Some Criticisms of the U.S. Government Made in a RAND Report

The following is only one piece of criticism of the government’s war on terror extracted from a RAND corporation report. RAND is virtually the government’s premier think-tank, so that it never questions the basic assumptions of the U.S. empire as a superpower. It never questions the existence of Big Government or the MIC (military-industrial complex). Therefore, the report makes numerous suggestions to improve government-led and government-run operations. What it doesn’t do is to place the government failures of the past 13 years in an historical context or in an international context that would show that such failures are habitual. Despite its massive brainpower, RAND doesn’t analyze why government failures are always to be expected and why they are the norm. If, instead of their studied blindness, they did make this effort or read the work of those who already have made such efforts, their suggestions might have to sound a lot more like those of Ron Paul or libertarians. But even without such an improbable transformation of their perspective, it helps that they can publish documents that affirm many of the same criticisms that libertarians have been making for a long time. Here’s the excerpt.

“Lesson 1: The making of national security strategy has suffered from a lack of understanding and application of strategic art. The U.S. government has experienced a persistent deficit in understanding and applying strategic art. The blurry line between policy and strategy requires both civilians and the military to engage in a dynamic, iterative dialogue to make successful strategy, but that often failed to occur. The decision to go to war in Iraq, the decisions to send a surge of troops to Iraq and then Afghanistan to bolster faltering war efforts, and the approach taken toward countering terrorism in the past two administrations all illustrate strategy deficits. In the first case, the civilian policymakers did not seek and factor in the needed information to examine their assumptions and prepare for likely consequences. In the second case, the civilian policymakers found the military’s recommendations inadequate and relied on outside advice in making the decision to surge in Iraq. In the case of the Afghan surge, that decision was reached after multiple reviews stretching over two years, but it did not resolve the divergence in approach favored by the military (full-spectrum counterinsurgency) and senior civilians in the White House who advocated a narrower counterterrorism agenda aimed at al Qaeda. The fourth major decision, ratified and pursued by both administrations, was to adopt a global counterterrorism strategy that relied primarily on strikes against terrorists who were actively plotting to strike the United States. During the past 13 years, the strategies typically failed to envision a war-ending approach and did not achieve declared objectives in a definitive or lasting manner. The ends, ways, and means did not align, whether because the policy objectives were too ambitious, the ways of achieving them ineffective, or the means applied inadequate.”

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