Few things are more common in government circles these days than the lament that what we need name the circumstance is a strategy; we don t have a strategy name the circumstance and until we do name the circumstance we are at a loss as to what to do, or how, or with what. On its surface, this is a truly puzzling contention. There is an industrialstrength enterprise in the government today, particularly in DoD and DHS, to produce strategy on ever conceivable necessity or non-necessity. There is a Noah s Ark of hes and shes, two by two, strategies. The Congress requires the president to submit a national strategy, if not annually at least regularly and has done so in law since 1987. Administrations duly produce a national strategy and executive branch agencies generate a family of subordinate strategies in bewildering numbers, which then become the occasion for producing yet a further set of implementing operational and tactical documents in rococo detail, not to mention the follow-on budget documents purporting to add ways and means to all these ends. Virtually all of these documents are unclassified, available on line and are the product of intensive, intra- or interagency processes with many hands involved. Yet, the impression persists that there is no current strategy.
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