The Biden administration recently released its first National Security Strategy. As is the custom in Washington, the document was greeted with fanfare by bureaucrats eager to promote their work, beat reporters with deadlines to meet, and think tank pundits, who skim to find mention of their pet issues. But the National Security Strategy is a predictable sham. There is no real strategy to be found there because strategy documents do not prioritize among goals to guide resource allocation.
While national security strategy is unavoidable, “national security strategy” documents should end. The same goes for Quadrennial Defense Reviews and National Defense Strategies. They are a distraction from debate about real strategy—the unofficial but operative kind manifest in the defense budget. Those concerned about the need for strategy should focus on making the budget process more strategic, not on documents that are at best a vacuous public relations exercise.
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