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Recent US security policy failures in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect a flawed National Security Council (NSC) process and capacity to identify and prioritize security interests and goals. Failure to recognize and adjust NSC analytic procedures is particularly problematic given growing security challenges, growing trends in America, and the fragile state of our Republic. President Joe Biden’s long-awaited national security strategy fails to correct this and is predictably flawed in the same fundamental ways as past NSC efforts. The document voices broad, aspirational goals describing what the administration wants to achieve, but is very ambiguous on the fundamental purpose of strategy, describing how their goals will be achieved. Specifically, the document’s lofty yet ambiguous language articulates more policy than strategy, reemphasizing a fundamental NSC misunderstanding of strategy. This disconnect has implications to successful implementation. Ambiguous goals mean defining intent and formulation of supporting objectives are left to departmental and interagency interpretation. This invariably assures poor implementation towards disparate ends, and recently in abject failure.
This piece was originally published in Volume 67, Issue 1.
The lasting effects of a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the downward spiral of relations with China, North Korean nuclear belligerence, the specter of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East-as well as domestic upheaval over the 2020 presidential election and the insurrection that followed-are driving a crisis of confidence in America. These all conspire to accelerate both domestic and international perceptions of a diminished America whose power and influence are receding.[1]
The new national security strategy predictably focuses on these challenges, looking largely outward in terms of US interests, values, and place in the world. Echoing President Biden’s March 2021 interim guidance, the document underscores restoring America’s “enduring advantages,” with emphasis on rebuilding economic foundations and international institutions while advancing “shared interests” and seeking to “bolster deterrence in an increasingly confrontational world.”[2]
National security professionals, pundits and scholars alike have opined for months over the structure, themes, and priorities that the pending document should emphasize. Fueling this flood of opinion is the pervasive anxiety among scholars and national security professionals who recognize an unprecedented lack of confidence in both the national character and in the ability of American institutions to deal with these problems effectively. In contrast, the new Biden strategy argues that we are “strong abroad because we are strong at home.” This sentiment undermines the document’s validity. A viable strategy is one based in a clear understanding of the security environment. A strategy that minimizes and fails to prioritize genuine domestic threats to our republic ignores reality.
More broadly, the National Security Strategy is intended to provide Congress with the president’s interpretation of national security interests, objectives and intent for applying all facets of US power needed to achieve the nation’s security goals.[3] Articulating national security priorities in an actionable way is the key challenge of the strategy. Unfortunately, the new strategy reads much like past documents: full of aspirational, but ambiguous, objectives that fail to define what constitutes successful achievement, thereby denying focused unity of national effort .
Considering its seventy-plus years of existence, the NSC has a mixed record of performance. But tacit failures over the past twenty years undermine confidence and lower expectations at a time when various threats could dramatically alter our lives and our republic.
The expressed purpose of our national security system is to focus on threats to US interests, to characterize them for presidents in terms of risk to our national wellbeing, and to develop actionable, proportional policy responses to them.[4] This is a daunting task given a world of competing and dangerous security challenges, and it is in this most important task that the NSC frequently fails. A flawed policy-making procedure not only fails Americans, but it also fails allies and emboldens adversaries who increasingly believe the US and Western democracies in general are in decline.
Of primary concern is the deeply flawed policy decision support process that underpins NSC deliberations. Strategic failures in Afghanistan and Iraq reinforce concerns that NSC policy decision support is broken such that our national focus and budgets are not aligned with the most likely threats. Consequently, our collective security is in jeopardy. Clearly, an NSC incapable of informing competent, proportional, risk-based policy advice is an unacceptable liability to the future security of our republic.
Why Does the NSC So Often Get it Wrong?
The NSC is a political body composed of the president’s appointees and a staff of regional and functional experts. This body cannot help but consider decisions in a political context, wherein party positions and political equities temper choices.
This political scenario represents a key challenge to competent policy decisions that is amplified in the current political environment, in which Democrats and Republicans demonize each other. The two dominant political partys’ animosity toward each other fuels an environment that resists consensus on even the most pressing challenges. Widely differing narratives about the January 6, 2021, attack on the US capitol building offer a case in point. This dynamic paralyzes our government’s ability to address domestic threats, as both parties view them first in terms of party agendas.
Beyond the implications of a partisan and paralyzed political system and its inability to address basic issues, compelling domestic security challenges reflect a glaring lack of policy focus on the implications of increased domestic conflict and the growing threat of civil war accelerated by both mainstream and social media.[5] The new national security strategy gives a scant half-page discussion on its intent to deal with “domestic terrorism” while largely ignoring the broader, increasingly violent political divide.[6] The NSC has yet to publish any meaningful policy approach to a disturbing growth of heavily armed groups-motivated by a broad spectrum of irreconcilable political, ethnic, and religious convictions-that increasingly align themselves with a particular party. [7] These groups’ differing narratives cannot help but be fueled by government’s lack of attention to our neglected and broken infrastructure. While the new strategy briefly articulates the administration’s actions to address infrastructure, it is done in a context of global economic competition, not necessarily to address domestic security challenges. Additionally, significant threats-like chemical pollution at levels that threaten our ecosystems and human existence, and the unknown consequences of unregulated technological responses to climate change by artificially influencing the weather demand action now.[8] It may be reasonably argued that these internal threats collectively represent a greater danger to near-term US security than do near-peer adversaries or nuclear or terrorist threats, such that NSC prioritization of existential threats should be reconsidered.
Any of these challenges is more likely to impact our collective lives than is terrorism, or China’s threat to Taiwan, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and threat to the Baltic States. They certainty warrant attention and realistic prioritization in our national security policy documents. The overarching challenge to effective policy is the NSC’s capacity to form reasonable policy choices about them. If the NSC is not postured to develop viable and timely strategic choices about them, the urgency of threats hardly matters. We are left to react to the consequences of failing to address them.
Presidents, and those who advise them, naturally ground their security policy positions in a marriage of ideological worldviews, experience, and threat assessments from the intelligence community. A brief review of recent national security documents affirms a focus on a common set of external threats, e.g., terrorism, great power competition, cyber warfare, and nuclear proliferation.[9]
The most recent White House and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) documents predictably reinforce these external threats. The March 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance characterizes China as a pacing threat and enumerates a cast of other familiar threats.[10]
Americans are accustomed to hearing presidents and national security experts describe these threats in terms of adversaries, alliances, and technological or economic challenges. Climate change increasingly is included among these as a compelling threat, but it has not yet been formally prioritized among other interests within the national security apparatus and budgets.[11]
This NSC guidance frequently fails to articulate priorities or tangible objectives about which national security efforts might be measurably pursued. This flaw has become a chronic challenge in the national security system. Guidance that fails to articulate a meaningful policy end-state toward which the Congress and national security apparatus might prioritize resources often leads to opposing efforts and considerable waste.
For example, the 2022 strategy describes an ongoing intent to revitalize international relations and domestic institutions in aspirational language but fails to articulate the tangible goals about which to focus budgets and effort. In this environment, the departments and agencies are left largely to determine their own goals and priorities-competing for budget and often working toward incongruent ends. The new strategy fails to correct this problem.
Of greater concern, national security documents like the new strategy reflect assessments that are almost exclusively outward looking, focusing little on compelling domestic challenges. In fact, serious threats to American democracy aren’t just the product of external actors. Taken as a whole, there are compelling security challenges at home that may well be of more immediate concern today than are China or international terrorism.
The scarce attention given to real domestic threats in these documents is as puzzling as it is troubling. The national security strategy includes a mere half page and a recent DNI document highlighting domestic extremism as a challenge was a brief four-page summary. This scant focus is indicative of the little public policy emphasis on addressing growing threats in the homeland.[12] Ignoring the growing domestic threat is irresponsible and ignores a real threat to our national security, where immediate actions are crucial. In short, a system that fails to recognize and prioritize all serious threats isn’t protecting our collective interests.
The threats that are most emphasized by the NSC and intelligence sources predictably receive greater attention and budget. That immediate threats get little or no attention while others get outsized attention and budget is a clear problem. A ready example is terrorism. While disruptive and scary, terrorist attacks are not a threat to our national existence. Acts of terrorism represent gruesome tactics and ignite fear, but their impact on our daily lives is marginal. In fact, intense security measures have ensured that no attacks on the 9/ 11 scale have occurred in the past twenty-plus years. It is fair to observe that fear drives budgets and, as a result, counterterrorism (CT) has been a central focus of US national security strategy since 9/ 11. In fact, CT comprised nearly 15 percent of $18 trillion in discretionary spending between 2001 and 2017.[13] The resources expended on CT today continue to consume a significant portion of the defense budget, with no foreseeable decline in sight. [14]
A key consideration here is whether terrorism is a more immediate threat to our livelihoods than are growing domestic challenges. This highlights the core problem: how do administrations, and specifically the NSC, go about informing their security policy decisions?
When confronted with an immediate threat like the 9/11 attacks, the NSC’s policy responses reflected a poorly structured decision-making procedure. In turn, this led to unachievable objectives in Afghanistan and irresponsible loss of lives in pursuit of them. The Bush administration’s NSC compounded poor decisions in Afghanistan with equally poor decisions for the Iraq invasion. Setting aside the contrived nexus of terrorism, nuclear threats, and biological threats-offered as a compelling rationale-the administration’s policy decisions for Iraq undermined military planning and ultimately led to strategic failure. The vast resources wasted in pursuing unachievable goals are startling. The United States spent in excess of $2 trillion in these conflicts only to withdraw without realizing our goals in either theater.[15] Continued emphasis and outsized budgets to combat terrorism today at the expense of other security priorities represents an example of poorly judged priorities. In short, the Bush and Obama administrations’ NSCs frequently failed at their most fundamental task. Since there have been no significant changes to their procedures, the Biden NSC is likely to commit many of the same errors.
Anatomy of a Flawed NSC Analytical Procedure
It is well established that the US national security apparatus is challenged in responding effectively in a fast-paced, twenty-first century environment. Several prominent studies of the US national security policy apparatus provide insights into the structural shortcomings of the national security system. Among these studies, the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) released a 2008 report, “Forging a New Shield,” that describes troublesome structural and process issues:
Real “course of action” strategy is infrequent and limited to key high-level officials, so the system cannot fully support strategy formation or implementation. Interagency planning is irregular, resisted by individual agencies, and too slow and laborious to keep pace with the environment. Implementation is often poorly resourced and poorly integrated. The system militates against rigorous evaluation. The net result is a significantly reduced ability to adapt and respond to a rapidly changing world. [16]
The report emphasizes that “While formal processes are followed in the main, actual decision-making often takes place through informal processes.”[17] The report also identified a disturbing inability to share intelligence and chronic inability to match resources to objectives. [18]
Similar studies reflect these shortcomings and forward common recommendations to address them-including the need for systemic changes, reorganization, restructuring and redefinition of authorities as keys for making the system more responsive. [19] While these recommendations have strong merit, they largely sidestep the key shortcoming that undermines our security policy: the quality ofNSC decision support. The NSC acts as a president’s brain trust in assessing problems and developing policy recommendations. Additionally, when policy decisions make military conflict likely, senior military leaders and their staffs play a central role in advising the NSC and policymakers. In this important relationship, it is imperative that military leaders satisfactorily shape political objectives into supporting military ones that can achieve policy intent. This process requires close coordination between civilian and military leaders, and it demands that military leaders advocate for and achieve a mutual definition of political objectives. Ideally, a president’s appointees to the NSC and their supporting staff provide a circle of expert policy and strategy advisors spanning governmental functions. As mentioned, the political nature of appointments does not assure sufficient analytical skills. By statute, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, provide the preponderance of analysis and advice to inform NSC understanding on issues. [20] The results are predictably stove-piped intelligence assessments and department-centric analyses of issues. All of these recommendations must be integrated into a cohesive, unified executive branch understanding. This integration is to be done within the committee process, but this process is not used consistently, and bureaucratic tensions inhibit effectiveness.[21] Cohesiveness within the NSC is also not assured, as the competition among departments and agencies for budget and influence over policy represents an undermining dynamic.[22] This scenario results in bureaucratic competition that inhibits a cohesive, integrated effort to resolve policy issues.[23]
Thus, adjudication within the NSC committee process requires a sufficiently empowered National Security Advisor (NSA) and subordinate National Security Staff (NSS). While the specific NSS composition is not the focus here, it is important to understand that NSS members’ roles represent a contributing factor in policy success or failure. Since NSS composition and empowerment are subject to presidential prerogative, clearly their influence varies from administration to administration. The NSS is intended to perform several functions across the interagency of government, including administration, policy coordination, supervision, adjudication, formulation, advocacy, and crisis management.[24] Regarding the decision-making procedure, their role in policy formulation depends solely on executive empowerment. Their key function is to manage the committee process and, upon decision, to monitor policy implementation and performance.
If a president does not fully leverage the committee process, decision analysis is centralized within the NSC and principals’ acumen becomes important. A significant challenge emerges when members are assumed to know how to make decisions on complex issues. Therefore, it is important to consider the NSC’s composition and capacity to provide the analytical rigor necessary to review complex problems and make sense of competing threats. NSC principals typically change with each administration, and despite professional members who span administrations, the majority of the NSS also changes. This practice creates breaks in continuity and understanding of issues, thereby imposing a steep learning curve for new administrations. The Bush NSC experienced the 9/11 attacks in their first nine months in office. The Obama NSC entered office to immediate strategic reviews on Iraq and Afghanistan, while a dire financial crisis competed for the president’s attention. Understandably, new administrations will be prone to mistakes. In this environment, it is easy to neglect extensive analysis and instead consider security issues through reference to history and personal experience. Historical context and experience are certainly invaluable in understanding an issue and avoiding past mistakes. However, reliance on historical reference can quickly lead to over-simplification and conflation of issues. Reliance on experience and judgment alone are insufficient. Doing so assumes the current problem is similar to past ones, such that experience is sufficient to address them. This assumption requires all actors to behave like the past, such that judgments about them are reasonable. Contemporary security issues are typically complex and unique, defying historical analogy. Yet, it is under this construct of “experienced judgment” that the NSC and committee system largely functions. Nevertheless, when confronted with a flood of competing issues and the fast pace of information flow, administrations must be capable of responsive decision-making. In this environment, decision-makers must rapidly identify and often choose between sub-optimal, hedging options laden with compromises and “to not get it too far wrong.”[25]
The chances of making good decisions in this environment are hampered by several other impediments. Among fundamental challenges to good policy decision-making is the lack of a formal lexicon of terms or common language. Specificity in language matters, especially when the lives of Americans are at risk. A basic example is that staff routinely use the terms strategy and policy interchangeably.[26] Yet, in NSC deliberations, a policy defines what is to be achieved in terms of objectives; strategy describes how objectives are to be achieved. In this sense, policy must precede strategy. There are also problematic uses of the term “objective” when discussing policy and strategy. For example, when articulating intent to enter into military conflict, presidents often define policy goals in aspirational terms that appeal to their constituencies. These statements may be useful politically, but commitment of military force requires a more practical definition to guide development of achievable objectives. This process requires differentiating the military objective from the political, as Basil Liddell-Hart observed:
In discussing the subject of “the objective” in war it is essential to be clear about, and to keep clear in our minds, the distinction between the political and the military objective. The two are different but not separate. For nations do not wage war for war’s sake, but the pursuance of policy. The military objective is only the means to a political end. Hence the military objective should be governed by the political objective, subject to the basic condition that policy does not demand what is militarily-that is practically-impossible.[27]
Thus, the distinction between political and military objectives is important in understanding how NSC members and military planners interpret presidential intent and implement policy. The same dynamic exists in articulating homeland security policy intent, where law enforcement professionals must derive viable strategies. In the military example, a fundamental flaw in US policy for Afghanistan, Iraq, and the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) was a lack of viable militarily-achievable objectives. The Bush administration articulated the GWOT as “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”[28] This aspirational objective appealed to the nation reacting to the 9/ 11 attacks, but a policy objective requiring military defeat of terrorism was not practical. Terrorism is a tactic that may be employed by anyone. Defeating terrorism then depends upon addressing the motivations for its use. Twenty-plus years of constant pursuit of terrorists demonstrates the folly of “defeating” terrorism by trying to kill all terrorists. US security policy habitually suffers for a lack of clearly specified interests. Not all interests are equal, nor are all threats to them. Internal domestic security interests, with few exceptions, must trump external ones. Our current national security policy focus does not emphasize this imperative. Rather our policies emphasize securing US interests abroad as the key to domestic security.
The competing nature of resource constraints, and the challenge to marshal and sustain national will to secure them, means that administrations must clearly differentiate between-and prioritize among-competing interests. It is necessary, then, to clearly define national interests and their relative importance to guide appropriate security policy decisions. The concept of “national interests” is vague; it assumes a number of meanings and is used in varying contexts. Stanford University professor Stephen Krasner defined them simply as “the objectives sought by the state.”[29] Political scientist Hans Morgenthau described them in more specific terms of survival-that is, “the protection of physical, political and cultural identity against encroachments by other nation-states.”[30] These varying definitions lead to a consideration of their potential uses. International affairs scholar James Rosenau described two general uses, one being “to describe, explain, or evaluate the sources or the adequacy of a nation’s foreign policy”; he also calls national interest “an instrument of political action [that] serves as a means of justifying, denouncing or proposing policies.”[31] Yet others assert that Rosenau’s definitions do “not offer the means for further logical analysis or for empirical investigation.”[32] These observations imply that there must be a necessary differentiation between interests to enable rational comparison. A common approach to achieve this differentiation is by using the terms “vital” and “fundamental.” However, these too require common understanding.
International relations scholar Donald Nuechterlein offered a useful approach to characterize levels of interest that enables prioritization. His approach further provides a specific definition of their relative intensity or risk that is useful to this discussion.[33] Nuechterlein’s approach provides a basis for comparison and an approach to enable prioritization based on the amount of value or level of intensity a nation invests in them. He forwarded four basic categories of interests, listed in priority, which are constants: 1) defense of the homeland; 2) economic well-being; 3) favorable world order; and 4) promotion of values. Given these categories, Nuechterlein’s transitory scale of priority is useful to define the level of intensity or value associated with a basic interest:[34]
Survival Interest is: “where the very existence of the nation is in peril.”
Vital Interest is: “where probable serious harm to the security and well-being of the nation will result if strong measures, including military ones, are not taken by the government within a short period of time.”
Major Interest is: “where potential serious harm could come to the nation if no action is taken to counter an unfavorable trend abroad.”
Peripheral Interest is: “where little if any harm to the entire nation will result if a ‘wait and see’ policy is adopted.”
These definitions are useful in characterizing the differing interpretations of interests between administrations. Certainly, interpreting levels of intensity regarding any interest may change with administrations.[35] Presidents define and value interests in varying ways, depending on their own personal values and ideals, their perception of national values, their worldview, and the competing political interests that influence their behavior. Consequently, one administration may view an interest as vital to the nation while their political opposition may view the same interest differently. The value of Nuechterlein’s approach is that it provides a discrete basis for comparing NSC policy decisions.
When considering the various threats to US interests during the Bush and Obama administrations, none met the “survival” definition. While various actors possessed nuclear and conventional capabilities that could cause devastating harm, none posed an immediate and likely threat to the United States. In this sense, the state of nuclear-capable and conventional threats at the time may be reasonably characterized in terms of vital interests. Whether or not terror threats emanating from around the globe represented vital national interests remains a point of debate. It is, however, fair to characterize the increasingly partisan nature of American politics and a growing threat of conflict or civil war as a vital threat, if not a survival one. Similar to the Bush and Obama administrations’ considerations of Afghanistan and Iraq, President Biden’s challenge is to consider the threat of domestic upheaval in perspective with competing threats and to identify the appropriate urgency in addressing it. Yet it is precisely the uncertainty and complexity associated with characterizing threats that poses difficultly in formulating appropriate policies to address them. The sense of immediacy and level of intensity associated with threats drives the policy response. In this way, formal prioritization through analytical deliberation often gives way to a threat’s immediacy. This was the case in President Bush’s response to the 9/ 11 attacks. It is important to define “analytical process,” as it is also not used consistently across the national security system. National security practitioners use the term “process” liberally and while it typically refers to organizational and hierarchal staffing procedures, it is often conflated with “analysis.”[36] The NSC staffing process may represent a functional assessment, but it is not decision analysis. Analysis refers here to a specific procedure, or rather a series of discrete actions or operations to bring about a particular outcome. These are specific analytical deliberations undertaken to derive decision criteria and inform a choice.
In this context, were all cognitive, structural, and political influences to be stripped away, a decision would remain the product of a series of discrete deliberations. The NSC should emulate capable examples in other sectors-like the military and intelligence community, or the financial and business sectors-employing extensively tested and effective decision science-based approaches to inform decisions. Such an applied analytical procedure is essential to drive a common approach for making informed choices under conditions of significant uncertainty. This situation involves discrete consideration of assumptions, consequences, and their risk implications to achieving one’s objectives. This assessment then requires defining both risk and uncertainty. These words are often used interchangeably but are decidedly different. Statisticians and mathematicians generally define risk as a measurable chance or the degree of probability that a hazard occurs.[37] Risk then means a sufficient evaluation may be undertaken to enable informed judgment on the likelihood of a hazard occurring. These same disciplines also describe uncertainty in terms of a lack of any quantifiable knowledge about some possible occurrence. [38] This definition acknowledges a limit to knowledge and a degree of unpredictability of future events. In other words, there is not sufficient information available with which to make an informed judgment about it. In this sense, “risk reduction” is sort of a misnomer. One does not reduce risk; one reduces uncertainty about it. Understanding and informing judgments on risk under conditions of uncertainty then means detailed analysis of an action’s consequences and the potential implications of flawed assumptions.
People employ risk assessment every day, most times intuitively. Deciding whether to wear a rain jacket or risk getting wet is a risk assessment people perform routinely. Here the consequences do not warrant extensive analysis. However, the gravity of security policy decisions demands a more deliberate analysis of assumptions and the consequences of potential actions. Of course, this is easier said than done. The analysis of potential hazards is a fundamental task to enable presidents to make informed judgments as to whether intended actions represent acceptable risk. The NSC has often failed to provide this type of analysis. The complexity of security policy decisions is such that the great number of variables and stakeholders in play make risk assessment exceedingly difficult. Likewise, while informed judgment about security policy actions is the goal, time constraints that often accompany security decisions makes informing risk a genuine challenge. The reality is, decision makers are left to make decisions under significantly uncertain conditions. In this environment, even the best-informed decisions can have bad consequences. Anyone who has invested in the stock market understands that unpredictable market forces mean that even the most well-analyzed investment could result in loss. This reality demands that decision makers judge decisions under uncertainty by the quality of the decision-making, not the quality of the consequences. That is, one cannot make uncertainty disappear completely. Consequently, one must account for it in the decision-making procedure and rely on the quality of the analysis to inform judgments.[39] The quality of the decision procedure isin the span of the decision maker’s control.
Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks. The September 11, 2001 attacks certainly justified US action against al Qaeda, but a rushed, emotional approach led to a decision to invade that preceded consideration of what was to be achieved by it. Evaluating the Bush response reflects both omissions of analysis and violations of an orderly approach to understanding the security issue. George Bush decided to invade before articulating what was to be achieved. The NSC, principally the Defense Department, then developed objectives on what they wanted the invasion to achieve without defining mission success. In other words, strategy on how the invasion was to be executed preceded the policy necessary to articulate what the strategy was to achieve. The overarching lesson here is that an unstructured decision procedure within the NSC had direct causal implications to policy failure. Specifically, fundamental flaws in formulating objectives and failure to analyze both assumptions and potential consequences of actions meant the president made a policy decision that accepted excessive risk and ultimately resulted in failure.
It is not melodramatic to assert that security policy decisions of this magnitude demanded a level of professional scrutiny and diligence commensurate with the value of the lives and national resources to be placed at risk. This fundamental requirement demanded that the Bush NSC not only explain why their decision to invade was appropriate but also provide a reasonable characterization of what constituted success. Reasonable focus on the conditions that represented success would likely have driven further refinement of objectives that the military would be asked to achieve. On this point, Carl von Clausewitz remains ever pertinent:
First, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.[40]
The Bush NSC did not meet this requirement, and their policy formulation did not result in reasonable objectives tempered by consideration of what was feasible. Over the course of the past twenty years, the military pursued a focused campaign to kill or capture al Qaeda operatives, but this was insufficient by itself. An effective campaign to defeat al Qaeda demanded a more concerted effort requiring the focused application of other instruments of national power. The administration coined the term GWOT as an overarching strategy. Yet, defining confrontation of terrorism as a global war implied that the conflict in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, were subordinate elements of a “grand design” that was never satisfactorily articulated. [41] To emphasize the challenges in accurately defining grand strategy, the Bush administration articulated a policy, flawed though it was, but not a strategy.[42]
Actions under a grand strategy imply employing all instruments of national power toward a unified goal where, in this case, predominantly military capabilities were employed. Further, the ambiguity of GWOT objectives were problematic in defining proportional means where a war of indeterminate scope and duration could not be effectively resourced. A more fundamental problem was the stated objective of the GWOT to “defeat” terror. This unrealistic objective was “to eliminate a means of fighting, not to achieve a political goal.”[43] Bush’s objectives in Afghanistan and the GWOT were characterized by vague verbs like “disrupt, deny, and defeat” with no explanation of the conditions that would define successful achievement of each. These objectives did not change during the administration’s tenure nor the succeeding Obama administration. And twenty years later, the United States finally gave up on trying to achieve them.
Hart’s reminder on subordinating the military objective to the political one is particularly pertinent here: “the military objective should be governed by the political objective, subject to the basic condition that policy does not demand what is militarily-that is practically-impossible.” In this sense, the objectives to disrupt and deny al Qaeda, though vague, were militarily achievable by various measures, but defeating them was, to use Hart’s words, “practically impossible.” This demanded a broader political, legal, and financial strategy on a global scale to deny terrorists material support and reduce their ideology’s appeal. The perpetual nature of this effort, absent a clearly defined grand strategy and achievable end-state conditions, made identifying sustainable resourcing a veritable Gordian knot.
President Obama’s policy decisions on Afghanistan suffered much the same analysis failure as did Bush’s. His decision-making on Afghanistan is illustrative that poor decisions are not typically due to a lack of effort or intellect. Rather, many decision makers don’t know how to properly analyze and develop criteria to inform a good decision.[44]
The challenges to good policy decision-making by the Obama administration were amplified by the president’s requirement to address wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously responding to an immediate economic crisis. This environment led the president to rely on a strategic assessment from experts outside his NSC. The new president accepted the recommendations of a rapid strategic review that largely retained the flawed objectives of the previous seven years. Obama further complicated the policy intent by adding objectives for Pakistan that greatly expanded the scope of effort and increased the risk. A repeat of the flawed Bush procedure, the initial Obama policy decision focused on strategy formulation rather than on policy characterizing what was to be achieved by the strategy.
Obama was left unsatisfied by this initial policy. Over the course of a second extended policy and strategy review, the president demonstrated a pragmatic focus on resource-constrained objectives. He was forceful in stating that a long-term presence in Afghanistan was not in US interests.[45] However, the Obama NSC policy formulation procedure was an ad hoc approach that made the president vulnerable to analytical errors and omissions. This procedure was further undermined by bureaucratic and organizational influences that challenged good decision-making. Obama’s effort was ultimately no more effective than that of the Bush administration.
Dysfunction within Obama’s staff also impaired decision-making. Both NSS and the president’s personal staff members’ desire to control decision-making undermined the NSC process. This undermining also alienated departments of the executive branch from the president. Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed that the president’s NSS was impaired by a lack of executive branch experience and that National Security Advisor James Jones was quickly marginalized by others near the president.[46] In this environment, one might normally expect the president to rely heavily on his more experienced NSC principals. President Obama did not, and key policy decisions were often made outside of formal channels by the president and a small circle of trusted agents on his staff.[47]
While experienced judgment is insufficient by itself to address complex problems, a wealth of experience within the NSC takes on greater importance in the absence of a structured analytical procedure. Yet Obama marginalized his most experienced principals in favor of his own assessment and advice from inexperienced staff. As a result, his decisions were undermined by unstructured analysis and significant influence from the most inexperienced perspectives in his administration.
These flaws in Bush and Obama policy formulation provide insight into systemic challenges within the national security system that impair good policy decision-making. The compressed decision cycle under crisis conditions denied extensive use of the committee system. This tight timeframe left critically important analysis of assumptions, consequences, and risk up to principals who did not exercise a significant intellectual effort on them. This failure points to another key element of the system: the role of Congress in providing legal authority and approval of resources to implement the policy.
The Bush and Obama NSCs’ analytical failures also amplify the negative implications of both broad executive branch latitude and weak legislative branch actions to drive a more reasonable set of objectives. This lack of effective checks and balances between executive and legislative branches perhaps illustrates the incompleteness of statutory requirements dictating executive responsibilities in justifying employment of military force. More specifically, these cases both reflect a lack of necessary legislative requirements on NSC responsibilities to develop specific decision criteria on which to base congressional support. Absent legislative demands for key decision criteria clarifying objectives and the conditions that would indicate achievement of them, the executive branch was free to enter conflict without critically important legal tethers on the ways and means by which it would be prosecuted. These systemic issues likewise reflect a lack of diligence on Congress’ part to exercise appropriate checks and balances on executive authority. Congress failed to exercise conditional support, based on articulation of key policy criteria by which to judge the appropriateness of intended actions in terms of benefit to national interests and the cost in lives and resources. This systemic national security issue is likely to persist in the absence of statutory requirements for discrete policy decision criteria as a condition for Congressional support.
The outcomes of these cases reinforce how vast US economic capacity and unparalleled military capabilities were insufficient to overcome poor policy decision-making. The cited challenges to national security policy formulation in these cases are indicative of those that the Eiden administration now faces.
Although President Biden issued a Memorandum on Renewing the National Security Council System, no formal, systemic changes to the NSC’s analytical procedure have been made.[48] Consequently, the Biden NSC is prone to the same procedural errors as past administrations. Ignoring or delaying action on domestic threats only compounds this challenge. Left unaddressed, the administration will face a crisis situation where the decision analysis cycle is compressed and where the NSC is even more likely to recommend poor choices.
