By Daniel L. Davis
Ensuring American National Security – and Avoiding Nuclear War – is Biden’s Top Priority in Ukraine – While all the focus in the Western world has understandably been focused on urgently providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs to blunt Russia’s invasion, we need to simultaneously consider what’s next. It is vital that the White House quickly determines the long-term strategic objectives necessary to ensure our security well into the future.
Unfortunately, while establishing such objectives are critical to forming efficient and successful policies, strategic thinking has become rare in Washington. Failure to even identify, much less attain, strategic objectives regarding America’s war in Afghanistan from the Bush through Trump Administrations, for example, was a major reason for our failure there and cost our country dearly.
After President Bush gave the military an attainable mission on the initial attack in 2001, he later changed the mission to an amorphous “nation-building” objective that never had an attainable set of tasks. As a result, the Bush Administration – nor any that followed him – never articulated an achievable end-state in the war. It should stand to reason (but rarely does in Washington): if there is no clearly defined end-state, there will be no objective set of metrics by which an Administration will even know if its policy is a success or failure.
This piece was originally published in 1945 on April 21, 2022. Read more HERE.