WAR - The Chairman Speaks

"The ‘Mullen Doctrine’ Takes Shape" by Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent (non-profit news)

Excerpt

It’s not the Mullen Doctrine — yet. But in a recent speech that’s attracted little notice outside the defense blogosphere, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the first set of criteria for using military force since Gen. Colin Powell held Mullen’s job nearly 20 years ago. And Mullen’s inchoate offerings provide something of an update — and something of a refutation — to Powell’s advice.

Mullen’s speech, delivered to Kansas State University on March 3, was not intended to provide an inflexible blueprint for how the U.S. ought to use its military, aides to the chairman said. Instead, the speech meant to draw conclusions from Mullen’s three years as chairman advising two administrations about the scope — and, Mullen’s aides emphasize, the limitations — of military force in an era of stateless and unconventional threats after nine years of continuous warfare.

“This is his legacy,” said Patrick Cronin, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security. “He has articulated the Pentagon’s rediscovery of limited war theory.”

Perhaps Mullen’s most provocative “principle,” as he called it in the speech, is that military forces “should not – maybe cannot – be the last resort of the state.” On the surface, Mullen appeared to offer a profligate view of sending troops to battle, contradicting the Powell Doctrine’s warning that the military should only be used when all other options exhaust themselves. Powell’s warning has great appeal to a country exhausted by two costly, protracted wars, one of which was launched long before diplomatic options had run out.

But Mullen’s aides said the chairman was trying to make a subtler point, one that envisioned the deployment of military forces not as a sharp change in strategy from diplomacy but along a continuum of strategy alongside it. “The American people are used to thinking of war and peace as two very distinct activities,” said Air Force Col. Jim Baker, one of Mullen’s advisers for military strategy. “That is not always the case.” In the speech, Mullen focused his definition of military force on the forward deployment of troops or hardware to bolster diplomatic efforts or aid in humanitarian ones, rather than the invasions that the last decade saw.