Threat 7: Sociocultural Aspects of the Threat and Strategy

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a quote often attributed to Peter Drucker, highlights an undeniable truth: Even the most brilliant strategy can falter if not supported by a strong, aligned leadership culture.

The key sociocultural question framed in Part 1 of this series is “What internal factors shape intent and actions?” The quote above, often attributed to Peter Drucker, reflects the power of the sociocultural function in threat assessment. Potentially even the strongest capabilities, backed by the best capacity, will fail if the culture fails. The media and campus unrest during Vietnam and perhaps Afghanistan demonstrate the sociocultural power that can hamstring strong capabilities, while the US of Voice of America and other tools during the Cold War shows how powerful it can be.

When I was a first classman at West Point, I did a capstone course for my Russian Area Studies concentration. My topic was a geopolitical review of Europe and whether the Soviet Union could successfully invade and hold Europe. My conclusion was that it could not for a few reasons:

• The war would be violent and destroy much of the economic prize the Soviet Union sought to gain.
• The Soviet Army was not strong enough to defeat NATO and then hold it (capability and capacity).
• The Soviet Union would not risk nuclear war.
• Internal stresses would break apart the Soviet Union (I wrote this in Spring 1981).

The internal stresses bullet was, I thought, key to the analysis. The paper discussed the multiple nationalities in the Soviet Union, the very fragile nature of the Warsaw Pact, held together out of fear rather than loyalty, and a social malaise within the Warsaw Pact nations brought on by the corrosive effects of communism. The US, through Voice of America and other sociocultural tools, strengthened this malaise in the Soviet Union.

Part 6 of this series discussed the impact of internal stresses on needs, desires, and fears. While needs, desires, and fears are a potential outcome of stressors, sociocultural factors can drive and shape an organization in many other ways. The failure of the Soviet and the decline of Japan are the genesis of the sociocultural function statement.

Sociocultural = ƒ(government, social, cultural, geography, economic, media)

My blog post, Part 5: Does Culture Matter? discusses culture and its affects. Therefore, this analysis will focus more on geography/geopolitics and its impact on the sociocultural function.

There is an outlier in the function statement: geography. That seems strange amid other variables that are recognized as sociocultural. But at least until WWII, its inclusion would not have been totally out of place. Geopolitics was once a burgeoning field of study. Then it became interwoven with Nazism and Nazi Germany, particularly through the linkage with Karl Haushofer. Never mind that the Americans and Brits (see MacKinder, Spykman, and Mahan) also studied geopolitics with a different intent than Haushofer. When I took up the study in 1980, it was still in an uncertain state. Although it has shaken off most of the baggage, an interesting sub-discipline of geopolitics, cultural geopolitics did not come out of the closet until Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997 and argued that “geography can explain the inequality that exists between different societies.” Inland states tend not to be maritime powers and can be more isolated/isolationist than states on the seas and oceans. The US is an example of a state that is maritime and inland. It exhibits the strengths of Mahan, Spykman, and to a lesser extent, MacKinder (lessor because MacKinder focused more on Asia than land power in general).

While Diamond’s work is not strictly cultural geography/geopolitics, it touches on many of its themes. Succinctly put, cultural geography states that geography shapes culture, and cultural geopolitics states that culture shapes geopolitics. These two disciplines, while still around as evidenced by the popularity of Diamond’s work, was largely chased out of academia when liberals and Marxists took control of the social sciences and brought in World Systems Theory, Critical Theory and Cultural Hegemony (see my blog post, Part 3—Controlling the Narrative and Cultural Hegemony and Critical Thinking and International Relations Theory).

The takeover of academia in the US and its often-hostile view of American core values and history and replacement with Marxist-rooted concepts is an example of the threat use of sociocultural tactics and techniques. Threat use of American media in all its forms is another example of threat sociocultural capabilities to attack a far superior military opponent.

Some of the Marxist roots that infiltrated the US during Vietnam and the civil rights movement are very much behind what is happening today. This is not to be anti-civil rights, but to be honest about how the Soviet Union infiltrated the civil rights movement to co-opt it and shape it.

What is the threat doing now? Who is behind it? How do we counter it?