I had occasion to come across Michael Pillsbury’s work on China Debates the Future Security Environment today. What caught my eye was Pillsbury’s definition of strategic assessment in Appendix I.

Net Assessment is one of those concepts that is immensely important to the American strategic community yet nearly impossible to find good sources about. So Pillsbury’s straightforward statement, “strategic assessment is an analysis of the interaction of two or more national security establishments both in peace time and war,” is refreshingly direct. He goes on to explain that “it is the interaction of the two belligerents that is the central concept, not an assessment of one side alone.” A very important point, since in competitive endeavors it is incoherent to discuss the strengths or weaknesses of an entity without defining an opponent.

I’ve been reading David Halberstam’s excellent The Education of a Coach, which examines how Bill Belichick came to be regarded as a coaching genius and what actually makes him different from an average NFL head coach. I just finished the chapter on Belichick’s game plan for the 2002 Super Bowl against the Rams. Examined as an independent entity, as the television commentators often evaluate teams, the St. Louis Rams were a fearsome team with strength after strength: a gifted quarterback, an all-star stable of receivers, the offensive player of the year in Marshall Faulk and an exceptionally solid defense. Belichick knew this and carefully crafted a game plan to disrupt that strength. And disrupt it the Patriots did. Belichick analyzed the interaction between the two teams, while most “experts” were simply analyzing the strength of the Rams by themselves (how many points the offense had scored, how many yards Marshall Faulk had, how high Kurt Warner’s QB ratings had been). What the “experts” overlooked was how the Patriots strength (intelligent, highly motivated players able to adapt to Belichick’s game plan and work cooperately) could nullify the Rams’ strength.

Thus, a truly strategic assessment of peacetime and wartime competition “includes the identification of enemy vulnerabilities and weaknesses in comparison to the strengths and advantages of one’s own side.” Among journalists, cable news pundits and commontators posting as strategists, the vulnerabilities of one side will often be implicitly implied to align with the strengths of the other. An example of this would be ranting about America’s dependence upon Chinese goods (imagine what would happen if China stopped selling goods to us!) without devoting any time to considering China’s dependence upon the American market (and the CCP’s dependence upon growth to control social unrest). True strategic thinking looks at relative strengths and weaknesses of two (or more) sides, since it is the interaction of these strengths and weaknesses that will determine the ultimate outcome of the competition.

One factor that dates Pillsbury’s writing is its focus on states or “national security establishments.” A key question for our current world is how to include sub- and trans-national guerilla groups within the Net Assessment framework.

A final connection. Pillsbury points out that

Studies analyzing [adversary] perceptions are difficult because the data used often must be inferred from public writings and speeches. Implicit biases of Americans based on our own education and culture must also be avoided.

This is where work like David Lai’s (which longtime readers may remember I’ve referenced before) comes in. Studying the games of a potential adversaries’ culture may provide a window into how he assesses strengths and weaknesses, leading to more accurate assessments of the overall strategic balance.

By way of Bret Stephens oped in today’s WSJ, I came across this study from the Institute for Social Research at UMich [1], which included the following nuggets:

Between 2004 and 2006, the number of Iraqis who supported the idea of an Islamic state fell from 30% to 22%.
The number agreeing that religion and politics ought to be seperated rose from 27% to 41%.
The number of respondents who put their Iraqi identity ahead of their Muslim one rose from 30% to 60%.
And last but certainly not least, the number of Iraqis agreeing that it was “very important” for Iraq to be a democracy rose from 59% to 65%.

On an anecdotal level, Stephens oped goes on to note that

“Something basic has changed,” [Mithal al-Alusi, Iraqi member of parliament] says, noting that the terrorism that once was directed against Israel and the West has lost its cache on the Arab street now that Muslims have become its principal victims.

As I’ve discussed in the past, we need to separate positive feelings towards the US from positive feeling about anti-militant principles. All recent indicators are that the former are at a historical nadir, while the latter are healthy. It is easy to get wrapped up in statistics regarding how the US is perceived, but these poll numbers are like the body counts of Vietnam - an easy-to-measure metric that does a very poor job describing the current state of the conflict.

This conflict is not a popularity contest and people aren’t blowing themselves up because they hate the US. Hatred for the US is a symptom of deeper problems, not the cause of our problems. The poll data that drives long-run dynamics concerns those questions that ask “do you want a free press in your country?” or “do you think you should have a say in how your government is run?” The answers to these questions start to measure the root causes of problems: dysfunctional governments and stagnent economies.

Remember that victory for the bin Ladens of the world looks like a Taliban-style superpower. Victory for us looks like a world where Muslim countries are more integrated with the global economy, where Muslim girls are going to school and where Saudi, Iraqi and Jordanian professionals are competing with Indians and Chinese for technical jobs. Victory for us looks like a global company that arose from a Middle Eastern state becoming successful enough to buy an American company. When that day rolls around, we will have already won and global opinion of the US will be a non-issue.

[1] Tessler, Mark, Mansoor Moaddel, Ronald F. Inglehart. “What Do Iraqis Want?” Journal of Democracy, 17(1): 38-50. 2006.