The Problem of Grand Strategy

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing external pagedemandcall_made in Indian policy-making circles for the articulation of a ‘grand strategy’ by the government. It is widely believed that such formulation of grand strategy by the government will provide number of benefits: first, it will help concerned departments to develop their plans (short/medium/long-term) in accordance with the overall national intent. Second, it will help policy-makers view their particular policy initiatives holistically and highlight cross-cutting issues. Third, the strategy can provide a basis for prioritizing resource allocations. Fourth, it will improve coordination among agencies, increase synergies and provide direction to individual and collective actions. Fifth, it can enhance communication and cooperation with other states. Sixth, it will encourage policy-makers to think systematically about the long-term consequences of their actions. Seventh, it will be useful to test the robustness of current organizational structures, processes and resources. Eighth, it will help citizens to evaluate whether particular actions of the state are aligned with the nation’s core values and interests. Ninth, it will be useful to promote structured and focused research on core issues and areas that are identified as national priorities. Finally, it would be useful for educating the strategic leadership.

While the usefulness of a grand strategy for a country like India would seem obvious from the above discussion, its formulation is neither easy nor without costs. The first level of difficulty with formulating the grand strategy is conceptual. The term has come to mean different things to different thinkers. The second barrier to public articulation of grand strategy is that it is not without risks; that is, there are risks attached to the benefits. Also, historically strategies often end up producing paradoxical outcomes. The third barrier to making grand strategy is political contestation. Public articulation of grand strategy may engender political contestation rather than fostering consensus as its proponents suggest. The last of the barriers to making grand strategy is the institutional locus. Grand strategy requires skills and competence at convening a wide-ranging dialogue and synthesis of insights gained in the process. In most cases, the states have weak institutions and are critically short on the analytical resources and traditions of fostering in genuine interdisciplinary dialogue.

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Eight Areas of Agreement

As is evident from the above discussion, grand strategy lacks agreed definition and involves a complex process. Despite its multiple interpretations, the essence of grand strategy could be found in the eight areas of agreement among thinkers.

1. Grand strategy encompasses both internal and external dimensions of the nation: Unlike the foreign policy or military strategy, grand strategy thinking recognizes the inseparability of internal and external dimensions. It encompasses the whole of internal and external policy. For grand strategy to be meaningful it should provide a framework for integrating the entirety of a state’s purposes and resources.
2. Subject matter of Grand strategy is complex: Grand strategy deals with the complex set of interactions between elements in the external and internal environments whose outcomes are difficult to anticipate in advance. Grand strategy is in many ways a framework for management of change involving both adaptation to changes and fostering change to serve the national purposes. It is also an arena of interdependent choice-making, involving a number of actors whose responses to particular actions cannot be anticipated with certainty in advance.
3. Grand strategy involves both the content and the process: A grand strategy to be useful should contain both what should be done and how it should be achieved. Grand strategy formulation involves both identifying the goals, process and the institutional responsibilities.
4. Grand strategy involves both an analysis and synthesis: Grand strategy involves analysis of trends and drivers in specific domains of national and external environment. Analysis provides expert inputs for the formulation of grand strategy. But the grand strategy formulation has to transcend the domains and offer a synthetic perspective. It is a coherent framework linking the past with the future, internal with the external, opportunities with risks, interests with values, means with ends, etc. Grand strategy, like the real world, is interdisciplinary.
5. Grand strategy provides for both control and experimentation: A balanced grand strategy should be premised on irreducible uncertainty in the strategic environment and as a corollary, the imperative of adaptive behavior by various stakeholders in the system. Surprises are inevitable in the strategic domain. The world is witnessing exponential changes in the technological domain that will have an important bearing on the political, social, and environmental and security domains. Grand strategic framework, seeking to regulate national conduct, should encourage learning and adaptation to changing environments.
6. Grand strategy is both instrumental and value laden: Nation states do not exist or conduct their statecraft in a moral vacuum. Their perspectives and actions are conditioned as much by their moral codes, emotions and other non-rational elements. A grand strategy that does not take into account these non-instrumental dimensions is unlikely to gain the support of its citizens, nor will it provide for a conducive framework for enhancing cooperation in the international arena. For a grand strategy to be successful it should integrate both the interests and the values of the key stakeholders.
7. Grand strategy is essentially a political project: Grand strategy is about states. States are political projects. Grand strategy is a result of competing interests and values among the political elite of the nation. Therefore, there is no grand strategy in the pure rational goal-seeking sense. The existence of pure interests that are obvious to everyone is more a myth, not reality. National leadership that that doesn’t seek to reconcile the interests of key stakeholders will set itself for failure. Grand strategies succeed or fail to the extent the leadership co-opts key political actors.
8. Absence of deliberate grand strategy does not mean that the state is less successful in practice: Although a number of major states in the international system periodically articulate their grand strategies, it is not certain if it is a necessary condition for national success. Historical experience suggests that realized outcomes are often far removed from what was intended. The gap between what was intended in external pageAmerica’s National Security Strategy of 2002call_made and the outcomes it produced is just one recent instance of this phenomenon. Something similar could be said about Eisenhower’s much-fabled NSC-68.

States are complex organisms located in dynamically evolving environments that cheat the best of minds and do not often respect the will of the most powerful. States often develop a range of repertoires by trial and error enabling their survival and well-being. The most useful knowledge is distributed across the system, empowering individual agents to adapt and innovate. The sum of these micro-actions matter far more for national success than a document sanctioned by the leadership. Articulated strategy is useful to the extent it captures this reality and gives verbal expression to the government’s view of what causes security and well-being. A grand strategy is still an image of reality, not the reality itself. Absence of this image is not absence of strategic action.

Conclusion: Way Forward

Following upon the proceeding discussion, this section offers external pageframeworkcall_made for understanding process of making grand strategy. Grand strategy involves five elements:

1. The why’s of grand strategy involves identifying the need for the government to take strategic initiative. The first step of a grand strategy-making process is asking why it has become necessary to identify and prioritize the critical interests of the state that would require strategic intervention by the national leadership.
2. The second element involves identification of the context in which the actions are being proposed. The grand strategy should seek to be good fit with strategic environment. Achieving the right fit requires identification of the ‘fields of action’ that the national leadership is seeking to influence. There are four types of strategic environments—direct causation, multiple variables, complex fields and chaos. Direct Causation is a field in which there is direct causal link between the cause and the effect. The routine of work of the bureaucracies falls into this environment type. In this kind of environment, predicting the outcomes of specific action is possible. In the fields of multiple variables, cause and effect is not directly correlated and as a consequence this kind of environment cannot be modeled. Complex fields involves even less understood phenomenon, such as the national cultures, operational codes of leadership in a foreign state. Finally, chaos: this is a field most pronounce ‘during periods of crisis and transition’ when the established ‘rules and relations break down’.
3. The next step is to understand the relationship between ‘power and knowledge the government can bring to an issue or the task.’
4. The fourth dimension of strategy-making involves how to achieve specified objectives. There are multiple methods and means to achieve any particular strategic objective of the state. This step involves identifying the right tools to minimize costs and maximize positive outcomes.
5. The last element critical to the success of grand strategy is identification of feedback loops that will help keep the strategy adaptive. Irrespective of states’ capacity for anticipating the future and building strategies based on the insights from the past, history suggests that strategies will be modified in the light of experience. It is critical that states develop institutional capacities for multiple feedbacks and adaptation in light of experience in implementing the strategy.