Military Theory Analysis

This simple challenge hangs on the office door of a venerated SAASS instructor and inspired this essay. Six simple words simply arranged in two sentences evoke a flood of questions and scarce answers. How can strategy be a guess? Surely at any level, members craft strategies with great aforethought and care. At the national level, the National Security Strategy and the National Military Strategy are prominent examples. How could these documents, so essential to the country’s defense, possibly be a guess? Did the authors fathom a substitution of “guess” for “strategy” as possibly logically equivalent? National Security Guess and National Military Guess would not engender faith and confidence in either policy or defense officials.

Placing faith in the national security apparatus, one can assume however, strategy is not a complete shot in the dark. Nor, because it is a human endeavor, can it be viewed with completely knowable certainty. However placed between fiction and fact,

Military theory is equivalent to an education and those who study it reap the benefit of knowledge. While experience is valuable, Liddell Hart would claim it was better to learn from the experiences of others. Properly guided by military theory, a strategist can craft an appropriate strategy while avoiding pitfalls. Because of their symbiotic relationship, military theory and strategy complement one another benefitting from a feedback loop. Neither is a fixed sum and can and should be adjusted with the import of new, clarifying information. If either is absent, the remainder is ineffectual at best but most likely quite dangerous. Most significantly, military theory and its relationship to strategy enable a strategist to better complete his daunting task. Any generated strategy would remain merely a guess, but, benefitting from theory, it would be an educated