![]() Rather, he states the obvious: war is an outgrowth of existing political dynamics that manifest themselves in purposeful violence. Authoritarian governments merely bring the endemic domestic political battles of democracies within the Politburo, substituting the covert sniping of courtiers and bureaucrats for multi-party electoral conflict.Ĭlausewitz, perhaps because of the difficult translation of politik from the original German, does not argue that war is an abstract expression of direct policy. However, one should not assume that the policies of authoritarian nations are more coherent than democracies. Policy is the product of a political process, the fractiousness of which can vary by political culture. As the previous example indicates, those seeking to understand the neo-Clausewitzian paradigm should not expect that policy is rational, or that strategy will always serve the policy. The same political process that produced the initial AF-PAK policy aim generated a different policy, and thus a different strategy. ![]() This strategy served a policy aim of building a pro-Western, democratic, and stable state. Gentile has written soundly on counterinsurgency’s “strategy of tactics,” it may be said that there actually was a strategy in Afghanistan. These divergent tactics can be explained by the adoption of a different policy and corresponding strategy. ![]() Notice, however, that the actual focus of American tactics and operations in the region has been to build the authority of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan - which does not necessarily relate to the expressed policy aim. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, this ostensibly translates into a strategy (mislabeled as a policy) to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda. It is the policy of the United States that terrorism against its citizens must be prevented. Take, for example, the case of the “AF-PAK” conflict. While this sounds simple enough, it is significantly more difficult in practice. War is not an abstraction, and the political object can only be used as measurement in the context of two mutually opposed forces at war with each other. Moreover, while Clausewitz is clear that the political object is what determines the military objectives and the methods by which they are reached, the object cannot be used as a sole standard of measurement to evaluate a war’s progress. Policy can be the superb distillation of a guiding statesman’s strategic insight, a messy cobbled-together compromise brokered between competing domestic political elites, or both. The idea that “amateurs study strategy, while professionals study logistics” is not helpful, since while logistics enables strategy, logistics loses all meaning without a strategic aim.Ī government or governing entity formulates policy through an often-fractious political process and then seeks to institute it over another entity. Bad strategy can lose a war even if the policy is sound. A strategy cannot be executed without tactics and operations. While politics and policy sit on top of a military hierarchy, the relationship between these various components should be understood as dynamic and nonlinear. Operations and tactics are the building blocks of strategy, the process by which lofty strategic dreams become reality. Policy is that which a government decrees, and strategy is a highly technical set of steps to accomplish it. Strategy, in turn, is an instrumental device that is given meaning by the policy. To put it simply, policy is a condition or behavior. Widespread ignorance of policy-strategy in, among others, America holds back a sound analysis of modern security threats and retards the development of intellectual tools needed to cope with them. Tactics and strategy are frequently mistaken for policy, and policy mistaken for the strategies needed to execute them. While this debate is primarily intellectual, it also has manifold policy implications. “The political object is the goal,” Clausewitz notes, and “war is the means of reaching it.” Clausewitz further notes that strategy is the “the use of engagement for the purpose of the war.” This essay explains policy and strategy and argues for the importance of a sound understanding of their complex relationship in modern strategic thought and practice. The policy-strategy distinction is one of the most important issues in the neo-Clausewitzian canon.
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