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 For national security buffs, this is definitely worth a look:

Congressional Research Service – Richard Best :The National Security Council: An Organizational Assessment (PDF)

The NSC has a few fundamental tasks, not all of which are mutually compatible:

1. Honest broker on policy options and steward of the inter-agency coordination process.

2. Enforcement of bureaucratic accountability for PDD/NSDD orders from the President.

3. Analysis of bureaucracy-generated “options” ( usually artificially restricted to suit departmental interests) and proposing policy alternatives for the President.

Historically, most NSCs can do at least one of these tasks well, though sometimes not even that. Eisenhower’s NSC, in sync with the rest of his administration, was much more effective than most. However, this case was due not only to Ike’s oorganizational preferences as a former holder of supreme military command, but the close working relationships of his SECSTATE, John Foster Dulles, DCI Allen Dulles and Chief of Staff Sherman Adams.

Eisenhower ran a very tight ship. Most presidents come into office not knowing what they do not know and their NSC is seldom structured to compensate, being redesigned in the first national security directives to suit the preconceptions of the incoming POTUS and his political advisers. Presidents get what they ask for in an NSC, not what they will actually need.

Interestingly, “operational control” sometimes is covertly lodged in the NSC when a POTUS attempts to outflank a hostile bureaucracy rather than confront blatant insubordination from five levels below an ineffectual or indifferent Cabinet member. This usually has had very mixed results, permitting both brilliant tactical moves and ill-considered cowboyism from policy types attempting to “wing” directing delicate intelligence, diplomatic or military actions.

The United States is not the only Western power suffering from strategic uncertainty. James Frayne, a British political consultant who is a friend of this blog and an avid student of strategy, drew my attention to his post at The Campaign War Room:

“Who Does UK Grand Strategy?”

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee – under the leadership of Bernard Jenkin – has been running a very worthwhile investigation into “Who Does UK Grand Strategy?” The uncorrected evidence has begun to be put online and it’s worth taking a look at. Peter Hennessy, Julian Lindley-French, and Hew Strachan gave evidence on 9 September, which you can read here. Foreign Secretary William Hague and National Security Adviser Sir Peter Ricketts gave evidence on 14 September, available here. Various figures from the MoD gave evidence on 16 September, available here.We have no meaningful national conversation in the UK on national strategy, so we owe Bernard Jenkin one for pushing this investigation forward. I haven’t had a chance to go through all the evidence yet and will post something longer on it further down the line.

Seems straightforward enough, but the quality of the links are really good; senior British officials in frank discussion of grand strategy. Here’s an example:

Q54 Robert Halfon: Would you make the distinction between a Grand Strategy and a National Security Strategy and do you agree that if there is that difference, a long term strategy needs to look forward 20 years plus?

William Hague : I think a National Security Strategy is an important component of it. I do not think a National Security Strategy is the entire strategy of the country, because there needs to be a strategy not only for maintaining our security, but for advancing our prosperity. These things are closely linked; it is only on strong economic foundations that it is possible to build an effective foreign or defence policy. But it cannot just be a defensive strategy. Was it not a Napoleonic maxim: “The side that stays within its fortifications is beaten”? I think one has to have a strong sense of how the country is going to extend its influence and reach out into the rest of the world, using whatever, to use the jargon, using soft power as well as hard power. So there is something more to the strategy of the country than the National Security Strategy.

Q55 Robert Halfon: Once you have devised that strategy, how does it withstand political pressures and a change of government?

William Hague : If it is good, of course, it will withstand a change of government not by seeking prior agreement across political parties but by being something that has been clearly demonstrated as something the country should pursue. I think that is really how consensus and cross party agreement works in this country. Of course, we are in a period now where it works in a different way between the two coalition parties, because since we are in government together, we have to formally agree things together. But I think if an approach to the future of the nation is shown and understood to be working, it will be something that is continued by other governments in the future.

Some thoughts:

First, there’s a substantial difference between the committee hearing in the House of Commons and what would transpire over here in the US House of Representatives or especially in the Senate. The seriousness of the exchange in this inquiry is evident, conversational it may come across at times, the MPs led by Bernard Jenkin appear genuinely interested in the opinion of the witnesses and the Commons seems to be exercising oversight in a meaningful sense of the word. The Brits also use adult vocabularies, unlike most American politicians. It would be hard to imagine Congressmen saying “otiose” in a hearing. Or, in a few instances, knowing what it meant ( too self-referential, I suppose).
 
At a Congressional hearing on grand strategy, the witnesses would submit prepared statements that would be read only by junior staff and the MoC would use the opportunity for grandstanding speeches on C-Span and prosecutorial questions aimed at scoring polemical debating points. Winesses in America might not be forthcoming and could possibly bring their own lawyers due to the risk of being boxed in by questions that could later be construed as perjury. Real oversight by Congress or interest in the granular subject matter of national security is limited to a small number of MoC, basically the leadership (majority and minority) of each house, and a few distinguished members like Rep. Ike Skelton, Sen. Richard Lugar and so on.

Secondly, I have to wince at the perception senior British officials have of American governmental capacity for strategic thinking or the effectiveness of institutions like the National Security Council, which the British govenment seeks to imitate. To be brutally frank, the NSC has been a dysfunctional apparatus for most of it’s existence and operated at peak performance ( in the sense of assuring the president’s control over foreign, defense and intel policies and bureaucracies) only under Eisenhower and Nixon with relatively decent performance as “honest broker/enforcer” under Ford and Bush I. and select years here and there of other administrations. The apex of strategic thinking in the USG, interestingly enough, was during the presidencies of FDR, Truman, Nixon and Reagan; the NSC did not exist under the first, was a work in progress under the second and a roman circus during the tenure of the last until Carlucci and Powell became successive NSC advisers.
 
If the US seems to have given greater thought to strategy of late, it was because the downward spiral of Iraq beat the living hell out of the Bush administration politically into opening the policy door to outside voices like General Jack Keane, Kalev Sepp, the Kagans, David Kilcullen, John Nagl, General Petraeus, General Mattis etc. Even then American COIN is an operational activity of the US military, not a whole of government strategy, that serves to kick the ball of grand strategy down field (which politicians like because grand strategy can raise controversial questions of values and political economy).

Third, With some amusement, unless I missed it in my quick read,  senior British leaders appear to be unaware that Britain’s postwar choice under Clement Attlee to build a robust welfare state was a seminal act of grand strategy. British voters in 1945 made a strategic choice of butter over guns – or empire, or high levels of capital investment. As strategy is essentially a matter of ways, means and ends, devoting very high levels of GDP to public consumption puts narrow parameters on what a country will be able to do in the world. Or for that matter, at home in the future. American politicians clearly do not realize this either. Socialism in Europe has brought not the withering away of the state, but instead a withering away of the state’s military power.

Fourth, In reference to the second doc, Q215 Chair: Grand strategy is far more important to small or medium states than to a hegemon or an empire because their margin for error or waste is much smaller. The United States government can afford, relatively speaking, to gratuitously waste geopolitical opportunities (at least for a time) which it has been doing with gusto since 1991. Singapore, by contrast, cannot waste any of it’s chances if it wishes to remain prosperous and free. Britain needs a grand strategy if it’s leaders value and seek to pass on to posterity a British identity. The same can be said over here for America and some of the visceral anger inherent in the Tea Party arguably seems to come from their realization that American elites do not place too much importance on an American identity or sovereignty.

I sincerely hope the British can find not only a grand strategy, but the correct one. The world needs a strong and capable Britain and America does too.

ADDENDUM:

James Frayne delivers his verdict – Q: “Who Does UK Grand Strategy?”, A: “Nobody”:

There are three big things that stand out for me from the evidence. The first is that there was a strong consensus from the academics and the former defence officials that Britain has no real capability either for the creation of Grand Strategy specifically, or for competent strategic thinking more generally. They suggested that we do not have the institutional framework in place to create Grand Strategy and we do not have the functions within Government to train people – officials and politicians – in strategic thought.

Crucially, it was also suggested by the academics and former defence officials that we have actually got out of the habit of thinking strategically. In the past, when Britain had a more obvious formal global role, we were forced to think strategically. With relative decline and the consequent attachment of our foreign and security policy (to say nothing of our economic policy) to the US, NATO and the EU, we lost the capacity for independent thought. It was suggested by some of the former defence officials that Britain has something of an “anti-intellectual culture” which makes them sceptical about strategy-making; people prefer pragmatism.

Dr.Patrick Porter castigates the Tories:

Major war capability did not become obsolete with the end of the Cold War. The ‘north German plain’ symbol is the cliche and soundtrack of a dangerous complacency. Other states like China, India and Russia invest heavily in the kind of ‘kit’ that Osborne finds absurd. Russia recently fought a land war in Georgia, and puts its Blackjack bombers in British skies.

In fact, the dismissal of Russia as a has-been military power who went into history with the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of a complacency about power politics and major war, and we are still living with the consequences of our recent failure to take Russia seriously as a geopolitical heavyweight.

Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World by Adrienne Redd

I “met” Dr. Adrienne Redd some years ago through the kind offices of Critt Jarvis, which resulted in a wide-ranging and intermittent email discussion, sometimes joined by John Robb and others, of “virtual states”, “virtual nations”, “micropowers” and evolving concepts of sovereignty and statehood in international relations. It was an intellectually stimulating conversation.

Today, Dr. Redd is Nimble Books’ newest author, and she has just sent me a review copy of Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers, the culmination of approximately seven years of research and writing.  Redd investigates nothing less than the “fate of the state” and I am looking forward to reading her argument in detail.

To be reviewed here soon….

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Instituteand Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Joan Rivers, terrorists and inflight catering

by Charles Cameron

Don’t you love it when the internet provides us with what appears to be reliable (albeit counterintuitive) answers to rhetorical questions? As when Joan Rivers asks about terrorist dietary restrictions on David Letterman:

Joan in the subject of a new documentary, “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work”. Dave calls the film a wonderful, compelling documentary and something she should be very proud of. Joan recently had some trouble at a Costa Rica airport. She uses an alias on her passport, Joan Rosenberg, her married name, when she travels. The airport security was suspicious. Joan was detained at the airport for 24 hours while everyone she was with went on ahead. It was ridiculous. “What terrorist would take the name ‘Rosenberg’?” Joan wonders. She continued, “Do I look like a terrorist? Does a terrorist order a kosher meal?” Late Show with David Letterman, Show #3345, July 22, 2010

…and the answer is just a quick google away in Ha’aretz:

Matiri’s instruction manual for intelligence agents is part of a series of documents he has written. These include pointers on explosives, building an organization and recruiting agents. There are also explanations about Islam’s enemies. In his writings, Matiri comes across as someone who knows what he is talking about. He cites studies and conclusions from the experiences of other intelligence agencies, and he discusses methods used by Al-Qaida. … Matiri covers a variety of topics in the 42 pages of his instruction manual, among them advice on how the religious spy can get out of uncomfortable situations. He suggests that “Jewish meals” be ordered on airline flights – kosher meals that do not contain pork. Al-Qaida’s mother of all spy manuals, Ha’aretz, May 30, 2010

The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture by Ishmael Jones

A former clandestine officer of the CIA who operated overseas without benefit of diplomatic cover, “Ishmael Jones” has painted one of the most damning insider accounts of a puportedly self-serving and risk-averse CIA’s management culture that has ever been written. Jones’ description of a mendacious and incompetent CIA headquarters bureaucracy has less in common with critical documents like the 9/11 Commission Report or the legendary Church Committee hearings than it does with the literature produced by Soviet dissidents and defectors during the Cold War.

Jones, who quotes from the iconic 1990’s film Glengarry Glen Ross, yearned to be in an aggressive covert intelligence service whose case officers would “Always Be Closing” . Instead, he finds a Central Intelligence Agency topheavy with career managers averse to approving operational approaches to potential sources, eager to recall effective and productive officers permanently home on the slightest pretexts, comfortable with padding their incomes through familial nepotism and not above lying to Congress or political superiors in the Executive Branch. Jones navigates successfully through three consecutive overseas assignments via a strategy of keeping HQ in the dark about his activities, never becoming known as an “administrative problem” to HQ paper-shufflers and advancing operational costs from his own pocket, with the CIA eventually in arrears to Jones to the tune of $ 200,000.

CIA management in The Human Factor resembles nothing so much as the Soviet nomenklatura crossbred with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Even if we were to allow for exaggeration for humorous effect, or frankly discount 50 % of Jones’ examples outright, the remainder is still a horrifying picture of Langley as an insular bureaucracy that excels far more at Beltway intrigue than at foreign espionage or covert operations. Jones also discusses the tenure of CIA directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, the Valerie Plame story and the post-9/11 intelligence “reforms” that aggravated the CIA management culture’s worst tendencies. Jones concludes by stating flatly that the CIA cannot be fixed and should be abolished, with its useful operational personnel transferred to the Departments of State and Defense.

ADDENDUM:

An excellent – and more detailed – review of The Human Factor by  by fellow Chicago Boyz blogger, James McCormick:

Mini-Book Review – Jones – The Human Factor

….Other reviews of this book have proclaimed Human Factor a rather boring recollection of examples of institutional ineptitude and better as a guidebook for potential employees than a useful description of the CIA but I feel this is in fact the most useful book on the CIA’s clandestine service since:

Orrin Deforest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam, Simon & Schuster, 1990, 294 pp.

David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, Atheneum, 1977, 309 pp.

which covered clandestine case officer activities, first person, in Vietnam and Latin America.

Like these two aforementioned titles, Human Factor focuses on the day-to-day challenges of being a covert case officer … the “teeth” in any intelligence organization. It is noteworthy that the Director of Central Intelligence has rarely, if ever, been one of those covert (non-State Department) officers. It’s as if your dentist was being overseen by experts in small-engine mechanics.

Ishmael recounts the minutiae of what reports he needed to write, the porous e-mail systems he had to manipulate, and the permissions he needed to gain. The timing and delays of decisions from Langley … the phrasing and terminology that was necessary to get anyone back in the US to allow any activity whatsoever. As a former stock broker, Jones was entirely comfortable with the challenges of “cold-calling” and dealing with “No” over and over again. But this wasn’t the case for his fellow trainees or for any of his superiors. At every turn, he was able to contrast his experience in the Marines (and military culture), and with Wall Street’s “make the call” ethos, with what he was experiencing as one of the most at-risk members of the Agency