This chapter aims to examine the development of strategic planning from its origins in the eighteenth century through the Second War. It will not examine how different organizations accomplished the task, but rather the demands that strategy invariably has raised for strategic planners as well as the underlying reasons that have made strategic planning succeed or fail. In the end, competence in strategy and policy is the most important component in the success or failure in the conduct of war over the past 400 years. As the author and his colleague, Allan Millett, have noted about the first half of the twentieth century, “it is more important to make correct decisions at the political and strategic level than it is at the operational and tactical level. Mistakes in operations and tactics can be corrected, but political and strategic mistakes live for ever.”

Yet, what is meant by strategy? This essay at least will define strategy in Clausewitzian terms: the use of military means to achieve political goals. Inherent in such a definition is the belief that intelligent strategy demands a careful weighing of the means available and the extent of the goals to be achieved to ensure that there is a coherent connection between goals sought and means available. But it is to the political end that planners must pay particular attention. Above all, strategy and its planning involve complex processes through which statesmen, military leaders, and their planners adapt to the actual conditions, in both peace and war, that they confront. It is invariably a messy business for those engaged in its formulation. Strategists and strategic planners must inevitably grapple with the accumulated baggage of their national history and culture as well as the complex problems raised by logistics and operations, few of which offer simple or easy solutions. Moreover, statesmen, soldiers, and planners must make and articulate strategy in an extraordinary, fluid environment. The Cold War was an anomalous period in history precisely because so little change in the nature of the threat occurred.