Congress Calls On Experts To Formulate New "Grand Military Strategy"

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - A House Armed Services Committee subcommittee will hear from experts next week to help the nation's military move away from crisis management and develop a "grand strategy" for dealing with international affairs.

The Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee meeting is free and open to the public and will take place on Tuesday at 10 a.m. in room 2212 of the Rayburn building in Washington, D.C.

Witnesses are Ambassador James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation; Dr. Barry R. Posen, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of International Relations at Boston University and Dr. Mitchell B. Reiss, the vice provost for International Affairs at William and Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law.

The formulation of a grand strategy is viewed as important to get away from the day-to-day crisis management that has typified U.S. strategy for the past decade.

Reiss is viewed by observers as having keen insight into the obstacles hindering U.S. lawmakers from formulating a new U.S. grand strategy. One of those obstacles that Reiss has identified, according to a recent report by Patrick Doherty in the New American Strategist, has been that there was not much demand for such strategies for the past decade.

That has meant that the nation's think tanks, which often come up with ideas first, haven't worked on formulating such strategy.

Reiss, Posen and Bacevich all come from the academic world. But Dobbins, of RAND, represents a leading nonprofit institution that has helped improve policy and decision making through objective research and analysis for the past 60 years, according to a statement on its web site.