National Security Strategy in an Era of Growing Challenges and Resource Constraints

Introduction The United States is struggling to emerge from the greatest peacetime economic downturn since the Great Depression. Known as the Great Recession, the country's current fiscal difficulties seem unlikely to abate any time soon. If there is a consensus regarding the country's recovery, it is that it will be both gradual and protracted.2 Some economists, eyeing the government's rapidly growing debt and expanding obligations, have expressed concerns over the country's ability to sustain healthy growth levels over the longer term.3 The implications for U.S. security are potentially profound. Washington has long relied on its advantage to bring far greater resources to bear against any rival posing a threat to the nation's security. If current trends play out, this advantage is almost certain to diminish, perhaps dramatically, in the coming years. Long accustomed to pursuing a "rich man's approach to strategy, the United States will find itself increasingly challenged to take a "smart man's" approach—one for which it seems ill-prepared. The Logistical and Social Dimensions of Strategy The military historian Michael Howard has observed that modern warfare is conducted in four dimensions. There is the operational dimension, which pertains to how effectively a commander employs the forces at his disposal. The technological dimension of strategy refers to the quality of the equipment employed by a belligerent's armed forces. Howard noted that success in war also depended on the logistical dimension of strategy, or "the capacity to bring the largest and best-equipped forces into the operational theater and to maintain them there" until victory was achieved. 4 1 The author is indebted to Todd Harrison and Barry Watts for their most helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. However, any shortcomings in the paper are the author's sole responsibility. Finally (or perhaps ultimately), Howard went on to describe the social dimension of strategy as "the attitude of the people upon whose commitment and readiness for self-denial this logistical power ultimately.download