Overall Strategy Is Needed
U.S. can't prevail with piecemeal approaches
By Lawrence J. Korb, Sean Duggan and Laura Conley
When President Obama announced his decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, he presented a clear argument for why he believes U.S. national security is threatened by violence and extremism in that country and in the region.
What was missing from the speech, however, was a sense of how and to what degree continued U.S. involvement in that region fits into the United States' comprehensive national security agenda. That evaluation is the key to keeping U.S. foreign policy consistent and balanced, and should be based on the president's national security strategy (NSS).
Almost one year has passed since Mr. Obama's inauguration, and the White House has yet to issue that seminal document.
Phi Beta Iota: Every single person serving the President–and the President himself–are good earnest people trapped in a bad system. It is a system that is easy to fix, but it demands a President willing to say “STOP” and to demand that the government do what Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) always said needed to be done:
1. Evaluate the threat–the ENTIRE threat (hint: ten high-level threats to humanity)
2. Develop a STRATEGY for combining means and ways to achieve ends addressing ALL of the threats
3. Develop a force structure (ideally multinational, hint DIME, 12 core policies, religious forces matter)
4. Manage the force structure (ideally multinational and DIME) to achieve the objectives
Starting points:
Search: Strategic Analytic Model
Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]
