You can’t help but be flattered and honored to have a doctrine named after you. I haven’t figured out yet how it happened to me.
The so-called Powell Doctrine exists in no military manual. The term first emerged in late 1990 after President Bush, on General Schwarzkopf’s and my recommendation, decided to double the force facing the Iraqis. After Desert Storm the term entered the language, if not the manuals. It reflected my belief in using all the force necessary to achieve the kind of decisive and successful result that we had achieved in the invasion of Panama and in Operation Desert Storm.
In discussing what they take to be the doctrine’s most essential element, commentators have tended to use the term “overwhelming force,” but I have always preferred the term “decisive.” A force that achieves a decisive result does not necessarily have to be overwhelming. Or, to put it another way, overwhelming force may be too much force. It’s the successful outcome that’s important, not how thoroughly you can bury your adversary or enemy.
I have always held the view that decisive force should be used in addressing a military conflict. The reason is simple: Why wouldn’t you, if you could? After Desert Storm, during the question period following a speech to a naval audience at Annapolis, I was asked why I had sent General Schwarzkopf two additional aircraft carrier battle groups when he had only asked for one. My answer was simple: “I didn’t have time to go get the rest of them. This is a gang fight.” It was a great line, but my real reason was that I felt one more carrier than Norm requested added to the insurance policy that would give us ultimate victory.
The Powell Doctrine is often compared with the Weinberger Doctrine—six rules for the use of military force formulated by Defense Secretary Weinberger in 1984.
Though there are similarities between Secretary Weinberger’s ideas and mine, I have never formally set down a list of rules. My views are not rules. I have always seen them as guidelines that senior leaders should consider as part of their decision-making process. The President decides if they are relevant or not to a particular situation. The military executes whatever the President decides.
My concept of the Powell Doctrine begins with the premise that war is to be avoided. Use all available political, diplomatic, economic, and financial means to try to solve the problem and achieve the political objective the President has established. At the same time, make it understood that military force exists to support diplomacy and take over where diplomacy leaves off. There is no sharp distinction between the two. Diplomacy that does not also imply the prospect of force may not be effective. If the readiness level of forces, deployments, exercises, and threats of use always remain on the table, we can often support diplomacy and achieve the President’s political objective without firing a shot in anger.
But when the President decides that only force will accomplish his political objective, then force must be applied in a decisive manner. Without a clear political objective, you can’t make an analysis of the required force.
In deciding what forces to use and how to apply them, planners must think the operation through in its entirety from start to finish. After you achieve your initial military objective, what then? How do you know when it is over, and how and why do you stay on or exit?
Later, as an operation unfolds, senior leaders must explain it to the American people and their representatives and to the rest of the world. Public support is not initially essential, but if you don’t gain it over time, you will have trouble continuing the operation.
All of this assumes you have time to think, discuss, and plan. That doesn’t always happen. Surprises happen. Crises suddenly erupt.
Presidents making critical decisions have to use all the information at their disposal, call on their instincts, and avoid being at the mercy of fixed guidelines or rules. The need to use force may come up urgently when, as the British say, “You are on the back foot.” You have to act, decisively or not, clear political objective or not, public support or not. Those are the trying times when you earn your pay.
These principles apply all the way up through the largest, most complex military operations. But they rest on nothing more than fundamental principles of war that go back thousands of years. They could just as well have been called the Sun Tzu Doctrine or the Clausewitz Doctrine.
In the American Army, they are taught as Principles of War. I first learned them as an ROTC cadet. As currently taught, there are nine of them:
• Mass
• Objective
• Offensive
• Surprise
• Economy of force
• Maneuver
• Unity of command
• Security
• Simplicity
The first two are the classical formulation of the Powell Doctrine, with the order reversed. Here is how they are defined in Army manuals:
Objective—Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and obtainable objective.
Mass—Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time.
Note the repeated decisive. Not only must mass be concentrated at the decisive place and time, but the objective must also be decisive. If you gain it, you win. (Clausewitz called this the “strategic center of gravity.”)
When we launched the 1989 Panama invasion, our strategy was to take out not only the dictator, Manuel Noriega, but also his whole government and military force and replace them with a president already legally elected but in hiding. We used more than twenty-five thousand troops in a coup de main to quickly eliminate the Panamanian forces as a threat and consolidate our position. Then we shifted to protection of Panamanian society, installation of a new president and government, and reconstitution of the military. We were widely criticized around the world for unilaterally attacking a small country under what was believed to be insufficient provocation. The prompt and successful outcome of the operation quickly silenced criticisms. Today no American troops are in Panama, and in the two decades since the invasion the Panamanians have held four democratic elections.
President George H. W. Bush initially tried to counter the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by means of economic sanctions and diplomacy, and he mobilized the entire international community to support these efforts. Our military mission during that period was to deploy troops to defend against the Iraqi army moving farther south into Saudi Arabia. We achieved that mission.
When it became clear that sanctions would not lead the Iraqis to withdraw, President Bush, at the recommendation of General Schwarzkopf and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered a doubling of the size of the force in Saudi Arabia. The principal political and military mission of that force was clear—“eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait”—Desert Storm. We were certain the large force would be decisive, and so I was able to guarantee that outcome to the President.
That was the President’s and all the planners’ principal objective in Desert Storm.
Neither during the planning, nor during the actual operation, was there any consideration of marching on Baghdad, nor was there any political or international inclination to achieve that objective. We would not have had UN support; we would have been unable to build an international coalition; and President Bush had no desire to conquer a country. At the end of Desert Storm, the Iraqi army was no longer in Kuwait. Kuwait was firmly in the hands of its government. It was a military and political success.
At the very end of his term, President Bush sent troops into Somalia to restore order and permit the flow of food and other sustenance to a desperate people. The operation began in full view of television cameras. And of course the press made fun of the Navy SEALs seen wading ashore on every TV screen. So much for surprise. The truth was, we didn’t want to surprise the ragtag irregulars who were making everyone else in that country miserable. We wanted them to see what was coming. We wanted them to be afraid of what we were laying down on them, and our visibility in the press helped us do that. In a few weeks, we accomplished the mission we’d set out to accomplish.
The incoming Clinton administration was determined to achieve a far more ambitious goal. They took on the task of creating a democracy where democracy had never existed and where there was never much appetite for it. After the tragic Black Hawk Down episode in October 1993 illustrated the futility of that effort, we pulled out of Somalia.
Later, in Bosnia, President Clinton got it right. The Serbian military was conducting violent and sometimes genocidal ethnic cleansing in that region of the former Yugoslavia. The situation was extremely complex; there was no clearly achievable political objective and no way to touch all the bases preferred by military doctrine. Even though the rules did not fit the situation, the President decided that action was required. Over a two-year period NATO slowly ratcheted up military operations against the Serbs. The President was right, and the NATO operations succeeded.
In September 1994, President Clinton decided that military force would be necessary to reinstall as the legitimate president of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been removed from office by a coup led by General Raoul Cédras. As our troops were assembling and boarding planes, President Clinton dispatched former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and me to try to persuade General Cédras and the ruling military junta to step down. For two days we argued with Cédras and his generals.
At the critical meeting, President Carter asked me to explain what would happen to them if they didn’t step down. I described the force that had been assembled and the tactics that would be used. “The force will arrive tomorrow,” I told them.
Cédras gave me a long look. Finally, to break the tension, he said, “Hmm, Haiti used to have the smallest army in the Caribbean. Tomorrow we will have the largest.”
Cédras and the junta saw it was time to fold their cards and leave the table.
When the 82nd Airborne arrived the next morning, they were greeted by General Cédras. After it was all over, I was reminded of one of my favorite classical maxims, sometimes attributed to Thucydides: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”
In their initial phases, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq were extremely successful. Kabul and Baghdad fell quickly. We had taken out the governments, but the lack of clear and achievable follow-on objectives, or the means to achieve them, turned later phases into failures that took years and substantial surge forces to begin to reverse. The surge forces should have been there from the start. Wishful thinking had replaced strategic reality.
I could cite many more examples from American military history. And I could draw hundreds more from American corporate and political history—in fact, from just about any human endeavor.
Corporate leaders have to analyze their marketplace, their competitors, and the forces at their disposal. How do you mass your research and development, production, financial, and marketing forces to achieve your corporate goals? How do you deploy your leadership? How do you guard against surprises? When do you risk only using an economy of force? How do you exploit success or turn crisis and failure into an opportunity?
Even the Bible touches on these subjects. Luke 14:31 says:
Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?
I would rather be the second king with twenty thousand than the first with his ten . . . and also have a clearer objective and a more decisive strategy.