ABSTRACT

To be sure, no way of war is a fixed thing. Under the right set of circumstances leaders and their society may accept very different styles of conflict. But barring some cataclysmic event – a twenty-first century Pearl Harbor – it seems likely that the American way of war will prevail for some time to come

The ‘twenty-first century Pearl Harbor’ that Eliot Cohen imagined (with remarkable timing) might alter the American way of war did indeed occur on 11 September 2001. More precisely, the impact of 9/11 completed the marginalization of one cultural paradigm for the use of force as a political instrument, and assured the temporary ascendancy of its antithesis. Almost instantaneously, 9/11 joined Munich, Vietnam, and Pearl Harbor itself as defining reference points for the American national security establishment.2 Considered through the prism of 9/11, many of the lessons of Vietnam enshrined in the Overwhelming Force paradigm appeared irrelevant to the strategic demands of the new age of shadowy threats and transnational terrorist networks. During the 1990s, Vietnam had symbolized the hubris in the civilian strategists’ optimistic view of the political utility of military force. After 9/11, the pendulum swung back – those seeking to account for the failure of the Clinton administration to take decisive action against al Qaeda in the 1990s quickly identified the military elite’s risk-aversion and restrictive conception of war as a contributory factor.3