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The significance of the concept of grand strategy as distinct from foreign policy has been exaggerated. Grand strategy is promoted more by analysts than practitioners and rationalized in hindsight more than it has functioned as a plan. Divergence of practice from theory has been explained away by redefinitions that are wrong. Grand strategy is constrained by the complexity of great powers’ interests and the logic of democracy. It has been implemented in reality, but seldom, and lack of it is sometimes preferable anyway given the risks of consistency and coherence.

Al Qaeda's surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the U.S.'s second Pearl Harbor. The shocks jolted Americans out of the complacency about national security that they had enjoyed during the dozen years after the Cold War and launched them into a worldwide war against terrorists. When this shock was followed by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) after the invasion of Iraq, recriminations over intelligence failure provoked the most radical reorganization of the intelli gence system since the post-Pearl Harbor National Security Act. In one case, the intelligence community failed to provide enough warning; in the other, it failed by providing too much. The discussions that follow are not complete case studies of the two failures; lengthy examinations are available in definitive official investigations, as well as in the memoirs of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), George Tenet.1

Strategy is the essential ingredient for making war either politically effective or morally tenable. It is the link between military means and political ends, the scheme for how to make one produce the other. Without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure. Without strategy, power is a loose cannon and war is mindless. Mindless killing can only be criminal. Politicians and soldiers may debate which strategic choice is best, but only paciasts can doubt that strategy is necessary. Because strategy is necessary, however, does not mean that it is possible. Those who experience or study many wars and strong reasons to doubt that strategists can know enough about causes, effects, and intervening variables to make the operations planned produce the outcomes desired. To skeptics, effective strategy is often an illusion because what happens in the gap between policy objectives and war outcomes is too complex and unpredictable to be manipulated to a speciaed end. When this is true, war cannot be a legitimate instrument of policy. This article surveys ten critiques that throw the practicability of strategy into question. It pulls together many arguments that emerge in bits and pieces from a variety of sources. Some are my own formulation of skepticism implicit but unformed in others’ observations; few analysts have yet attacked the general viability of strategy head-on. The notion that effective strategy must be an illusion emerges cumulatively from arguments that: strategies cannot be evaluated because there are no agreed criteria for which are good or bad; there is little demonstrable relationship between strategies and outcomes in war; good strategies can seldom be formulated because of policymakers’ biases; if good strategies are formulated, they cannot be executed because of organizations’ limitations; and other points explored below. Unifying themes include the bar

Most major wars since 1939 have begun with surprise attacks. Hindsight reveals that the element of surprise in most of these attacks was unwarranted; substantial evidence of an impending strike was available to the victims before the fact. The high incidence of surprise is itself surprising. The voluminous literature on strategic surprise, however, suffers from three fixations. One is a focus on the problem of warning, and how to improve intelligence collection, rather than on the more difficult problem of how to improve political response to ample warning indicators. Another is a common view of surprise as an absolute or dichotomous problem rather than as a matter of degree. Third is the prevalent derivation of theories from single cases rather than from comparative studies. This article puts these fixations in perspective.1

Physicians have a motto that peacemakers would do well to adopt: "First, do no harm." Neither the United States nor the United Nations have quite grasped this. Since the end of the Cold War unleashed them to intervene in civil conflicts around the world, they have done reasonably well in some cases, but in others they have un wittingly prolonged suffering where they meant to relieve it. How does this happen? By following a principle that sounds like common sense: that intervention should be both limited and impartial, because weighing in on one side of a local struggle un dermines the legitimacy and effectiveness of outside involvement. This Olympian presumption resonates with respect for law and international cooperation. It has the ring of prudence, fairness, and restraint. It makes sense in old-fashioned U.N. peacekeeping operations, where the outsiders' role is not to make peace, but to bless and monitor a cease-fire that all parties have decided to accept. But it becomes a destructive misconception when carried over to the messier realm of "peace enforcement," where the bel ligerents have yet to decide that they have nothing more to gain by fighting.

Strategic intelligence failures cannot be prevented by organizational solutions to problems of analysis and communication. Analytic certainty is precluded by ambiguity of evidence, ambivalence of judgment, and atrophy of institutional reforms designed to avert failures. Many sources of error are unresolvable paradoxes and dilemmas rather than curable pathologies. Major failures in attack warning, operational evaluation, and intelligence for strategic planning are due primarily to leaders’ psychological attributes rather than to analysts’ failures to detect relevant data. Since analysis and decision are interactive rather than sequential processes, and authorities often hear but dismiss correct estimates, intelligence failure is inseparable from policy failure. Solutions most often proposed—worst-case analysis, multiple advocacy, devil's advocacy, organizational consolidation, sanctions and incentives for analysts, and cognitive rehabilitation—are either impractical because of constraints on the leaders’ time, or they are mixed blessings because they create new problems in the course of solving old ones.

The war in Southeast Asia was a competition in resolve between the United States (with its clients in Saigon) and the Vietnamese Communists. In the preceding article John Mueller presents a fine analysis of half of this competition. The worst that could be said is that the result is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. It is hard to appreciate fully the question of the Communists' breaking point without more explicitly considering America's. My critique, therefore, is marginally supplementary more than contradictory. Mueller's point-that the Communists absorbed great losses in pursuit of a goal that was not vital to national survival-may undervalue North Vietnam's stake in unifying the country. The mystique of union always makes civil wars more brutal and less susceptible to resolution short of complete victory by one side than wars between separate states. If North Vietnam conceived the south as a separate entity it wanted to acquire, rather than as part of itself that it wanted to get back, it might indeed have decided it would rather switch than fight, once it felt the weight of American power. In reality, the goal of unification may have been close to absolute, rather than a relative interest that would decline in proportion to pain. Given the tremendous disparity in the power of the contestants, the key to Hanoi's ultimate success, and the reason Washington reached the breaking point first, must lie in the asymmetry of stakes. U.S. interests were relative. In terms of Realpolitik, American involvement was driven by the containment doctrine, but in this regard Southeast Asia was a tertiary theater. Only the defense of Europe could provoke unlimited American commitment. In terms of idealistic motives, Washington wanted to make Vietnam safe for democracy, but years of paternalistic attempts to create strength and stability in Saigon's governing capacity failed to overcome the fatal fissiparous weakness in the political culture

Levite's attack on dominant theories of strategic surprise raises significant questions and deserves attention as the first serious revisionist attempt. It fails because his methodology narrows the issue artificially, excludes essential political variables, relies on faulty definitions and standards of comparison, and does not support the assumption that the analysis of success in wartime intelligence would apply to decisions in pre-war crises. The apparent academic rigor of the book, however, abets optimism in wider analytical debates about NATO's vulnerability to surprise, and whether the main problems for strategic stability are aggression and deterrence or accidental war and provocative mobilization. Different decisions in August 1914 and October 1962 illustrate why the fundamental dilemma between choices of avoiding surprise and avoiding war, which Levite ignores, cannot be resolved.

In the John G. Johnson Collection in Philadelphia there is a painting which never fails to excite the interest of visitors to the gallery (Fig. 1). It is a portrait of the sixteenth century Milanese prelate Filippo Archinto, which has long been attributed to Titian. With its mysterious veil, this painting would be unique in the work of Titian, and perhaps in the whole history of art. Another portrait of the same prelate, without a veil, hangs in the Altman Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum (Fig. 2), and it is so much like the painting in the Johnson Collection that one must be a copy of the other. We are thus confronted with an interesting problem of attribution as well as a fascinating iconographical riddle.