E.g. consider Ackerman on Mullen's recent speech - http://washingtonind...trine-takes-shape

[...]

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.

“Before a shot is even fired, we can bolster a diplomatic argument, support a friend or deter an enemy,” Mullen said. “We can assist rapidly in disaster-relief efforts, as we did in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake.”

As much as it seems as though Mullen’s first principle allows for an era of increased conflict, his additional principles flowing from that insight would appear to place constraints on the military. Mullen’s major proposal is that the military should be deployed for future counterinsurgencies or other unconventional conflicts “only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage as well,” such as governance advisers, development experts, and other civilians. “We ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops,” Mullen said, warning that “we aren’t moving fast enough” to strengthen the institutional capacity of the State Department and USAID in order to lift the greatest burdens of national security off the shoulders of the military.

“We shouldn’t start something unless we have the capacity to bring everybody on board,” Baker elaborated, highlighting the “precondition” as among the most important aspects of Mullen’s speech. “I almost read that as more of a cautionary note.” That, at least, is commensurate with the spirit of the Powell Doctrine’s cautions about a national over-reliance on military force. “If you’re going to have anything to sustainable to resolve a conflict, then there’s got to be something that follows,” Baker added, “or you’re going to dump it on the military.”

Stating the position from another — and more controversial — angle, Mullen contended in his speech that foreign policy had become “too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands,” an implicit rebuke of the structural factors resulting in the increased diplomatic profile of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus of U.S. Central Command and Adm. James Stavridis of U.S. European Command. In other words, if State and USAID don’t like being outshined by officers like Petraeus, they need to show a greater assertiveness and capacity to respond to foreign policy challenges before a president turns to the military to solve a problem.

“There is an imbalance in our civilian capacity to work alongside the military in fragile states,” said Cronin, a former senior official at USAID. “The combatant commands are regionally based out in the world, and we don’t have any civilian equivalent of that. So we have to find a way to connect our civilian organization, which is essentially a country team centered on an ambassador, with the interagency represented underneath, with the combatant commander, who has broad swaths of geography and can work across boundaries — which is necessary when you’re dealing with non-state and mobile threats.”

[...]

I take this and the Foreign Policy piece as the end of the Rumsfeldization of the DOD. Instead of treating the State Department as 'know-nothing peaceniks who only get in the way of the glorious of victory', they're returning to the idea that the world is complicated and we have to have a unified approach. State and USAID need to be strengthened, not undercut. What goes on in Israel does affect what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. We need to be aware of that and deal with it in a coherent way, not simply partition military strategy and tactics versus regional politics.

Mullen continues to strike me as a very sharp cookie who sees the big picture very well.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.

http://www.cfr.org/p...y_march_2010.html

The US military has been about much more than "killing people and breaking stuff" since at least the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949. No other organization can move thousands of tons of equipment and supplies, and experts, into a disaster region as quickly and in a sustained way. (And yes, they still are slower than they should be.) Haiti would be much worse off without their efforts.

Mullen's arguing for a much more nuanced approach than the Powell Doctrine and what happened under Rumsfeld, one that involves State and other civilian agencies much more than DOD.

The world has changed since 1945, and having a military designed for tank battles or sinking battleships isn't effective. In a world where 100M AK-47s and cheap IEDs are ubiquitous, no standing army alone can defeat the potential threat. There is no "battlefield" any more. Our military cannot "win" over the long term by "killing people and breaking stuff" - it has to change hearts and minds and that means doing much more than sending in the Marines or a squadron of stealth bombers to enforce our national interests. Mullen understands that.

Cheers,
Scott.