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Our invasion of Iraq offers a case in point. There's no question the U.S. government possesses all the necessary skill sets for state- building; the trick comes in actually getting all these disparate agencies to work together synergistically. Inside the Pentagon, the military spent years getti...
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| Published in | Deseret news (Salt Lake City, Utah : 1964) |
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| Main Author | |
| Format | Newspaper Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Salt Lake City, Utah
Deseret Digital Media
09.06.2007
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| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Our invasion of Iraq offers a case in point. There's no question the U.S. government possesses all the necessary skill sets for state- building; the trick comes in actually getting all these disparate agencies to work together synergistically. Inside the Pentagon, the military spent years getting the four services to operate with one another seamlessly -- the doctrine of "jointness." That's why we win wars so effectively. Getting Defense to cooperate with State to cooperate with Commerce to...That far more complex collaboration, known as the "interagency" process, remains dysfunctional. That's why we've lost the peace in Iraq -- too much vertical thinking pursued in isolation, with balkanized operations resulting in outcomes that often negate one another. It's the connections between economics and security, for example, that we understand least, not how to encourage job creation or kill bad guys. The vast bulk of what I do as a grand strategist involves translating thinking from one subject domain into another. There really is nothing new under the sun; it's just that the combinations are endless. I took a lot of economics and history and political- science across a decade of college, and although my Ph.D. reads "government," my doctorate's really in how to recognize good ideas and reconceptualize and/or combine them in new ways. |
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| ISSN: | 0745-4724 |