Planning for Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations Without a Grand Strategy

摘要

All efforts presently underway in the United States Government (USG) to plan, organize, and build resources for future stabilization and reconstruction operations are handicapped by the absence of a grand strategy. The Department of State and the Department of Defense, in coordination with several other departments and agencies of the USG, several intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and allies and friends, are ambitiously attempting to build new capacities and institutionalize new processes that will better enable the USG and its like-minded partners to conduct political interventions into fragile, failing, failed, and post-conflict states to rebuild those states' institutions of civil governance. All of these efforts are handicapped by the absence of a grand strategy that links them with -- and links together -- the array of adjacent USG plans to, among other things, align diplomacy and development assistance, secure and defend the U.S. homeland, combat terrorism, cooperate with theater security partners, counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and conduct major combat operations to win decisively and achieve enduring results. Not only should the USG plans be linked, but also the participation with the USG in these and similar operations of allies and partners and intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations needs to be addressed with sufficient specificity to guide investment in U.S. capacity as a measurable subset of global capacity. Absent grand strategy, which presumably accomplishes the above and more, planning and building resources for stabilization and reconstruction operations amounts to pre-planning responses to anticipated crises on a case-by-case basis.