At 8:46 in the morning on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Three plane crashes and almost 3,000 deaths followed. The US shut down. The City That Never Sleeps collapsed. And US television shows stopped running ads for a full two weeks — a cultural indicator of just how shocking and unprecedented the attacks were. Yet the greater and more insidious damage was caused by the changes in US strategy after 9/11, where the Bush administration abandoned the hard-earned lessons from the Vietnam War. The US has yet to correct these wrong turns.
Successful grand strategy depends on establishing and communicating clear objectives, calculating the appropriate means to achieve these goals, and using overwhelming force — i.e., the Powell Doctrine — when military action is needed. Previous US presidents followed these guidelines when they intervened in Grenada (1983), Panama (1988), Haiti (1994-1995), and in the larger Desert Shield and Desert Storm (1989-1990) operations. Not all were successful, as with the Iranian hostage rescue mission (1980) and the deployment of US marines in Lebanon (1983), but whatever else we might think of these operations, they were finite engagements with set objectives.
