America Needs a New Way of War
A Q&A with former Pentagon staffers Susanna V. Blume and Christopher Dougherty on the future of military doctrine.
Some officials are too fixated on size of the force, not capability of the force.
Photographer: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images
“One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine,” one German officer is said to have said in World War II, “is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.” Even if that’s apocryphal, it’s accurate. Making things up on the fly is the finest trait of the American national character.
If there is an “American way of war,” it’s very hard to pin down. So this week I talked to a couple of people who have tried. One is Susanna V. Blume, the deputy director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, who was previously the deputy chief of staff to the Pentagon’s resident futurist, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work. The other is Christopher M. Dougherty, a senior fellow in the CNAS defense program and former Pentagon defense strategist who helped develop the closest thing to a military doctrine the Pentagon has, the 2016 National Defense Strategy. Their new project is to develop what they call “A New American Way of War.” Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion: