So read Tanner Greer and Peter Mattis' threads

https://twitter.com/PLMattis/status/1259591190040772609 https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1259597611088084995
My own contribution is that Nathan Leites said, back in the middle of the 20th century, that party documents (in the USSR) are a way to coordinate rational behavior https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB104-1.html
e.g Leites' insight was that USSR state ideology formed system under which otherwise normal organizational decision-making was shaped and grounded
a good example of this is Soviet military science. It was, of course, sound military science (which was influential on US military thinking). But the Marxist-Leninist ideology was also more than just boilerplate
The reflexive "it's just cheap talk" response, as @Scholars_Stage notes, is sort of mirror-imaging a certain political structure (with politicians and a "base") onto something highly different
But another, more subtle, bias is this:
In the US, strategic reports and papers are often useless in interpreting actual US decision-making. "The budget is policy" as they say. Analyzing strategy often is rooted in looking at what de facto shape things take.
It should be noted that while US policy and strategy coordination has gotten worse over time, there is a historical baseline for it. https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Common-Defense-Kenneth/dp/0160533775
As Allard notes, the US has repeatedly rejected attempts to create a General Staff. This, for a variety of complicated reasons, is un-American and if anything resembling such an organization were to be created it would be a novel event in American history.
This is not the case for other countries! What is remarkable is that *both* factions in the Chinese Civil War (the CCP and the KMT) were designed to ideally function as top-down "parties with armies"
Sometimes American military and strategic scholars jealous of this capacity for centralized control will say that foreign enemies act "more strategically" because of it. I do not think this is the case and its a common error to assert it.
But regardless these are entities in which *not* taking ideological tracts seriously is a major mistake.
it leads to, for example, the error of assuming that entities like the Wehrmarcht in WWII were relatively autonomous spheres of military-technical professionalism instead of deeply and profoundly guided by noxious fascist ideology https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Army-Soldiers-Oxford-Paperbacks-ebook/dp/B0057CZ560/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=Omer+Bartov&qid=1589156700&s=books&sr=1-3
It also, at least in CT studies, led analysts to frequently underestimate and misinterpret the strategic behavior of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Often because they dismissed both the religious content of org docs/speeches and its link to observed behavior.
As an academic concern, it is of course an open question whether or not "cultural" or "ideational" influences are more important than the external environment, (boundedly) rational decision-making, bureaucratic behavior, etc.
Policy audiences have different concerns. They need to know about all of the relevant considerations for consequential decisions. And the cost of being wrong is vastly higher.
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