About Article

The strategic performance of the United States and its allies in the Long War has been uneven over the past eight years. Important successes against al-Qaeda and other Salafist groups have been scored, but the overall approach adopted by the American government in its publicly available strategy documents and in at least some of its actions failed to tackle the problem in a manner that is in accordance with the classical understanding of strategic theory. If the Long War will be the main security challenge for the United States over the next several years, and there are very good reasons to believe that it will,1 it is important for the Obama administration, together with its NATO partners and other allies, to pay more careful attention to some of the main tenets of strategic theory. There have been numerous studies in recent years criticizing the security policies of the Bush administration and its handling of the War on Terror. Unlike most of them, however, this paper will offer a theoretical critique of the planning process instead of a policy critique of some of the resulting policies or their troubled implementation. This study has two main objectives. The first goal is to show that both the American civilian leaders and their military counterparts often failed to ground their decisions on a sound understanding of classical strategic thought, as it was developed by Clausewitz and others over centuries of experience with warfare. The second one is to identify some of the key challenges to ameliorating what British-American strategic theorist Colin Gray refers to as the ‘strategy deficit’ 2 of the American approach to warfare a