Line of effort 1: Defend the homeland

MAJ Brennan Deveraux, COL Michael Long, and LTC Loris Lepri

In this episode of SSI Live, Major Brennan Deveraux interviews Army Strategists Colonel Michael Long and Lieutenant Colonel Loris Lepri to get their take on the recently released National Defense Strategy. The conversation explores the importance of the strategic document and is structured around its four lines of effort.

John Deni

Hello and welcome to SSI Live. You’ve long known the Strategic Studies Institute, or SSI, at the US Army War College, as the go-to location for issues related to national security and military strategy, with an emphasis on geostrategic analysis. SSI conducts strategic research and analysis to support the US Army War College curricula; assist and inform Army, DoD, and US government leadership; and serve as a bridge to the wider strategic community. Now, we are bringing you access to SSI analyses, scholars, and guests, through this, the SSI Live podcast series. Thanks for joining us.     

Brennan Deveraux   

Welcome back to SSI live. I’m still your host, Major Brennan Devereaux. I’m joined today by Colonel Mike Long and Lieutenant Colonel Loris Lepri. Colonel Long is an army strategist. He is the director of the China Landpower Study Center (CLSC) and will soon take over as the director of the Strategic Research and Analysis Department (SRAD) over at SSI becoming officially my boss instead of just a mentor.

Lieutenant Colonel Lepri is also an army strategist. He’s the director of the US Army War College Distance program resident courses. All of us have backgrounds in the Western Hemisphere working at Army North. And figured it’d be a good time to bring the crew together to talk about some of the stuff that recently populated in the National Defense Strategy.

And that’s going to be the focus of the conversation today. We’re going to be discussing that document, its impact, its implications, kind of what it means. So, Colonel Long, I’m going to start with you. On top of just being a strategist for, you know, a long time, being in these positions, having to adjust to, strategy as it comes out.

You also spent some time where I first met you at Fort Leavenworth teaching young majors about strategy, particularly talking about these documents, kind of how they nest. And recently, you also did a podcast on the CLSC Dialogues on the National Security Strategy. Kind of the overarching document. Can you talk a little bit about the NDS, what it is, what it means for kind of the community?

Michael Long

Yeah, absolutely. First, Brennan, thank you so much for having me here today. And, Loris, I appreciate you being here as well. It’s great to be able to sit down and talk to three other, to three total Army strategists and, kind of go over sort of our key seminal documents. So I appreciate that. So, let’s talk about this document, the National Defense Strategy, the one just posted, in January of this year.

So what is this document? If we kind of look at it holistically, the first thing I’ll say is the unclassified version that we’re looking at is really, like I said, an unclassified summary. The real document is a classified version that’s much longer, much more comprehensive. So there will be elements that are not necessarily included here that are going to be part of that classified document.

So, this document is nested to the NSS and I would argue that this specific National Defense Strategy that we’re going to talk about is the most nested to any NSS of any of the National Defense Strategies that we’ve seen so far. And there’s really three big, national level strategic documents that we like to talk about. Right?

So, we just talked about the National Security Strategy, just did a podcast on that on CLSC Dialogues. Please go listen if you’re interested. We’re talking right now about the National Defense Strategy, which we’ve said is necessary to it. And the next one is the National Military Strategy. But the National Military Strategy is not the only aspect of what comes from the National Defense Strategy.

So, National Defense Strategy Post, is prepared by the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War, as he calls himself here, the, National Military Strategy is by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But there’s other, other aspects that flow from this. So, several other strategic documents. So that includes our service strategies come from this, as well as our combat command strategies and plans come from this as well.

Deveraux       

So this document just published, that’s going to start a lot of necessary movement for those big thinkers somewhere. The services and the combat commands, the think tanks who are looking at defense policy, it’s really starting a lot of kind of processes.

Long  

Yeah. Exactly. Right. And what’s unique about the National Defense Strategy is that it’s got a significant and, and, statutorily, implementation plan. And that’s really how does this document, how does this turn into action. Right. So this is what we as strategists see is the transition of strategic guidance into operational and tactical results. And so, when we look at this this is really institutional strategy mostly.

And that’s because it’s developed along budgeting this thing called global force management. Where do we put all of the military allocations? Like the stuff the tanks, the planes, the units. Where did this go around the world? What are they focused against? And this thing called defense planning guidance as well, which comes out of another, document that comes from this.

Deveraux       

Okay. So that’s the NDS as a whole. What about this specific NDS?

Long  

Yeah, that’s a that’s a really good question. And I this is what I really wanted to get into today. Like the NSS, the National Defense Strategy sees the world from a multi-polar perspective. And this is what Secretary [Marco] Rubio has talked about quite a bit. And so what we look at is, since the end of the Soviet Union, the fall of Soviet Union, the United States has really looked at the world from a unipolar perspective as the United States being the largest part of that.

Deveraux       

What they call the end of history. But only for a short period. Right?

Long  

That’s exactly right. Yeah. Francis Fukuyama would be very proud of you on that. And so when we look at this document, what we see is this is a multipolar perspective, right? There is rising hegemons across the world. And this document responds to that hegemonial rise. Right. So we have a lot of experience in, a bipolar world between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But this is a multipolar where we’re looking at really three main actors. But there’s some other rising actors in there as well. So this specific document is developed by the undersecretary for policy. So that’s, Elbridge Colby. So if, he’s pretty famous for writing, writing a book specifically on this, right, The Strategy of Denial, and looking at, the world from a very realist perspective.

And his perspective in this is you can see throughout the document. So if you’re a realist and you see yourself having a relative loss of hegemonic power, you’re going to make some specific actions. A lot of those decisions are made throughout this document. We’re going to talk about those here in a bit. I would contrast that significantly with the first Trump administration’s strategies nesting strategy document.

So that was really developed by H.R. McMaster. He’s got a kind of famous book called Battlegrounds, which he really looks at from a different perspective. Right. So his book is, counters your statement from Fukuyama about the end of history saying, hey, we really didn’t pay enough attention to these rising powers. And he he’s much less realist. He sees the power, the value of hard power, but that’s really not his focus. This document says it’s flexible, practical realism. But I think from a political science perspective, it’s pretty heavy realist. And again, that’s about that relative decline in power to a rising hegemonic.

Deveraux       

And you talk about the powers. I think instinctively we just go China, maybe Russia, depending on how you view Russia’s actions in Ukraine and where they’re heading the future. But there’s more than that. As we talk about, you know, what’s kind of out there and the document does start with looking at that security environment. We don’t know where we’re going if we don’t outline kind of what we’re looking at.

Can you talk a little bit about how they structure, just briefly, the security environment, the threat, what we’re facing out there.

Long  

Yeah, that’s one of my favorite parts of the document is the is the current state, as we would call it, if we were writing a strategy. And so it hits a couple pieces. Most of those are going to be very familiar to us. The first one is gets hit from a unique perspective. I’m not going to get too much into that, that’s Loris’ area there. So that pivot to America that we see, that’s a new look at homeland defense from, a perspective, that sees it as much more vulnerable than we have in the past. And these are mostly technological upgrades.

The second part of that is what we’ve seen in the past, and that’s China, as a threat. And that’s, the most powerful country relative to US since the 19th century. And it’s kind of took me some time to kind of think about what that means. 19th century is a long time ago, and what that rising hegemon means to us and how we’re responding to that. And I’ll get into that a little bit when we talk about that line of effort focused on the Indo-Pacific.

The nex...