Impact of Strategic Culture and Cognition on U.S. Outcomes

摘要

The United States' national government does not perform as well as it should.' The outcomes that result from many national security policy decisions have been less than stellar. With each poor outcome the United States begins to realize an erosion of its national powers. At the conclusion of the analysis we will determine that the strategic leader's decision making and U.S. outcomes are impacted by strategic culture and cognition. In each U.S. policy decision analyzed, we will illustrate that the optimal outcome was not achieved. To help future leaders gain awareness we have developed an illustrative term for the combined impact of strategic culture and cognition on the decision making process entitled the 'drowning effect'. The drowning effect is the unintentional pushing of new concepts, approaches, acknowledgement of risk, and processes below the surface or casting them out to sea by national security professionals due to their cultural and cognitive biases.