Strategy FOR Action
Food for Strategic Thought that is Long Overdue
Review by Bernard Jenkin MP, Chairman, Public Administration Select Committee.
Having recently chaired a select committee inquiry entitled “Who Does UK National Strategy?” the confusion that surrounds the true meaning of the word “strategy” is all too familiar. Strategy is not “a plan”. Planning is not strategy. Planning turns strategy into action. Strategy is not policy. Commodore Jermy argues that strategy is the servant of policy. “Strategy should answer the ‘how’ question: ‘How are we going to do this?’” In its widest sense, “strategy enables the rational application of state power, including armed force, for instrumental purposes.
In his evidence to our inquiry, he said that his would be the first book about strategy written by a British military officer for over 100 years. Having now read his book, it is clear that the Public Administration Select Committee’s inquiry merely scratched the surface of this huge and vastly complex subject. This thorough and educative volume should become that standard textbook for anyone embarking on a study of strategy. It explains the historical origins of strategic thought and basics through different periods in history and how they might apply to today’s ever more complex challenges.
Commodore Jermy draws on his experience as a naval commander, not least as Principle Staff Officer to the Chief of the Defence Staff at the time the UK military deployment to Helmand was planned and approved, and then as Strategy Director in the British Embassy in Kabul in 2007. These latter experiences clearly disturbed him. He reports how he could not recall a single occasion in 2005-6 when the PM, his Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, Defence, and International Development and his Chancellor sat down with the Chiefs of Staff to discuss Afghanistan and Iraq in the round. He relates his arrival in Kabul with a sense of “strategic uncertainty”, which turned out to be worse than he feared. Five years into the Afghan mission, under UN and NATO direction, he found “no sense… of a strategy to guide the campaign”, and (worse still) “little recognition [on the part of politicians, diplomats and officials] that this lack of strategy was a problem”. He is careful not to make accusations, since that would have overshadowed his intellectual purpose, but his analysis is damning. He quotes the late US Rear Admiral J C Wylie: “Too many lives are at stake for us not to recognise strategy as a legitimate public concern.” Jermy sets out to educate strategic leaders – not just military officers, but politicians, diplomats and officials – and to provide insights for anyone interested in strategy, military operations and war.
This book is no meandering through the subject of strategy, nor is it the mere personal musings of someone sounding off about their career frustrations. It is carefully divided into five parts, dealing with the nature of war and strategy; the history of strategic thought; theory of strategy making; strategy making in practice in the modern world; and some further reflections. Each chapter is carefully argued – not an easy feat on a topic of such potentially turgid complexity. Being a good teacher, he does not stint at repetition, where the same points are made relevant at different stages of the debate. He introduces the reader to all the key thinkers on strategy – Jomini, Clausewitz, Corbett, Liddell-Hart, Castex, Slim, Brodie, Wylie, Baufre – as well as to more modern thinkers, including some from the world of corporate strategy. The reader is left with a useful feeling of familiarity with the genre of strategy and its practical application. This should become the “must read”, not just for any aspiring military officer, but for anyone in government, academia or the media who will have anything to do with judgement about the use of military force.
Commodore Jermy is primarily concerned about what he calls “politico-military strategy” – that is the making of strategy concerning the use of armed forces at the highest levels of the state. This is where he feels the origin of failures in Iraq and Afghanistan lie. His conclusions are important and should be embraced by government. He shares in Admiral Wylie’s lament that strategy making tends to be a “disorganised, undisciplined intellectual activity” which is surely capable of improvement. Great strategists have always been highly intelligent and educated people. A great concert pianist is born with innate gifts, but there is no substitute for instruction and practice before he embarks on a life of performance. Moreover –
“Formulation of strategy is an inherently creative activity, and as such requires the employment of teams comprised of clever, well informed and operationally experienced people – the brightest and the best – who must be given sufficient time, space and opportunity to think, and not be rigidly constrained by doctrine, or decision making processes and structures, or party politics.”
“People” is one of the four ‘P’s he picks up in his penultimate chapter, which sets out “how we in the West could improve the way we make strategy”, the other ‘P’s being a wider understanding of the “Philosophy” of strategy, better “Processes” for making strategy and clearer “Policy”, about which he observes that “without higher foreign policy, the strategy maker’s task will always be more difficult.”
The Public Administration Select Committee’s enquiry was more concerned with Grand Strategy, than with “politico-military” strategy, and this is not something which Strategy for Action explores in any depth. Grand Strategy (or National Strategy) does beg different questions. It cannot make strategy the servant of policy, because Grand Strategy must surely be as much about how to choose rational policies and objectives as about anything. The present government has based its National Security Strategy (in truth, a plan, not a strategy) and the Strategic Defence and Security Review on the haziest notions of “our national interests”. They are defined in terms so broad (our freedom, prosperity and security) as to be meaningless for any practical purposes. Foreign policy is based on on two “givens”: on our security relationship with the US, and on our economic and political relationship with Europe through the EU. Ministers promote visions of “expanding UK influence” and they reject “strategic shrinkage” at the same time as implementing savage cuts in defence capability. The government has rejected our call for a National Strategy, suggesting that a National Security Strategy (ie plan) is enough. One suspects that a genuinely free thinking reassessment of the UK Grand Strategy would open too many difficult questions. Commodore Jermy gives measured support to retired diplomat Sir John Cole who claims that the FCO makes a virtue of the absence of strategy, but all this means is that nobody has bothered to assemble all the component parts of foreign policy or to place them into an intellectual framework – exactly the “disorganised, undisciplined intellectual activity” which Wylie lamented. We will explore this further and press our case. In the meantime, and Commodore Jermy’s superb exploration of strategic thinking should provide an electric shock to at least parts of the system and this will undoubtedly help us in our work.
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