George Clemenceau, who as prime minister of France presided over the final year of World War I, once famously said that war was too important to be left to the generals.
If the Pentagon’s recently released National Military Strategy (NMS), penned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is any indication, the generals should be left pretty far away from strategy, too.
This year’s NMS, the first since 2011, is a typical farrago of threat-inflation, strategic incoherence and “a glass half-empty” conception of 21st-century international affairs, lubricated by the oft-heard notion from inside the Pentagon that the U.S military “must provide a full range of military options” for countering both states and nonstate actors.