The United States has entered a new era of long-term, strategic competition.[1] The country now finds itself face-to-face with the People’s Republic of China, facing a bona fide peer rival again after emerging from nearly two decades of focus on countering trans-national violent extremists. This time, however, the rival has the deep pockets and 100-year vision necessary to challenge U.S. global primacy.[2] In stark contrast, the U.S. national security policy apparatus, namely the National Security Council system, is lacking. While the statutory requirements governing the National Security Council system are simple, their execution can be remarkably complex. This system leads to long-term strategic inconsistency resulting from the inter-administration variability in decision-making structure and short-term strategic incoherence due to the intra-administration democratization of policy-making. The U.S. essentially executes strategy in four- and eight-year stints. By understanding the national security system, its players, and the relationships between presidential administrations, military planners within the enterprise can build continuity, working to inoculate plans against change by anticipating the degree and direction of national security policy shifts, mitigating potential setbacks in the execution of strategy.
Inter-Administration Variability and Strategic Consistency
Long-term strategic consistency is difficult to achieve within the context of the U.S. system.[3] This lack of consistency can be blamed, in part, on the frequent change of presidential administrations and, with it, decision-making philosophy. This inter-administration variability directly impacts the long-term consistency of U.S. national strategy. To understand how inter-administration variability affects national security decision-making, it is essential to understand its key aspects.
With the National Security Act of 1947, Congress created a statutory requirement for an advisory body to assist the executive branch in drafting and implementing national security policy: the National Security Council. Intentionally vague, the act left all but the necessary statutory requirements—inclusion of the President of the United States, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Energy—to the president to amend its membership and use the body according to personal preference.[4] Ergo, the body has taken on a different form with each administration, morphing to fit individual decision-making styles. While some administrations have favored centralization focused around small groups of trusted individuals, others have opted for decentralized systems built around rigorous departmental analysis and interdepartmental discourse.[5]
The ensuing variance in process and structure can result in either strategic conformity or nonconformity between administrations. For example, the transition between Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had less heavily pronounced ideological differences than that of Johnson and Nixon. This is attributable, in part, to the more widely distributed decision-making styles of Truman and Eisenhower. While President Truman initially rejected the National Security Council premise, he quickly recognized its value following the Korean War’s outbreak. He came to embrace and rely on the council and its staff to provide expert analysis and recommendations. Decentralization within the Truman administration meant that, while he ultimately made decisions, he received information from a wide variety of sources.[6]
The president’s flexibility within the National Security Council system enables frequent changes to its process and influence as the nation’s primary strategy-making device.
Like Truman, President Eisenhower embraced the National Security Council system, expanding the organization and building in processes to ensure detailed and thorough staffing for critical national security issues.[7] During Project Solarium, for example, President Eisenhower created multi-disciplinary teams to spur detailed strategic planning, providing him multiple fully developed policy options.[8] The decentralized nature of strategy formulation within both administrations served to dilute their leadership styles. This resulted in strategies based on similar interpretations of containment reflected in their governing strategic documents: NSC 68 and NSC 162/2, both of which painted communism as a threat to the free world to be stopped wherever it might spread.[9] Later administrations, using more centralized decision-making processes, arrived at vastly different solutions, to include Nixon distinguishing Chinese communists from Soviet communists.[10]
President Lyndon Johnson shown meeting with the National Security Council in 1964. (Bettman/Corbis)
Conversely, when Lyndon Johnson took office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he inherited a National Security Council system based mainly around a small group of trusted advisors.[11] Johnson preferred ad hoc meetings with his team, generally consisting of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and retained control over all meaningful decisions.[12] Johnson’s resultant strategic direction revolved around an uninhibited version of containment that called for the United States to block communism wherever it arose.
Like Johnson’s administration, President Nixon preferred a centralized decision-making process. He relied almost entirely on Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor, to provide policy recommendations while the remainder of the National Security Council staff was relegated to analytical work.[13] This resulted in the formulation of internally consistent strategy, although it was almost diametrically opposed to that of Johnson. While Johnson built his strategy on completely containing communism, Nixon embraced a realist approach, opening relations with Communist China and exploiting a rift in Sino-Soviet relations.[14]
Intra-administration Dynamics and Strategic Coherence
The decentralization of strategy formulation can mitigate difficulties with long-term, strategic consistency; however, the resultant democratization of decision-making within administrations complicates short-term strategic coherence. This results from conflicting perspectives, competing organizational equities, and voluntary sub-optimization of individual policy preferences. First, national security decision-making involves myriad individuals with varying degrees of influence informed by a vast array of perspectives. For example, within the George W. Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell sat ideologically opposed to one another in terms of their respective views of the security environment. Rumsfeld espoused positions strongly influenced by his neoconservative departmental executives who championed the spread of liberal ideals through military interventionism.[15] Powell, contrarily, expressed realist sentiments, advocating for intervention only in support of vital national interests using overwhelming force in pursuit of clearly articulated ends.[16]
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with President Bush (Getty)
As the leaders of the two most influential foreign policy departments in the U.S. government, Rumsfeld and Powell played significant roles in strategy formulation. And their contentious relationship led to rifts within the administration and threatened the strategic coherence. Within the context of the Iraq invasion in particular, the two disagreed fundamentally on the best strategy. Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives believed the Iraqis would embrace American troops as liberators, thereby negating the need for a large occupying force. Conversely, Powell believed overwhelming force was warranted if Iraq represented a significant threat to U.S. interests. In the end, President Bush adjudicated a compromise, the result of which was neither a small, agile force nor an overwhelmingly large force executing the intervention.[17]
Of the statutory members of the National Security Council, three are departmental secretaries.
Though each individual within the national security system brings a unique worldview, the interests of their bureaucratic organizations present another challenge to building coherent strategy. Many of the chief advisors to the president are also leaders within the federal bureaucracy. Of the statutory members of the National Security Council, three are departmental secretaries.[18] Though these are political appointees and not career bureaucrats, their advice is still shaped by their respective organizational mission, culture, and desire for autonomy.[19] Following his advocacy of increased State Department funding as combat operations wound down in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs, “No one could ever recall a secretary of defense calling for an increase in the State Department budget.”[20] The advice these senior leaders provide is so tied to their organizational needs that Gates wanted to highlight just how odd it was that he was advocating on behalf of a rival department. Biases toward organizational interests often leads to parochial in-fighting, requiring compromise in the formulation and implementation of national strategy.
Even as senior policy advisors advocate in accordance with their security perspectives and organizational equities, they tend to voluntarily sub-optimize their positions. Though they may have a suitable solution to a known foreign policy problem, they also understand certain options lack political tenability. As highly influential advisors, it is generally in their personal and organizational interests to maintain a favorable relationship with the president. Having a seat at the table ensures their voices are heard. Consistently making unrealistic requests or packaging information in a way that is not well received can result in their expulsion from the circle of trust. As a result, they will often moderate their positions to maintain their status on the team. For instance, President Johnson focused on passing key domestic legislation in 1965 as Vietnam was heating up. Understanding this, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to build and maintain trust with the president more than provide unfiltered military advice. As a result, they proposed sub-optimal solutions in Vietnam to ensure continued access to and influence over the president.[21]
The Moderating Role of the Military Planner
Given the variability in the system at the very top, the key points of continuity are the military planners operating within the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the combatant commands, and their components. These planners can and should serve two distinct roles in inoculating strategy against discontinuity. First, at strategic inflection points, oftentimes coinciding with presidential elections, military planners must understand, anticipate, and act. These points of continuity need to have an understanding of the current and potential successive administration and their preferred decision-making style. This enables them to anticipate strategic discontinuity. Armed with this information, they can use planning to ensure continuity. While conventional wisdom may dictate that planners wait and see where the incoming administration’s strategy diverges, planners must also realize that they, and their plans, will persist for a time after their appointed leaders are gone. They continue to be responsible for operationalizing strategy even as a new administration begins to formulate its national-level direction. Planning takes time. Within its first two years, an administration will likely roll out the National Security Strategy. The Defense Department will follow, sometime in year two, with the National Defense Strategy. Concurrently, the Joint Staff will be working on the National Military Strategy. By the time the combatant commands are looking to translate the new administration’s strategic direction into theater campaign plans, the term is nearly half over. The plans completed in the waning days of the previous administration have been in execution for nearly three years at this point.
…planners must understand the structured decision-making process of the current administration and its nature as either centralized or decentralized.
The buffer created by the plans currently in execution provides space for planners to act in the interest of strategic continuity. While preparing to formulate their respective theater plans, these planners should also be studying the strategic preferences of the new administration. In doing so, they can find congruence with the old guidance and think through linkages that soften what could otherwise be hard shifts in strategy.
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Drew Angerer/Getty)
In between the strategic inflection points, they understand, anticipate, and act to ensure the framework remains relevant. In this case, planners must understand the structured decision-making process of the current administration and its nature as either centralized or decentralized. This requires an understanding of the key players, their personal perspectives, and current inter-organizational dynamics. Knowing these critical facts, planners can anticipate the expected level of strategic coherence and act accordingly, modifying planning efforts to prioritize potential problem areas. For instance, in the current administration, the enterprise has reoriented on competition with China. Even so, the president prioritized counter narcotics in March of this year, potentially diluting efforts to undermine Chinese influence in a critical combatant command area of responsibility.[22] Planners with an understanding of the president’s decision-making style, specifically his results-oriented tendency, could have anticipated the shift. Success can be difficult to measure and articulate in competition. Conversely, the legacy mission of counter narcotics is easily quantifiable through latent measures like drug seizures, dollar value, and incarcerations.[23] Understanding the potential for an operational shift, planners should have been identifying convergence points and building plans that continue to combat the long-term priority while providing senior leaders with the tangible results they require.
Conclusion
Strategy formulation within the United States is a difficult and messy process that can differ substantially from administration to administration. The president’s flexibility within the National Security Council system enables frequent changes to its process and influence as the nation’s primary strategy-making device. This variance, in turn, makes it difficult to ensure long-term, inter-administration strategic consistency. Furthermore, even within individual administrations, strategy is not the result of a monolithic policy machine, but of multiple sub-optimized positions informed by a variety of security perspectives and moderated by organizational equities. The interplay of these dynamics can, and often does, impede short-term strategic coherence. All the while, it is the responsibility of the military planners working primarily at the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, combatant command, and component levels to understand, anticipate, and act to provide continuity between administrations and effective employment of resources within the bounds of strategic direction.
Martin P. Mangum is a U.S. Army Officer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
Have a response or an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:
Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.
Header Image: The National Security Council (Truman Library)
Notes:
[1] Department of Defense, The National Defense Strategy of the United States, (Washington: Department of Defense, 2018).
[2] John Malden, “China’s Grand Plan To Take Over The World”, Forbes (November 12, 2019), https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2019/11/12/chinas-grand-plan-to-take-over-the-world/#38779ae85ab5
[3] Alex J. Beckstrand, “On American Grand Strategy”, Real Clear Defense (March 10, 2020), https://www.realcleardefense.om/articles/2020/03/10/on_american_grand_strategy_115113.html. The U.S. consistently struggles to maintain long term strategic vision. In the past thirty years, this has been exacerbated by the lack of a true strategic rival. U.S. foreign policy has persistently shifted. From the Clinton administration’s “enlargement” focus on spreading liberal ideals to the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror”, to the current environment built around strategic competition, each administration has had a different take on the United States’ general direction and role in the world.
[4] National Security Council, The White House, The United States Government, Accessed July 8, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/.
[5] Alan G. Whittaker, Shannon A. Brown, Frederick C. Smith, Elizabeth McKune, The National Security Policy Process: The National Security Council and Interagency System (Washington, D.C.: Industrial College of the Armed Forces National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense, August 15, 2011)
[6] Stanley L. Falk, The National Security Council Under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, Political Science Quarterly 79, no. 3 (September 1964): 414-415, Accessed July 8, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2145907.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Kori Schake, “Trump Doesn’t Need a Second Solarium”, The Atlantic (October 20, 2018), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/what-eisenhower-could-teach-trump-about-strategy/574261/.
[9] A. U.S. National Security Council, National Security Council Report, NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (Washington: National Security Council, 1950). B. U.S. National Security Council, National Security Council Report, NSC 162/2: Basic National Security Policy (Washington: National Security Council, 1953).
[10] “The Week that Changed The World”, The Nixon Foundation (November 12, 2014), https://www.nixonfoundation.org/exhibit/the-opening-of-china/.
[11] Alan G. Whittaker, Shannon A. Brown, Frederick C. Smith, Elizabeth McKune, The National Security Policy Process: The National Security Council and Interagency System (Washington, D.C.: Industrial College of the Armed Forces National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense, August 15, 2011), 7 – 8.
[12] H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 48 – 50, 262 – 270.
[13] Joseph G. Bock and Duncan L. Clarke, The National Security Assistant and the White House Staff: National Security Policy Decisionmaking and Domestic Political Considerations, 1947-1984, Presidential Studies Quarterly 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 264, Accessed July 8, 2020, http://www.jstor.com/stable/40574649.
[14]“The Week that Changed The World”, The Nixon Foundation (November 12, 2014), https://www.nixonfoundation.org/exhibit/the-opening-of-china/
[15] Joshua Micah Marshall, “Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives”, The New York Times (October 21, 2003), https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20031101FAREVIEWESSAY_v82n6_marshall.html.
[16] Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 78.
[17] Michael R. Gordon and General (R) Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Random House, 2006), 104 - 108.
[18] Whittaker, Brown, Smith, McKune, The National Security Policy Process: The National Security Council and Interagency System, 7 – 8.
[19] James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 90 – 101, 181 - 184.
[20] Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Borzoi Books, 2014), 92.
[21] McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 311 – 312.
[22] Morgan Chalfant, “Trump announces enhanced counternarcotics operation at coronavirus briefing”, The Hill (April 1, 2020), https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/490704-trump-announces-enhanced-counternarcotics-operation-at-coronavirus
[23] Trump, Donald, “Remarks by President Trump in Briefing on SOUTHCOM Enhanced Counter Narcotics Operations”, Doral, FL, July 10, 2020. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-briefing-southcom-enhanced-counternarcotics-operations/. President Trump specifically called out the more than “1,000 arrests and the interdiction of 120 metric tons” as well as its value in the “billions and billions of dollars.”