Shivers: Soft power needs to become a whole-of-nation effort
In an op-ed on Forbes today, Mitchell Shivers, a former senior policy official at the Department of Defense in the George W. Bush Administration and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the American Security Project , argues the need to promote (and sustain) the use of smart / soft power.
We here at ASP are immensely proud to be counseled by Mr. Shivers.
He notes:
The projection of America’s abundant soft power is still wholly inadequate. Tally the scorecard in Afghanistan – you’ll see the consequence of our inadequacy in misspent treasure and tragic human sacrifice. When we fail with our soft power, we rely more heavily on hard power to achieve our goals, placing an undue, and unfair, burden on our armed forces.
As a nation, we dare not face our global national security challenges without the latest hi-tech armaments – and we’ll readily commit to making multi-hundred-billion dollar, multi-year commitments.
But why is it, when the stakes are so high, that we still can’t tap into our vast, abundant reservoirs of national soft power resources? Where’s our sense of urgency on this?
He concludes by saying:
Secretary Gates was right. We need to seriously invest in correcting this critical shortfall in our national security capabilities. Soft power needs to become a whole-of-nation effort. This is a skill set we’ll surely need for the rest of this century.
You can read the whole artice here
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