State and Defense: Integrating Plans and Planning for Enhanced Strategic and Operational Cooperation

By Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” DeLeal, U.S. Marine Corps

“…the distribution of power across the world is changing, creating new threats.”

-Interim National Security Guidance, 2021

Strategic competition between great powers has evolved over the previous ten years. Dominated by struggles with weak states and violent extremist organizations since the beginning of the century, this emergent strategic setting is characterized by competition among great powers with many similarities to the Cold War. As then, the logic that determines the character of strategic competition is complex, dynamic, interactive, interdependent, and consequential across all elements of national power. Rather than colossal power structures converging on weak states and international terrorist organizations, as has been the case since 2001, the United States and its allies and partners will compete with highly developed, resourced, and interconnected global powers in a game that could lead to conventional conflict whose scope and scale could rival those of the World Wars of the 20^th Century. These are the elevated stakes of contemporary strategic competition. 

Change within international power structures is both inevitable and consequential, as is armed conflict between great powers. Strategic phase transitions are periods of tension, vulnerabilities, threats, and opportunities. We are in a strategic phase transition, comparable to the five-year period following the end of World War II when existing power structures were reduced or subsumed by more resilient structures, and others emerged. This current transition period follows the de-emphasis on weak states and international terrorism for a focus on the rise of China, the entrenchment of Russia as a belligerent power, and the crystallizing of alliances and partnerships within the dynamic of this Sino-Russo-American strategic competition. Further complicating the problem is the vast economic and informational connectedness shared by all strategic competitors. This factor ensures inevitable systemic imbalance and shock following punitive actions or provocations by either side in this competition, limiting options and increasing risk of conventional conflict between global powers and their allies.  

Within this consequential setting, an overarching strategy and integrated plans across the inter-agency are paramount for the viability of any theory of success. The U.S. government has been adapting to this emergent reality across its elements of national power under an interim National Security Strategy (NSS). Governmental departments generate their own strategy and plans linked to the NSS. Typically, these department-level plans focus exclusively inward to marshal their functional resources to achieve a portion of the national “ends” in the NSS. This inwardly focused approach to plans and planning often results in compartmentalized efforts by organizations moving toward the same set of goals, but which are often disconnected from their adjacent organizations. While this methodology has been in place for decades, its precedence does not guarantee viability in this new strategic setting. 

Within the Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement (DIME-FIL) construct of national power, the diplomatic and military elements are critical in strategic competition to achieve advantages during peacetime and to dominate and rapidly achieve victory in conflict. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Department of State (DOS) are organizations often regarded as vanguards within global “D” and “M” power settings. They operate at the epicenter of any national theory of victory within a strategic competition paradigm. As such, their plans and planning functionalities should be deeply integrated beyond current levels. To this end, DOD and DOS should consider establishing multi-functional plans and planning organizations at strategic and operational levels, namely at the Department level and within DOD Combatant Commands and interagency staffs at U.S. Embassies abroad. 

The U.S. and its allies and partners will compete within this strategic setting from varying positions of dominance, parity, and disadvantage. Thus, the imperative to integrate and synchronize the vast spectrum of national elements of power is greater now than at any time in the last thirty years. To this end, the U.S. “Integrated Deterrence” concept calls for a deepening of capabilities and accesses that require a synchronization of the military and diplomatic elements, to include a strong reaffirmation of ties with U.S. allies and partners. This concept both affirms the complexity of strategic competition and the need to increase interagency integration.

While the U.S. maintains a wide spectrum of functional capabilities within its DIME-FIL power structure, DOD and DOS arguably play the most prominent roles in the international realm as arbiters of peace and practitioners of war. DOS sets conditions to remain in peace, while DOD assists during the interwar period and decisively wins during conflict based on the advantageous conditions set by both departments before and during conflict. The two share a symbiotic relationship that, arguably, no other two federal agencies have in peace and wartime. Conflict is all but inevitable as consistent historical trends suggest. As war is fundamentally a political act of controlled violence, any winning strategy must have an integrated political-military approach. How to achieve this delicate and paramount balance?

The importance of plans and planning cannot be understated. At the strategic level, DOD publishes its National Defense Strategy (NDS) and National Military Strategy (NMS) every four years. DOS publishes its Joint Strategic Plan (JSP) with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on the same recurring basis. At operational levels, DOD has Operational (OPLAN) and Conceptual Plans (CONPLAN) to address crises and contingencies, and campaign plans to guide steady-state operations. These campaign plans include security cooperation, exercises, force posture, and international engagement priorities. Likewise, DOS publishes Joint Regional Strategies (JRS) and Functional Bureau Strategies (FBS) that represent their regional or functional contribution to the goals outlined in the JSP. While these plans are sophisticated and structured to support their higher echelon goals in a vertical path, they do not sufficiently synchronize horizontally with each other as fellow U.S. governmental departments as depicted in Figure 1.  

The current construct of an exclusively separate DOD and DOS plans, and planning structure may not be sufficient to support a theory of victory in the contemporary strategic setting (Figure 2). To be sure, these functions have been sufficient in their current construct as they ensured, albeit separately, our national military and diplomatic goals as part of the NSS. Further, the two departments already host a wide network of liaison billets meant to synchronize diplomatic and military activities, to include military advisors (MILAD), political advisors (POLAD), and myriad functional liaisons scattered throughout diplomatic and military posts. However, the demands of the current strategic setting call for increased mutual understanding of sophisticated adversaries and competitors, as well an increased synchronization of multi-functional diplomatic and military actions that emanate from plans. 

Integrating at strategic and operational levels beyond the status quo could generate advantages and facilitate national goals in three ways. First, with diplomacy in the lead in peacetime competition, ongoing DOD activities could evolve symbiotically to achieve their own ends as well as better support and integrate with diplomatic goals. If deterrence fails, the U.S. will enter into conflict with a well-rehearsed diplomatic-military symbiosis. Second, DOD and DOS could better understand issues and problems at strategic and operational levels via permanent diplomatic-military planning organizations, reducing the inherent biases that come from planning teams who lack organizational and intellectual diversity. Third, our nation’s integrated approach to strategic competition demands an all-of-government synchronization with its departments acting in mutually supporting roles from commonly understood plans and goals. As the most recent strategic competition experience, the Cold War presents examples to support the value of deep interagency integration, and warn against, effectively, playing a “pick-up game” when highly contentious flashpoints occur between great powers.  

A short assessment of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 presents a case for deepening the plans and planning structure between DOD and DOS. The U.S. became aware of Soviet nuclear missiles arriving in Cuba and was forced to decide on a course of action to prevent the complete introduction of that capability 90 miles from its border. While the U.S. ultimately achieved a solution below the threshold of war, the lack of diplomatic-military integration in the planning and execution phases of the crisis nearly forced the hand of the President to select a purely military solution that could have led to global conflict with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Had DOD and DOS been better integrated in planning prior to the crisis, options presented to the executive authority would have been more holistic and representative of the full scope of diplomatic and military understanding.  

Throughout the crisis, members of the National Security Council presented courses of action to the President that lacked multi-functional synthesis of military and diplomatic options. At points in the crisis, these were categorically either diplomatic or military vice synthesized, all-of-government options. For example, the military recommended either an invasion, air campaign, or quarantine of Cuba with little reference to a diplomatic component. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, championed the diplomatic solution of removing U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey as a bargain with the Soviets to remove theirs from Cuba, absent any military activities. These options emerged in the planning process not as a synthesized multi-functional approach, but rather as unilateral proposals from diplomatic and military members of the President’s planning team. Had there been options developed prior to the crisis from well-established diplomatic-military planning teams at strategic and operational levels, the U.S. could have pressed the Soviets with more sophisticated diplomatic-military countermoves. 

The lack of mutual integration at strategic and operational levels between military and diplomatic planners, thinkers, and decision makers rendered elements of the military unrestrained in their hard-line approach. Two examples are Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay’s provocative elevation of nuclear forces to Defense Condition Two without coordination through POTUS, let alone clearing through diplomatic channels. Further flaming diplomatic tensions was the uncoordinated naming of a military exercise in Puerto Rico as “ORTSAC,” or Castro spelled backwards, which rehearsed an amphibious landing on a Caribbean Island not far from Cuba. 

These aggressive military actions not only escalated tensions from a uni-dimensional origin, but they also communicated diplomatically to the Soviets and Cubans a willingness to escalate militarily that had not been sanctioned by the national authority. Had there existed a diplomatic-military planning structure at strategic and operational levels, understanding of the situation would have produced a more holistic set of options and may have diluted overly provocative, unidimensional actions. The likelihood of crises where miscalculations could lead to global conflict with China or Russia in the current strategic setting is high, particularly as the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization continue to respond to the March 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. To avoid miscalculations and better integrate diplomatic and military power to U.S. advantage, DOD and DOS should consider the following interagency plans and planning organizations. 

At the strategic level, integration would occur within an “Office of Strategic Diplomatic-Military Planning.” This organization would formally link existing planning organizations at DOS and DOD and synchronize development of the NMS, NDS, and JSP as mutually supporting and integrated plans. Ideally, it would be staffed with senior planners and policy experts, operational artists, experienced commanders, and officials of sufficient rank or paygrade from both departments. The component from DOS would include the Policy Planning Staff (S/P), a Secretary-level organization that, “…serves as a source of independent policy analysis and advice for the Secretary of State,” and is meant to, “fuse thought with action.” This organization is staffed with senior diplomats and private-sector thinkers with myriad levels of experience. The MILAD and staff from the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs would also represent the diplomatic component. From DOD, senior planners and officials from each of the military departments and the Joint Staff J-5 and J-35 would form the military component (see Figures 3 and 4).

At the operational level, integration would occur within a more distributed network under an “Office of Operational Diplomatic-Military Planning.” The functionality of this office would resemble a J-35 that transitions strategic plans to actions and resourcing. Touch points within this distributed network of diplomatic-military planning cells would exist at the DOS Regional Bureaus, DOD Combatant Commands, and U.S. Embassies abroad. These cells would synchronize both national and regional-specific diplomatic and military strategies within DOD Combatant Command OPLAN and CONPLANS, and DOS Regional Bureau and Functional Strategies (see Figures 3 and 4).

The functionality of these organizations would best be served in the following ways. First, the organizations would be permanent and staffed with personnel experienced to not only plan at these complex strategic and operational levels but also nuanced enough to function within a diverse team from different cultural backgrounds. Second, they would need to function both as organizations that generate plans, as well as multi-functional teams who continually problem frame and assess issues and probable futures relevant to U.S. strategic and operational interests. Third, they would need to retain links to their parent organizations, much like existing liaison elements. 

Much of the structure for these planning organizations already exists. DOS HQ already maintains a robust active-duty military cadre within its Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and scattered throughout other functional bureaus such as the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. These service members are fully integrated into the DOS staffs and work both as liaisons to DOD and staff functionaries to assist DOS with its security-related programs. DOS maintains extensive POLADs at key strategic and operational levels, to include Service Chiefs and Combatant Commands. Further, DOS bureaus post liaison officers throughout DOD organizations, namely those involved in security and crisis response. U.S. Embassies already host a robust DOD presence among the DOS staff. 

While the strategic logic for diplomatic-military integration is clear and a baseline structure exists, there are challenges to establishing these organizations. Organizational culture is one of these challenges. DOD and DOS function in strategic realms that demand and influence cultures that are often at odds with each other. For instance, diplomats work in politically sensitive environments that require nuance, compromise, passivity, and patience. The military often functions in environments that demand immediate quantitative effects, rapidity, biases for action, and kinetic activity. While not diametrically opposed, aspects of culture would need to be addressed to emphasize similarities over differences to ensure diplomatic-military planning teams remain practical and amenable to cooperative outcomes. 

Despite this and other challenges, the complexity of the strategic environment demands an all-of-government approach. While there are extensive liaison elements and concurrent activities between DOD and DOS, the critical function of mutual planning between these two prominent elements of national power should be increased. The current liaison structure, while sufficient, is not ideal or efficient to affect enhanced plans, planning, and integration. Deepening the planning function will also support DOD Service-level initiatives, such as the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 and its Concept for Stand-In Forces, which emphasizes the crucial role of diplomacy as a means to achieve military advantage prior to conflict. Further, to deny the deeply symbiotic role between diplomatic and military elements of power is to reject thousands of years of strategic history that demonstrate the utility of fully integrated diplomatic-military strategies, as well as the follies of fractured approaches to strategic competition. 

About the Author

Lieutenant Colonel Bill DeLeal is the Commandant of the Marine Corps Top Level School Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. He is an Africa Foreign Area Officer who will serve as Marine Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in France.  Previously, he served in Okinawa, Japan as Commanding Officer of 3d Intelligence Battalion, MAGTF Plans Officer at U.S. Marine Corps Forces Korea, in the Office of Security Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Senegal, and multiple combat deployments as a MAGTF Intelligence Officer in Iraq and Afghanistan.