The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Multiplicity’s Impact on the Post 9/11 Strategic Narrative and Its Influence on America’s Military Strategy.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The substance of this dissertation is focused on exploring strategic narratives and the influence narratives have on military strategy development. The social nature of stories links narratives employed in strategic situations with meaning-making during times of conflict. Exploring strategic narratives within security studies provides greater richness and texture to our understanding of decisions made during conflicts. Presently, there are two broad approaches to understanding strategic narratives. The open-social construction approach views narratives as socially constructed storylines that shape understanding of events relative to the culture or society that composes the narrative. The open-social construction approach is a bottom-up methodology. Oppositely, the elite employment approach takes a top-down perspective. Strategic narratives are elite tools employed to achieve political or military agendas. However, this dissertation takes both approaches and proposes a hybrid strategic narrative approach. This approach attempts to reintroduce the social perspective back into strategic narratives.The US military recognizes the importance of strategic narratives and has sought to operationalize them within conflict. However, the military has not fully leveraged the body of academic literature to understand how strategic narratives have influence. Moreover, the theory in this dissertation argues that while the military is trying to operationalize strategic narratives, it is missing how strategic narratives influence strategy on the front end.By way of an applicable case, the attacks on 9/11 represent an inflection point between two periods where there is a distinct change within the strategic narratives and military strategy. During both periods, the American strategic narrative ecology comprised the president, Congress, news agencies, academics, and the broader public. Using the 9/11 case, this dissertation presents the framework to explore the change in strategic narratives and military strategy after the 9/11 attacks.