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National Security Strategy (Updated)
The Cable has posted the new National Security Strategy, due to be released today at Brookings. My initial impression, which I shared with my colleagues at CNAS, is posted below:
"Considering the financial crisis from which our country is still emerging, I am surprised there is not more in the National Security Strategy about the environment of scarcity in which the United States now operates. Strategy is, in part, about setting goals, prioritizing those goals, and matching resources to each goal. Aside from the section about spending tax-payer money wisely -- which seems more about reducing fraud, waste and abuse than anything else -- there seems to be little acknowledgment that the United States might not be able to pursue all of our national security goals as vigorously as we might like in part due to spending constraints. I'm still trying to understand how the acknowledgment that the United States must address its deficit to ensure our future security squares with a bold statement like 'the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security'. That is an especially bold claim considering the fact that this document seems to consider security to include not just physical security but economic security, food security, medical security and addressing problems of governance and reducing poverty outside America's borders. This document is much like the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review in that I liked a lot of what it had to say but was left unsure of what the administration's true priorities are heading into the rest of its term in office."
In summary, I would have liked to have seen a more ruthless prioritization of efforts. If I were a reporter working the national security beat and could ask Sec. Clinton just one question today, my question would be, "Madam Secretary, this strategy lays out some very ambitious goals for the United States. But if we could only do three of the things on the list of activities, what would they be? What, in other words, are this nation's top priorities in national security -- whereby if we get other stuff wrong but get these specific things right, we can sleep soundly at night?"
UPDATE: A couple of my friends have written some good dissenting opinions in reply to my comments. The first objection (written by my officemate, the GZA aka The Genius, and soon-to-be-posted in full on Tom's blog) is basically, "Exum, as usual, you're complaining too much. The NSS is not meant to match ends, ways and means. It is intended to outline the broader way in which the administration thinks about the contemporary security environment. The NSS can't allot resources because we have this thing called the legislative branch -- you may have heard of it? -- which does that. The QDR and QDDR are the documents that should then identify ends, ways and means."
My response to that is, uh, first off, the QDR preceded the NSS. Which, we can all agree, is as f***ed up as a football bat. Also, the QDR also punted on setting priorities, something that has frustrated both allies with whom I have spoken as well as key legislators. (See, Abe! I am aware of the Congress!) I will note my major complaint about all of this, though, after I cover the second objection.
The second objection is that these kinds of "strategies" are really just long political speeches focused on national security. There is a little in there for everyone, and everyone's activities and opinions are at least acknowledged if not promoted. The document is, at the end of the day, intended more for external consumption than for internal use.
The problem with this is the internal leadership vacuum that results. Like it or not, people in the Departments of Defense, National Intelligence and State -- not to mention USAID and the combatant commands -- will refer back to this document to justify their programs and budget requests before both the administration and the Congress. And who can blame them? It's an official document signed off on by POTUS himself. All of those good progressive voices who fret the military has too much power and is dictating strategy from below need to take note here: when you produce something-for-everyone documents like this NSS and the QDR which do not set firm priorities, you're essentially asking departments and commanders below you in the food chain to set their own priorities. Or, at best, you are forcing them to constantly be seeking guidance as to what your true priorities are.
I may be asking for too much -- I don't know. But both the QDR and this NSS strike me as thoughtful, intelligent, comprehensive and ... kinda empty. Because these documents do not establish clear priorities or recommendations, I am left studying the budget like everyone else for clues as to what the U.S. government's real priorities are for national security.
Patrick Porter, meanwhile, has an intelligent take on his blog, which doesn't feature comments so Patrick isn't bothered by hoi polloi like you.
Below is a picture of my office door. Nate rues the day I discovered the template for our office name plates on the CNAS share drive...
I am surprised there is not more in the National Security Strategy about the environment of scarcity in which the United States now operates.
Same here, although I guess it's not really surprising. Expanding the definitions of security has been part of Obama's security team since Day One, and they're certainly not going to willingly be the team that said, "Sorry, but we have to prioritize and not try and pursue all of these 'Wouldn't-it-be-nice?' ideals". Interventionism reigns supreme, as it always has until we get push-back.
That is an especially bold claim considering the fact that this document seems to consider security to include not just physical security but economic security, food security, medical security and addressing problems of governance and reducing poverty outside America's borders.
I didn't like that about the document. It basically ropes everything - from economic incentives at home to nuclear proliferation abroad - under the "Security" term, which also means that the term is so watered-down that it's lost most of its meaning. It also meant that the document was full of a ton of fluff; it took them more than 10 pages into the document (not including Obama's introduction) before they even started to get specific on some of the actual "security" issues.
Who are you calling a hoi-polloi? Aren't you supposed to be working on something?
Vaguely on topic: I cannot get a sense of this administration or its strategy. But we all know I am not sympathetic generally, so maybe it's that.
Agree with Brett that there was way too much fluff and filler and very little in the way of substantive National Security issues. Health care was mentioned six times. As a national security issue, c'mon. COIN and insurgency got one mention each. Climate or climate change a whopping 28 (I believe this administration has engaged in a bit of Orwellian newspeak and has substituted “climate change” for “global warming” to throw off the skeptic hounds).
A tad bit too much focus on defeating al-Qaida and “its affiliates” rather than the broader focus of containing and mitigating violent extremism around the globe. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for calling out radical Islamist extremists but this is supposed to be an overarching document.
The subsection “Present a Clear Choice to Iran and North Korea” is “not about singling out nations...” Probably not how Iran and the DPRK are going to read that.
“Our approach [to homeland security] relies on our shared efforts to identify and interdict threats; deny hostile actors the ability to operate within our borders; maintain effective control of our physical borders; safeguard lawful trade and travel into and out of the United States; disrupt and dismantle transnational terrorist, and criminal organizations; and ensure our national resilience in the face of the threat and hazards. Taken together, these efforts must support a homeland that is safe and secure from terrorism and other hazards and in which American interests, aspirations, and way of life can thrive.”
Sort of vindicated Arizona's SB 1070 with that pearl of wisdom.
“Our diplomacy and development capabilities must help prevent conflict, spur economic growth, strengthen weak and failing states, lift people out of poverty, combat climate change and epidemic disease, and strengthen institutions of democratic governance.” First two are good, third is okay, good luck with funding four and five given our current economic spiral.
The whole document seemed more of an Obama Administration laundry list of pet projects which they'd like to have addressed. Best part was the three short paragraphs on “Use of Force.”
Ex, you're close to the mark on QDR not setting priorities and “GZA” is a bit wrong in that the QDR identifies “ends, ways and means." It mostly identifies ends. Also, not to denigrate the efforts of the fine folks who crafted it, the QDR is a statutory document imposed upon the DoD by the Congress. Thus is often offered up as a sop to satisfy a legal requirement. The GDF and GEF are the more relevant guiding documents that outline DoD's ends, ways, and means.
Long before Congressionally-mandated National Security Strategy and Quadrennial Defense Review documents, the Nixon administration experimented with yearly reports on the state of foreign policy.
Like modern NSS's and QDR's, these had a weakness for laundry-listism, a product of the contributions invited as a matter of course from various parts of the State Department (in those days a relatively more important part of the government's foreign policy establishment). News coverage of the reports tended, understandably, to dwell on the sections about Vietnam and ignore the rest. This was one reason why Nixon administration policy shifts on things like China and the Middle East caught so many people by surprise, for the process of assembling these yearly reports was overseen by Henry Kissinger, who had a much firmer grip on the course of the Nixon administration's major foreign policy initiatives than anyone in the Obama administration does on its own. As Kissinger himself observed, there was news in the annual reports if one knew where to look.
I haven't read the Obama NSS yet, and will withhold substantive comment until I do. For now I will only repeat the observation that President Obama has a lot of cooks in his national security policy kitchen, and no one in his administration with the knowledge, ability and relationship with the President to drive significant policy changes on his (or her) own. Policy documents like this one are therefore likely to require statements on pending issues negotiated among many contending parties. They are not likely to declare for politically controversial policy changes that go beyond what the President himself has already said in public. Having said that, it remains possible that news in the Obama NSS is a matter of knowing where to look.
I have to agree on your take of NSS and QDR -- esp the QDR. The pol/mil chattering class seem to have grown tired of lambasting the Bush administration's hubristic defense strategy (pre-emptive war, "wanted dead or alive," etc). The 2008 NDS set a more modest tone, which was followed by increasing levels of modesty in the QDR and 2010 NSS -- got it, we learned our lesson that invading other countries is not always the best way to achieve security. However, I think we may be setting ourselves up to repeat an earlier strategic approach which has been refuted -- that of the 1990s, which was routinely characterized by policy makers as "uncertain, unknowable, full of change, dynamic, drift, drift, drift...) The NDS-QDR-NSS approach -- modest in voice and inclusive in scope -- will never force us to eat our words (as did the neo-conn approach of the early 2000s), and it will never be accused of failing to at least mention the origin of the next problem (whether it is economic, pandemic, Taiwan, WMD, etc). However, choices have to be made. We can't afford a military that both optimizes our chances in a major war with a near-peer competitor and allows for major OIF/OEF style COIN campaigns, and resources a counter-WMD program, and keeps illegal immigrants out, and intercepts drugs flowing across the Caribbean, and conducts high-end CT operations, etc, etc, etc. To put this in terms of Pentagon bureaucracy, the problem is not one of OSD-Policy failing to articulate all the potential sources of strife, but one of failing to (at the DoD, DoS, and NSC) specify which challenges are the most threatening, and where we should divest.
Happy Memorial Day everyone.
V/r Mark
Your concern about providing top-level justifying language for various programs in a something-for-everyone document is valid, but then it just seems like we might as well not do this. I mean, does the U.S. really just walk to the middle of Times Square and drop its pants, exposing its true National Security Strategy (and thus priorities) to the world, every four years? Whatever was produced, U.S. agencies would fashion their pitches around the language in documents like this and QDR. What this really is is a strategic diplomatic communication, especially this year (I guess the 2002 document was supposed to be that as well - judge the results for yourself.) As Ackerman has pointed out extensively of late, our actions at the moment (and thus our actual strategy0) simply don't reflect the rhetoric and other language coming out of the administration at this time. In this administration, language has its own independent strategic role for which it is deployed, and is largely divorced from action, which has its own respective role. That's why you had such cognitive dissonance last fall, as your comically repeated references to the March 2009 AfPak document signed off by the president demonstrated. This is just a very large-scale manifestation of that reality.
There is not much point in hyping 'environmental scarcity', which really means resource scarcity from a policy standpoint, when the economic recovery is in question. The values of oil and other key commodities are falling currently due to the perceived threat of global economic collapse (again). This points us to a candidate for prioritization, the prevention of global financial instability. Nuclear proliferation is another no brainer, as is extracting ourselves from Afghanistan before it crushes us with debt (back to the first mentioned priority). Since the perception that we needed to intervene militarily in the middle east is driven by securing access to oil (No oil, no Shah, no OBL), then finding another energy source should also be high priority for restoring our economy. The above priorities have nothing to do with pollution, biodiversity, or environmental degradation, so the 'environment' descriptor is non starter.
Mike D.'s thinking UPDATE: The Ink Spots post AM tweeted today really drives home the same basic points AM makes here in a much, much more convincing fashion, and I now stand persuaded of the basic critique.
People and organizations of people do not operate in a linear and logical fashion. Especially the US govt - from day 1.
Not from the days of the Continental Congress, Articles of Confederation, or the Republic. It's a function of human nature and who we are and our founding imperatives, and our Constitutions - the written ones (include the States) and the nature of us as a people. It's always been disorganized and all over the map.
"You want an efficient government? It's called Dictatorship" - Harry S. Truman
Except we know in fact that dictatorships have their own many dysfunctions, now don't they?
As far as realizing the world and the USA is out of all money except the printed fiat kind - that realization will probably happen swiftly and painfully, and in a series of shocks. DC will stop acting like DC when events and the people force it to do so, not before. Careers spent on filling out laundry lists of largess don't make for prioritizing.
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