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From 1941 through 1945, national leaders gave minimal thought to issues outside of the ongoing conflict and its aftermath. Other foreign policy issues paled in comparison to the global war. Such was not the case in the years of the Cold War. Although the Soviet bloc was the focus of US strategic thinking from 1946 to 1991, other tangentially related issues occasionally required the United States to develop separate policies and supporting strategies, most notably for the Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam War. For these “lesser” cases the US defense establishment had no agreed upon way to create strategies that were in consonance with policies, the latter of which the Executive Branch often failed to articulate clearly.
I first became aware of these failing as a student in the Naval War College’s Command and Staff course in 1977. As a mid-grade Marine Corps major, the tactical realm had been the center of my experience up until that point. The College’s instructors introduced me to the larger world of policy and strategy in a rigorous and well-designed curriculum. Ironically, the title of the course was “Strategy and Policy” taught by the Strategy and Policy Department, putting the proverbial cart (strategy) before the horse (policy). I learned to dissect presidential speeches, especially the annual State of the Union address, various reports to Congress, and other similar documents to distill policy guidance that was to inform strategy. In many ways it seemed akin to “reading tea leaves,” but as I discovered, this was the way the Pentagon carried out business in Washington DC. Fortunately for me, the operational assignments that followed the Command and Staff course did not involve any high-level planning, thus I did not have to practice what I had learned at Newport.
(Excerpt from article “From Grand Strategy to Operational Design: Getting it Right”)
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