“Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.”[1] The number of international conflicts throughout history in which observers predicted swift and decisive victory by one side, only to be dumbfounded by how events unfolded, is so staggering it can make the concept of strategy seem farcical.[2] The United States is no exception as it continues to struggle for decisive strategic gains. The recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, decades after the withdrawal from Vietnam, demonstrates a pattern of incongruity: years of effort and vast expenditures of manpower and resources are not achieving political gains worth their cost to the global superpower. These failings were not the result of any one asset of strategic power; in fact, efforts failed to achieve desired goals despite military, political, and economic advantage. A powerful and plausible explanation for this pattern is a flaw in the U.S. strategic framework relating to the oldest tenet of strategy and war: know your enemy. More concretely, the implicit bias of ethnocentrism in the decision-making process warps an otherwise effective process of linking ends, ways, and means to achieve political objectives. Without a deliberate effort to control ethnocentric tendencies in its strategic process, the United States will continue to pursue ineffective strategic courses of action given the dual impacts of ethnocentrism on statecraft: misperceiving ourselves and stereotyping others.

Of all the planning considerations for which strategists and statesmen must account, the enemy is the most crucial yet least accounted for.

There is more than one side in any issue, any story. Planning and acting without this perspective richness makes it difficult to do more than muddle through a given strategic situation—a costly, hesitating approach of trial and error. While some scholars argue that this illustrates that the concept of strategy is an unattainable fiction, that assertion does not capture the role of biases in the strategic process.[3] Of all the planning considerations for which strategists and statesmen must account, the enemy is the most crucial yet least accounted for. They cite Sun Tzu for the importance of knowing the enemy but do not elaborate on what that means or how one can achieve it. Ironically, the passage in question contains that exact formula:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.[4]

Understanding the enemy is a running and relative estimate, a value judgment that takes into account the subject’s own disposition at the time it is made. Understanding the enemy is the linchpin of consistent success. Conversely, understanding oneself, the how and why of one’s strategic decision-making process, is vital in avoiding defeat. Not only does it affect the validity of strategic reasoning, but it also creates vulnerabilities, loopholes that an adversary can exploit.  

“Why do you look at the mote in your brother’s eye, but not notice the beam in your own eye?”[5]

Psychological studies consistently show that humans use instinctive heuristic processes to judge elements and other humans within their environments and assess threats and opportunities.[6] It is arguably wired into the decision-making process which evolved to ensure species survival. While this serves in primordial survival environs, it is less conducive to building positive relationships in a society of disparate individuals.[7] Ethnocentrism is the implicit phenomenon in the decision-making process which creates vulnerabilities in strategy. While it served a useful purpose in natural history it has consistently caused intra-societal problems. Providing objective analysis of other actors’ actions takes deliberate effort because of the natural tendency to assess others relative to our own dispositions. By identifying common goals among others, individuals then work together against a competing group. However, because even group judgments are relative to the groups own perspective, other groups are categorized as competitive threats until proven otherwise. Strategic decision-making is no different from this fundamental psychological phenomenon but on a systematized and substantially larger scale. Thus, it is also susceptible to ethnocentric biases.

There is not a substantial body of literature which treats strategy from this cultural-psychological nexus, but there is enough to demonstrate that the interest did not die with Sun Tzu. Political theorist Colin Gray’s staunch advocacy of strategic culture encompasses this problem, particularly focusing on how culture has a clear role in the process, despite conventional wisdom’s advocacy of an objective logic of war.[8] More directly, anthropologist Ken Booth published a comprehensive case study of ethnocentrism’s impacts on strategy. Most recently, General H.R. McMaster, former U.S. National Security Advisor, published a book focused on the dual concepts of strategic narcissism and empathy.[9]

This self-centered paradigm is the core of ethnocentrism and affects both the analysis of the enemy and self-analysis. Ken Booth gives three aspects of the phenomena in his study “Strategy and Ethnocentrism”—a less-known work that Colin Gray calls “a classic by any reasonable standard:”[10]

1. A group’s sense of its own superiority and importance;

2. A technical term for a type of bias in the social sciences; and

3. A synonym for being “culture-bound.”[11]

More recently, H.R. McMaster published Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, in which he introduced in his view on strategic narcissism: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans.”[12]  McMaster elaborates on the concept as a linear thought pattern which puts U.S. action as the central force in world politics, undervaluing the strategies and dispositions of other actors.[13] The result of this influence, in his estimation, is strategic failure: the plan fails to yield the desired political outcomes. McMaster points to the 20 years the U.S. struggled to make progress in Afghanistan; Booth points to a host of blunders from a variety of different nations throughout history, especially in Cold War maneuverings and politics.

McMaster and Booth also propose solutions to this problem: strategic empathy and cultural relativism, respectively. The former counteracts narcissistic biases by forcing strategists and policymakers to personify their opponent in a way that meaningfully penetrates the other’s psyche.[14] Booth, on the other hand, goes even further in his argument, parsing how strategists fail to account for enemy considerations:

To know the enemy has always been a cardinal tenet of strategy. If this goal is to be achieved in the future with more regularity than it has in the past, then cultural relativism should take its place in the strategist's lexicon. Knowing the enemy is the bedrock of the business of strategy: strategic theories, in comparison, are second order problems. To concentrate on doctrines before enemies is to put the theoretical cart before the actual horse—a double error.[15]

Because strategy needs to be crafted in relation to other actors, it is important to understand the enemy at a fundamental level.

As mentioned above, strategy is group decision-making on a larger, systemic scale. As a consequence, it is crafted relative to what the actor wants vis-à-vis a competing actor. As Booth stresses several times: “Strategy, like nature, abhors a vacuum…Without enemies strategy is shapeless: it is like a house without walls…Sometimes the assumption of an enemy relationship will be justified, sometimes it will be misperceived. Sometimes the enemies will be real; sometimes they will be imagined.”[16] Because strategy needs to be crafted in relation to other actors, it is important to understand the enemy at a fundamental level. Whether or not the enemy is real, strategy’s need to construct actors into these juxtaposed roles has two flawed heuristics: accounting for the enemy’s philosophy and approach to war, and accounting for its strategic process.[17]

The two negative tendencies encouraged by ethnocentrism are the imposition of stereotyped strategic decision-making and cultural values on adversaries. For instance, the U.S. strategic climate of today is replete with references to the founders of military theory: Clausewitz, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, and other common names. As Booth notes, “Philosophies of war, like strategic theories, are products of time and place.”[18] There are always conditional variables from the times and places in which these theorists wrote which must be reconciled against the current operating environment. Their findings must be applied to changing circumstances and reassessed over time, or strategy becomes a rote function of a given society, liable to be circumvented by an enemy with little effort on their part.

Beyond the decision-making framework, the decision-making process itself is also stereotyped, leaving the impression that the enemy’s decisions are not rational, not understandable, and that they are just lucky in their outcomes. Booth argues that this friction is caused by the assumption that the enemy’s decision process is a black box operating along the rational agency model; that is, the enemy uses similar reasoning and a similar process and, regardless of other factors, will always seek value-maximizing outcomes. However, while treated as an objective value, what is rational or reasonable is a relative assessment informed by one’s ethics and personal values.[19] Without understanding those values, one cannot anticipate another’s strategic process or objectives.

Altogether, knowing one’s enemy, down to their cultural-ethical values system, is the key to victory. However, knowing one’s own biases and judgment values is necessary to avoid defeat. Balancing the values of both sides and developing a strategy relative to each is not a part of the U.S. strategic process, resulting in Sun Tzu’s exact prediction. If the United States can identify and control its ethnocentric tendencies in its strategy, then it will see more consistent success.

Joe McGiffin is an officer in the U.S. Army. He currently serves as an instructor and operations officer at West Point’s Modern War Institute where he teaches research methodology and strategic decision-making for the Defense and Strategic Studies program. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: “The Parable of the Mote and the Beam (Matthew 7:3)” by Ottmar Elliger the Younger (MET, 2012.368).

Notes:

[1] Richard Saunders, Poor Richard, 1743 (Benjamin Franklin, 1743). https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0089

[2] Richard K. Betts, “Plans and Results: Is Strategy an Illusion?”  American Force (NY: Columbia University Press, 2012):236.

[3] Betts, American Force, 250.

[4] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: 3-18.

[5] Bible: Gospel of Matthew 7:3.

[6] Gupta, Divya. “The Psychology of Decision Making.” Minds Healer August 2020. The Psychology of Decision Making (mindshealer.com).

[7] Pratto, Felicia, and Demis E Glasford. “Ethnocentrism and the Value of a Human Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1411–1428. This study focuses on the role of intergroup dynamics and how ethnocentrism and ‘in group’ politics influence the perception of competing groups and how members value human life.

[8] Gray, Colin S. (2007) “Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy 26:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/01495930701271478

[9] McMaster, H.R. Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (U.S.: Harper, 2020). Author credits jurist Hans Morganthau for originally coining the term.

[10] Gray, Colin S. “The Strategic Anthropologist.” International Affairs 89, 5 (2013).

[11] Booth, Ken. Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979).

[12] McMaster, H.R. Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (U.S.: Harper, 2020): 32.

[13] McMaster, H.R. “H.R. McMaster Advises on How to Overcome Strategic Narcissism| Policy Briefs.” April 29, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGIaF3SfpoE

[14] McMaster, H.R. Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (U.S.: Harper, 2020).

[15] Booth, Ken. Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979).

[16] Booth, 24.

[17] Booth, 37-8.

[18] Booth, 75.

[19] Booth, 23 and 64.