Since its inception in 1946, the National War College has had as its primary mission the education of senior U.S. government officials in national security strategy. Then-Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower was convinced by wartime experience that future American military actions would be increasingly both joint (that is, involving all or most of the military services) and military-civilian in nature. As a result, the new College he established was composed of an equal balance of officers from each of the military services and included significant participation by officials from the Department of State. And its focus was on national security strategy, roughly defined as the nation's evolving plan for the coordinated use of all the instruments of state power to defend and advance the national interest.
Across the half-century of the College's existence, each of its four JCS- approved charters and all congressional and Pentagon studies of its functions have reaffirmed and strengthened this distinctive focus on strategic thinking at the highest levels of statecraft. By contrast, the war colleges of the military services quite properly focus on military strategy, and particularly on the application of their own service's power in its joint and grand strategic context. This College, however, is both inter-service and interagency in composition and therefore in perspective; its focus is on not just the various forms of military power but on the non-military instruments as well. Its core curriculum can still be fairly described, following George Kennan, as a course "on strategic-political doctrine," on the relationship between force and diplomacy.
The first two courses in the College's core curriculum -- 5601, Fundamentals of Statecraft, and 5602, Fundamentals of Military Thought and Strategy -- are designed to introduce the major themes and issues that will dominate the core program for the remainder of the academic year. This course, 5601, concentrates on statecraft in its broadest sense and on the highest level of strategic thought. It is directly concerned with the nature of national power and the nonmilitary instruments through which it can be applied - political, economic, and informational; covert and overt; concrete and psychological; cooperative and coercive. The objectives or purposes for which the power of the United States should be employed, validated by the nationalinterest, are also of central importance, as are the particular strategies at the national level through which the connection between means (policy tools) and ends (the goals of statecraft) is established. Finally, because strategies are always situation-specific, the policymaker must understand the domestic and international contexts within which national security strategy is formulated and executed.
This "Fundamentals of Statecraft" course addresses all of these subjects and thus sets the stage for the core and elective courses that follow. For example, although this course does not discuss war, national security strategy does define the interests and set the objectives served by the military instrument; hence, this course is an essential precursor to the second Fundamentals course (on Military Thought and Strategy) as well as to Course 5605, Military Strategy and Operations. National security strategies are also inputs to and may on occasion be created by the policy process, the subject of Course 5603. Finally, Fundamentals of Statecraft highlights important aspects of the international political and economic systems and surveys the non-military policy instruments that will be applied to particular regional and country contexts in Course 5604, The Geostrategic Context.
Unfortunately for the national security strategist, however, there exists neither a fully accepted theory of statecraft nor a single doctrine of national security strategy. There are only partial or contested theories dealing with various aspects of international relations, consisting of propositions about the international system and its operation or about national decision-making. Though we will be reading and discussing some of these theories in this course, our perspective will be that of the doer, the policymaker who searches for guides to action. And in this area the closest thing we have to a theory are the scattered maxims left to us by practitioners from Machiavelli to Kissinger, though none is anywhere near as complete in its field as are even the unfinished writings of Clausewitz on the theory of warfare.
Our goal, then, is not to transmit a theory of national security strategy but to seek out concepts and principles that will be useful to the strategist working at the highest levels of U.S. foreign and national security policy. "Fundamentals of Statecraft" is a course of applied theory, focused on how to think about national security strategy in a generic way. We are concerned with policy relevant knowledge regarding both national security strategy and statecraft, both the thinking (or planning) part and the doing part. By considering frameworks for strategic thought, by studying how past American national security strategists dealt with the problems they faced, and by familiarizing themselves with the current lively debate on contemporary American national security strategy, students can begin to free their minds from ingrained habits of reasoning and begin to appreciate the subtle and complex relationships among the elements of strategic thought. It is our hope that you will thus be better prepared to deal with the specifics of time and place in later courses and to take up the challenges posed by national security strategy in the century about to dawn.
COURSE DESIGN
Course 5601 is presented in five parts that are intended, at least implicitly, to suggest a logical approach to the development of national security strategy:
Block A: Philosophies of Statecraft
Based on a belief that policymakers necessarily bring certain ingrained, and often unstated, assumptions to the task of strategic analysis, this section strives to help students explore and evaluate their own assumptions about statecraft while learning about the traditions that have guided earlier generations of American statesmen.
Block B: Ends
This block examines the concepts of the national interest, threats, and opportunities as they are used in the development of national security strategy. Also, the contemporary international political and economic environments are explored in an effort, first, to understand their structure and dynamics, and second, to get some sense of the current challenges to U.S. interests in the world and the opportunities for advancing them.
Block C: Means
This portion of the course looks at power in general as a means to strategic ends and introduces the specific political, economic, and military instruments of statecraft that that strategist uses to accomplish his purposes. Ten different persuasive, cooperative, and coercive tools are examined for their characteristic strengths and weaknesses under the broad coordinating instrument of diplomacy.
Block D: Integrating Strategy
Here we will begin to consider the complexities and challenges involved in developing a coherent national security strategy: verifying assumptions; defining interests and searching the international environment for threats to and opportunities for advancing them; setting objectives while factoring in resource constraints; choosing among available instruments of power; and specifying how these tools will be used to achieve objectives. This Block will provide a fully-developed framework for strategic analysis, illustrate its dynamics by looking at American grand strategy in the twenty years after World War II, and ask students to apply it by analyzing President Bush's statecraft during the 1990 Persian Gulf crisis.
Block E: Strategies for the Post-Cold War Era
This concluding section asks students to begin to think through what American national security strategy should look like in the 21st Century. To help in that task it looks first at the statecraft of our only two post-Cold War presidents and then surveys the range of alternative strategies for the future that appear in the contemporary strategic debate, ending with a strategic analysis in seminar of a developing foreign affairs problem.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
When you have completed this course, you should be well on your way towards developing the ability to:
- Analyze the interrelationships among ends and means and the ways resources are applied to objectives in national security strategy, as well as the use of all the instruments of national power to achieve national security objectives. (PJE)
- Define, interrelate, and apply the concepts used in strategic thinking to evaluate national security policies and strategy and develop recommendations for various national security issues. (PJE)
- Appreciate the implications of the post-Cold War international environment for the design and implementation of U.S. national security strategy.
COURSE THEMES
The central propositions of this course, both analytical and heuristic, can be boiled down into the following seven propositions:
- Strategic thinking is generic. Productive thinking in foreign affairs is strategic thinking, and the same basic concepts and logical interrelationships characterize strategic thinking for national, foreign affairs, national security, grand, and military strategy.
- Guidelines help. American national security strategists today must deal with an overwhelming morass of information and have extraordinary freedom of choice. As a result, carefully thought-out assumptions, checklists, frameworks, hypotheses, and theories are essential tools for the decision maker.
- The context counts. The way the world works has changed in some ways since the end of the Cold War, but in others it has not. Knowing which is which is not easy, but getting it right makes a big difference to sound strategy.
- Check your logic. Clear strategic thinking requires precise and workable definitions of concepts like the national interest, threats, objectives, power, costs, and risks; an appreciation of the interrelationships between them; and as much empirical knowledge as one can amass about the characteristics, strengths, and limitations of the various instruments of state power.
- Most problems can't be solved. Having power does not necessarily mean having influence, and foreign policy problems, being foreign, are by definition even less susceptible to "solutions" than the most intractable societal problems here at home. Politics everywhere is the art of the possible; economics everywhere remains the dismal science.
- Thinking strategically is hard. Ends must be balanced with means, perceptions with realities, the desirable with the possible, risks with costs, the present with the future, and every regional, country, and functional policy with every other. Everything is uncertain, and most factors conducing to success are unknowable or uncontrollable. If you do it right, your brain will hurt.
- Thinking strategically is essential.Despite all the difficulties, the United States is at the most fortunate juncture in all its favored history. As the sole global superpower, it has an unprecedented opportunity. For those with parts to play in the saga of 21st century American statecraft, not to infuse our power with farsighted purpose, not to think and act strategically because of its difficulty, would be a moral abdication of the worst sort. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men and women do nothing.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
This course will utilize a variety of teaching and learning methods: lectures, readings, seminars, guest seminars, case studies, and course essays.
The readings for this course have been selected for overall quality, timeliness, and relevance. Every effort has been made to limit the length and number of readings by focusing on essential teaching objectives, and where possible time is reserved in the class schedule to provide opportunities for reading and class preparation. Still, the readings are intellectually demanding, and students will find that keeping up to date and assimilating the lessons they have to offer will be a challenge.
Required Readings for a given topic must be read and digested before the seminar meets. Generally, these readings are listed in an order reflecting the logical development of the topic and can most profitably be read in that order. Supplemental Readings are listed for those who might wish to pursue a particular topic in greater depth, but they are neither required nor provided to students. Readings in these various categories are listed under each topic description in the syllabus, and each citation for Required Readings will indicate whether the piece can be found as a "Reprint" in the readings book or has been distributed separately as a "Student Issue."
A short paper (2,000-2,500 words) will be required of each student on a topic that could constitute the beginning of a personal project for the year: the formulation of his or her own national security strategy. Papers should answer one of the following questions, each related directly to a topic or part of the course:
1. What is your philosophy of statecraft? Analyze your own assumptions about national security strategy. Are you a realist or an idealist, and why? (Topic 2)
2. What are the major global interests of the United States, and what threats to and opportunities for advancing them do you see in the international environment? (Block B)
3. Which of the non-violent instruments of statecraft is likely to be of greater and lesser value to the United States over the next decade, and why? (Block C) Most of the materials needed to support these inquiries can be found in the topic or block noted above in parenthesis after each question. Your faculty seminar leader (FSL) will also be a resource, and the staff at the NDU Library are invariably supportive and helpful should you wish to investigate any of these questions further than course materials permit. Writing on a course-related topic other than those listed above is certainly permissible, but you should seek your FSL's approval at an early date. Papers will be due in class on September 13, but students are encouraged to share early outlines and drafts with their FSLs. Faculty will return papers with comments September 17, and student final drafts will be due at the course seminar on September 24.
CONCLUSIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The rest of this booklet contains a topic calendar for the course, along with detailed descriptions, discussion questions, and objectives for each topic. A complete listing of the course topics will be found in the Course Outline and Syllabus Table of Contents below. Students are urged to read and refer to the entire syllabus often to get their bearings and check their sense of direction.
As with every core course at the National War College, development of Course 5601 was truly a collaborative effort reflecting helpful comments from across the faculty as well as thoughtful critiques by many previous students. This year's syllabus includes many readings based on the recommendations of faculty members too numerous to acknowledge individually, but suggestions by Richard Melanson, Bard O'Neill, Roy Stafford, Bruce Gregory, David Cohen, were particularly helpful. The Academic Support Center, particularly Mike Ellis, provided invaluable support in securing copyright permissions and reprints. Joyce Whiting cheerfully and expertly prepared the syllabus for printing and attended to the many administrative details that accompany an undertaking of this sort. Jim Di Crocco ably assisted in locating and pulling together the required readings. To all whose outstanding efforts aided in the preparation of Course 5601, our sincere thanks.
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