| Description |
The 9/11 terror attacks in New York by al Qaeda have largely been considered a landmark moment in American hist ory, and in the path of the Bush presidency. While the Bush administration had something of a general foreign policy and guiding strategy, the attacks on 9/11 were a seminal moment for the evolution and articulation of the grand strategy. Following in the footsteps of previous administrations, the Bush administration made it clear that they would remain engaged in the wider world. However, they made it clear that they would attempt to go in a different path than that of the Clinton administration and avoid nation-building efforts. As well as a different style of approach to engagement, the Bush administration followed a military doctrine pushed by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld based on limited forces and technological superiority rather than the enduring Powell doctrine of massive force. Looking through the lens of the bureaucratic politics mode l, we can examine how the Bush administration came to adopt this strategy, reviewing the well -documented feud between the State Department under Colin Powell and the Department of De fense under Donald Rumsfeld. This thesis examines Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as the concrete examples of this strategy being physically applied, and argues that in conflicts like that, the Rumsfeld doctrine and the Bush strategy were unable to adapt to changing situations once events digressed from pre-war planning expectat ions, in many ways because of institutional differences and rivalries between leaders of the DOD and DOS. I maintain that because of this inability to adapt, the United States spent unnecessarily high amount of both manpower and funding in OEF and OIF. Based on this argument, and the assumption that subsequent iii administrations will continue to involve themselves in international affairs, I propose a new style of foreign intervention and interaction, built ar ound placing the Department of State (DoS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) under the O ffice of Foreign Affairs and Reconstruction (OFAR), heading by the Director of the Office of Foreign Affairs and Reconstruction (DOFAR), combining their assets and capabilities in order to create a better organization with the operational capability to both fight enemies abroad as well as maintain stability in those areas during and after combat operations. I hope that by placing the DOD and DOS under the control of DOFAR in future operations similar to Iraq an d Afghanistan, we can also avoid the pitfalls of bureaucratic rivalry between the two organizations. That being said, the creation of a new organization such as OFAR can, and will, only be a failure like the many organizations and structural changes pushed before it, if it is not implemented with structural and doctrinal change in the larger American government instituti on. The United States government must adapt a doctrine of flexibility that allows it to take advantage of the technological advantages the United States military enjoys in most military conflicts, as well as applying the knowledge and know-how of the Department of State in reconstruction operations partnered with the security and technical ability of the Department of Defense for Stability and Reconstruction Operations (SROs). |
