You’ve likely read Frederick Kagan’s name recently in the news; he’s one of the authors of the “surge” plan from which the Bush administration drew much of its most recent strategy for the Iraq campaign.
Kagan’s also the author of the recent book Finding The Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter Books, 2006). In it, he outlines the flawed planning principles that have contributed to some of the military’s current problems in Iraq.
Among his arguments: military planning since the Cold War has suffered as planners ignored current military threats to focus on hypothetical future needs. That planning process included a nearly single-minded focus on harnessing the power of futuristic technology.
The U.S. strategy community in the 1990s was in general so caught up with the minutiae of technology that it lost sight of the larger purpose of war, and therefore missed the emergence of a challenge even more important than that of technology — the challenge of designing military operations to achieve particular political objectives.
Kagan contends military leaders need to give greater consideration to factors beyond killing enemies and blowing things up.
Rather than developing plans for military operations and then considering the post-war conditions, U.S. military planners should reverse the process. It is essential to consider the desirable post-war situation and the problems that will hinder its achievements first, and only then to develop military plans that will get there.
