Days before the election, President Donald Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, lieutenant general H. R. McMaster, laid out his vision of the threats facing America and the country’s deficiencies in facing them, as well as the value of education to remedy those deficiencies.
McMaster, a widely respected and highly decorated Army officer, told students and cadets at the Virginia Military Institute that the United States confronts a range of enemies but lacks the strategic competence to deal with them.
Education can remedy this weakness. The study of history, strategy, philosophy, and other subjects, McMaster said, provides a new generation of leaders with the ability to understand and defend American values.
“We are engaged today, as General George C. Marshall’s generation was engaged, against enemies who pose a great threat to all civilized peoples,” McMaster said.
In the post-September 11 era, enemies include terror organizations overseas, as well as states that leverage less overt tools, including propaganda, political subversion, and espionage, against America.
“Geopolitics has returned, as hostile, revisionist powers—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—annex territory, intimidate our allies, develop nuclear weapons, and use proxies,” McMaster said.
In one of many acknowledgments of the limits of human understanding, McMaster admits that the United States lacks a grand strategy to approach these threats. Confusion on the matter runs deep.
“We are even confused about what strategy is,” he said. “The word strategy has acquired a universality which has robbed it of meaning and left it only with banalities.”
“But this confusion is not only banal, it is dangerous. Loss of precision in the word strategy has encouraged, in our nation, I believe, a narcissistic approach to national security,” he said.
Strategy, he makes clear, is the tie between means and ends as they relate to war.
“[Strategy] is the link between military means and political ends,” he said. “The scheme of how to make one produce the other. Without strategy, there is no rationale for how a force will achieve purposes worth the price of blood and treasure.”
Strategy must recognize the limits of human knowledge because conflict is fluid and based on particular interactions. War cannot be staked in declarations early on that the United States is withdrawing or limiting its efforts, McMaster said, if only for the effect that such declarations have on the public and those fighting overseas.
“Rather than recognizing the interactive nature of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, for example, our strategies were based mainly on how we would prefer to fight,” he said. “We announce publicly, often years in advance, how we intend to limit our level of effort.”
Most important to regaining strategic competence, McMaster underscored, is “knowing ourselves” and the enemy: understanding the ultimate end of a conflict, the means necessary to achieve it, and America’s values. This knowledge will give America the will to prevail.
“Our values,” he said, “bind our nation together, and our values connect military professionals to the citizens in whose name we fight.”
Education can remedy deficiencies in America’s strategic vision: “We all might aspire to be more like General Marshall,” McMaster said. “To study history and strategy, to understand the nature of competition with enemies and adversaries, to recognize that we also must know ourselves and maintain the will, the will necessary to prevail and preserve our way of life.”
However, McMaster reminded listeners, studying the wisdom of those that came before as it relates to war is not based in blood-lust or hawkishness, but prudence.
“For those in some of our universities who might confuse the study of war and strategy with militarism, you might remind them that thinking clearly about the problem of war and strategy in war is both and unfortunate necessity and the best way to prevent war,” he said.
