Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture

Abstract

Scholars are rightly suspicious of, or disdainful of and actually hostile to, common sense. After all, common sense is not really common, rather is it value-charged by culture, the subject of this essay. Nonetheless, we discard and despise common sense at our peril. Among other points, I will suggest that one can explain strategic culture and its associated concepts (public culture and military or organizational culture), what they are, how they work, and why they are important, both simply and accurately enough. Accurately enough for what? Accurately enough to grasp the essentials of “the plot” concerning strategic culture. And that, after all, is all that a defense community needs to achieve. I might proceed further, if pressed, and argue that the bare outlines of the plot are the most that can be achieved. By way of a thought-provoking analogy, you might care to consider the practical inutility of the nearly ninety years of scholarship that have been devoted to that highly scholarunfriendly subject, the causes of war. Just about everything that has been written on the subject with a view to developing a general theory of the causes of war has been a thorough waste of effort. The reason is not hard to find. The job cannot be done. The relevant history is too complex, contexts are too rich and contingent. If you attempt the impossible, settle upon the wrong organizing question, you will accomplish nothing of much value, save by serendipity. I suspect that scholarship on strategic culture, albeit for a different reason, similarly is bound to fail when it ventures far beyond our culture-bound common sense and positivistically seeks a certain general wisdom. Strategy does not yield to the scientific method; nor does the study of culture.