
During the Cold War, much of American strategic thought was dedicated to “thinking about the unthinkable” in the context of nuclear war. The famed “Wizards of Armageddon” did not merely postulate and stipulate on geopolitical threats and then shrug their shoulders at the magnitude of the problem; they attempted to articulate clear and actionable strategies as best as one can about events that had not happened and might never have happened. To name but a few examples: Colin Gray and Keith Payne argued that “Victory Is Possible” in a nuclear war, Bernard Brodie detailed the interplay between tactical nuclear weapons and conflict escalation, Herman Kahn, perhaps the most creative of the Wizards, delineated separate rungs on an “escalation ladder” that led to general nuclear war.[ii] Thank God, we can never know how well any of their theories would have worked in the advent of nuclear war. But if, as the Cold War nuclear theorists insisted, there is value in nonuse, there is also value in thinking about the unthinkable. Should general nuclear war have occurred, there would have been some thinking about how it could have been managed. The United States would not have stumbled into calamity totally blind. Following the Cold War, however, this type of creative strategic thinking, especially about “unthinkable” problems, significantly declined.
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