THE ELEMENTS OF STRATEGIC THINKING: A PRACTICAL GUIDE

With 58,000 American lives lost, 350,000 casualties, and untold national treasure forfeited, on April 30, 1975, the last Americans in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces at the height of the Cold War. A few days earlier, with the end in clear view, a Four Party Joint Military Team, established under provisions of the January 1973 Paris peace accords, met in Hanoi, North Vietnam. At that meeting, Colonel Harry Summers, Chief, Negotiations Division of the U.S. Delegation, in a conversation with Colonel Tu, Chief of the North Vietnamese Delegation remarked: “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu responded: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”1 So was told the story of failed strategy.
It might be facile to contend that the need for systematic thinking about U.S. foreign and security policies and defense issues peaked during the Cold War. After all, during the Cold War the Soviet Union came to pose a military threat to the United States that was unique in American history—the threat of instant annihilation. It also posed a direct military threat to our allies in Europe and Asia whom we were pledged to defend, as well as the danger of ever increasing Soviet influence around the world through proxy wars and other forms of political violence that seemed to some to represent a more subtle, more likely, and perhaps graver long-term threat to the overall security and well-being of the United States. Thus the objectives were clear. First, counterbalance Soviet strategic power and its military might on the continent of Europe with countervailing theater and strategic forces that could deliver responses to any aggression by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) so devastating that no Soviet leader would dare take such a step. Second, contain the growth of Soviet influence through policies designed to thwart attempts by the USSR to subvert governments friendly to the United States and its allies. Though the objectives were clear, the methods to accomplish these twin tasks were not. Here systematic thinking was at a premium, albeit not always wisely undertaken.