If you are at all interested in the future national security of the United States, do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to read Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen’s speech yesterday at Kansas State University. It’s clear that Adm. Mullen understands the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century and that the military must adapt along with it. Mullen’s fears that U.S. foreign policy is “too dominated by the military” is particularly striking given that Adm. Mullen is, well, the highest ranking military officer in the U.S. military. Or, to quote Nathan Hodge of Danger Room, Mullen seems to be saying that, “avoiding wars is as important as winning them.”
Adm. Mullen endorses a strong, smart and principled national security worldview that progressives should embrace. Here are a few extended excerpts (they’re long, but worth it), which should double as powerful rebuttals to any conservative who accuses progressives of being “weak on security”:
On the nature of war:
[T]here is no single defining American way of war. It changes over time, and it should change over time, adapting appropriately to the most relevant threats to our national security….[T]he military may be the best and sometimes the first tool; it should never be the only tool. The tangible effects of military engagement may give policymakers a level of comfort not necessarily or wholly justified. As we have seen, the international environment is more fluid and more complex than ever before.
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Contrary to popular imagination, war has never been a set-piece affair. The enemy adapts to your strategy and you adapt to his. And so you keep the interplay going between policy and strategy until you find the right combination at the right time.
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Trying everything else is not weakness. It means we don’t give up. It means we never stop learning, and in my view if we’ve learned nothing else from these two wars of ours, it is that a flexible, balanced approach to using military force is best.
On the relationship between defense and diplomacy:
Defense and diplomacy are simply no longer discrete choices, one to be applied when the other one fails, but must, in fact, complement one another throughout the messy process of international relations….[W]e cannot count on military might alone. We have to invest in our homeland security; we have to improve and better coordinate our intelligence; and we will have to use diplomacy, because no one nation can meet the challenges of an interconnected world acting alone. My fear, quite frankly, is that we aren’t moving fast enough in this regard.
U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military, too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands. Secretaries Clinton and Gates have called for more funding and more emphasis on our soft power, and I could not agree with them more. Should we choose to exert American influence solely through our troops, we should expect to see that influence diminish in time.
On the use of force:
Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way….[P]recisely applying force in a principled manner can help reduce…costs and actually improve our chances of success. In this type of war, when the objective is not the enemy’s defeat but the people’s success, less really is more. Each time an errant bomb or a bomb accurately aimed but against the wrong target kills or hurts civilians, we risk setting our strategy back months, if not years.
Precise and principled force applies whether we are attacking an entrenched enemy or securing the population. In either case, it protects the innocent. We protect the innocent. It’s who we are. And in so doing, we better preserve both our freedom of action and our security interests.
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thejointstaff/ / CC BY 2.0
