US National Security Reform

Reassessing the National Security Act of 1947

Heidi B. Demarest, Erica D. Borghard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815398462
• eBook ISBN: 9781351171540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This collection of essays considers the evolution of American institutions and processes for forming and implementing US national security policy, and offers diverse policy prescriptions for reform to confront an evolving and uncertain security environment.

Twelve renowned scholars and practitioners of US national security policy take up the question of whether the national security institutions we have are the ones we need to confront an uncertain future. Topics include a characterization of future threats to national security, organizational structure and leadership of national security bureaucracies, the role of the US Congress in national security policy making and oversight, and the importance of strategic planning within the national security enterprise. The book concludes with concrete recommendations for policy makers, most of which can be accomplished under the existing and enduring National Security Act.

This book will be of much interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, Cold War studies, public policy and Internationl Relations in general.

1

The durable National Security Act

Richard K. Betts

The National Security Act of 1947 is now well past normal retirement age but like many other baby boomers is still working full-time. As the Trump revolution unfolds, should we expect to see it junked?

Even before Trump there were calls to update the fundamental statutory basis for national security decision and implementation, as young up-and-comers looked impatiently at the seemingly outmoded attitudes and waning capacities of elders they wished would step aside. The urge to replace is natural for those who focus on blunders in the substance of national security policy and assume results would have been better if the process of policymaking had been different. Or it seems natural to frustrated toilers inside the Beltway as they focus on barriers to accomplishing the specific priorities of interest to them among the complex mix of purposes in national security.

If we look beyond the intuition stoked by immediate dissatisfactions the case for major change is unclear. Dissatisfaction is largely about the speed and results of the existing structure and process. Speed is blunted in large part by the conflict of complex competing interests and the checks and balances that protect them. This is the price of democratic government in general. Results, in turn, depend on the wisdom of incumbents who act through the existing process. At some level, judgment about the success or failure of institutions is not independent of the policy that comes out of them, but designers can only aim for structures and processes that will enable a proper process or decision; they cannot select the individuals who accede to power over time and inhabit the structures. Office holders come and go, true institutions must endure for generations. Successful institutions set and bound the conditions in which government operates and provide incentives and opportunities for fallible incumbents to do their best. Institutions must work despite wide variation over time in officials’ ideologies, experience, and sensibility, and through tidal changes in the political, economic, and social conditions that surround them.

A bad structure may hamper good designs of wise incumbents, but a good structure cannot prevent bad initiatives or foolish ones. In short, it is important to focus on the difference between institutions and outcomes or the difference between a design that optimizes one purpose and a design that “satisfices” across the board when many purposes conflict. Fixing particular problems opens the door to other problems.

There are two main managerial issues to be handled over time: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal one is when to add new organs, as technology changes and new functions or policy problem areas emerge. In principle, this should also mean when to retire obsolete organs, although this hardly ever happens, so the complexity of the system tends to grow. The vertical issue is where the balance should be struck between the benefits of centralization and decentralization of authority.

Among the tests of how well an institutional system manages these adaptations are whether it works to reveal issues requiring consideration and decision, provides relevant information and options to policymakers, and produces clear and deliberate actions rather than accidental or unrecognized ones. A system must enable these processes even if it cannot force a president and his lieutenants to take proper advantage of them – a big issue in the evolving Trump era. Enabling requires some balance between organizational pluralism and decentralization to represent relevant concerns, and integration and centralization to impose direction and coherence on choices. The National Security Act and the several amendments and additions to it have accomplished these aims imperfectly, but better than the less developed system before 1947, and probably as well on balance as a system that might be designed differently. In the United States since 1947 failures in national security policy have been due far more to high politics and misjudgments than to the managerial apparatus established by the Act.

When attention focuses on the difference between institutions and results, and one considers whatever else is on offer, the National Security Act still looks like a solid foundation. This does not mean that no changes in the system are needed. New problems can sometimes prove revolutionary – today, for example, the rapid emergence of cybersecurity as a fundamental priority for all elements of government and the civilian economy. The question is whether necessary adaptations cannot be thoroughly accomplished within the limits of existing legislation. No structure remains perfectly suited for a mission over long spans of evolving conditions and challenges, and any that is successful must evolve along with its context, but the institutions designed in 1947 and the 1949 amendments to the Act, tweaked occasionally since, have proved remarkably able to perform their functions through changing times.

Strategic revolution, institutional evolution

What was the impetus for the Act? Consensus on peacetime American activism in the world, and maintenance of a large standing military establishment, is now deeply rooted in American politics, but in 1947 it was new. Within government the National Security Act gave support to the direction in which the United States had been firmly headed since Pearl Harbor. The idea of isolationism had always been exaggerated anyway. The United States had been deeply involved in Asia since 1898 and in Latin America earlier; isolationism applied in effect to abstention from the European balance of power. Events of the 1930s and subsequent global catastrophe discredited that abstention and World War II left Washington with dramatically expanded political, economic, and military roles, both outside and inside the country.

Outside, the war had left revolutionary changes in world order: economic unipolarity and politico-military bipolarity. With the rest of the West in ruins, both revolutions in world order seemed to demand American leadership. Inside, all of the American government had grown rapidly, first in the New Deal, then in the mobilization for war. Both outside and inside the country these expansions naturally generated efforts to organize and integrate the proliferation of participants and mechanisms of policymaking and implementation. Outside, the point was to unite allies in reliable and effective collaboration well before war, to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. Inside, the point was to bring coherence to a complex array of organizations that had emerged haphazardly and grown quickly.

On the inside, there was an anti-statist tradition that remained an undercurrent and constrained some aspects of Cold War mobilization.¹ The domestic consensus for sustaining muscular government across the board, however, lasted nearly half a century, from Roosevelt until Reagan. Although that consensus has faltered since then it is useful to remember that none of the three Republican presidents between 1945 and 1981 challenged the main institutions of the New Deal. In any case, the consensus (or to be accurate, the elite consensus) on international activism, and thus for maintaining robust national security institutions, has lasted longer than the public’s favorable view of government in general. Civilian political leaders are rated low in public opinion surveys but the military remains more respected and popular than almost all other domestic institutions. Commitment to forward-leaning foreign policy has been stronger among the American elite than in mass opinion, but it endures and controls, brushing off political challenge from losers such as Robert Taft, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, or Ron and Rand Paul. (Donald Trump has tilted erratically in the direction of retrenchment when he rails about free-riding allies, but has more often indulged his contradictory instinct toward belligerence.) The domestic reflection of the global mission at its dawn was the reshaping of the policymaking system in the 1947 Act.

The principal early efforts to organize and integrate in the outside world were the United Nations (UN) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), multinational organizations led by the United States. Many had high hopes for the UN at its birth and assumed it would play an important material role in peace enforcement. In an exclamation in 1950 that now seems quaintly naï ve after more than six decades of international violence, Secretary General Trygve Lie responded to Assistant Secretary of State John Hickerson’s news that North Korea had invaded the South in June 1950 by blurting, “My God, Jack, that’s a violation of the United Nations Charter!”² The UN’s utility, however, has remained primarily diplomatic, while NATO in Europe and bilateral alliances elsewhere have been the effective instruments for the prevention and prosecution of America’s wars.

In the late 1940s American economic hegemony, represented in the Marshall Plan and its bureaucratic embodiment, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), underwrote NATO’s political and military counterweight to the threat from Moscow. The USSR was ravaged by the war, but left with military forces controlling half of Europe and ideological influence, via Communist parties, within the countries of the other half. As time went on, the overwhelming American economic dominance was eroded as Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union recovered, but bipolarity endured and intensified – politically, as electoral challenges from western Communist parties were blunted and the two blocs solidified, and militarily, as Moscow developed nuclear weapons – and the peacetime fielding of large conventional forces on both sides continued.

NATO was the main event in external integration. As Robert Osgood emphasized more than a half-century ago, it was an unprecedented alliance in two respects. First, it was a peacetime commitment by the United States to immediate involvement in a European war – the “entangling alliance” against which Washington’s Farewell Address had warned, but which the lessons of the 1930s were seen to require. Along with the Marshall Plan which preceded it, the North Atlantic Treaty marked the Republican Party’s enlistment in the Cold War consensus, as Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s support trumped Robert Taft’s opposition.

Osgood’s second emphasis remains NATO’s most significant aspect today: “NATO is unique among peacetime alliances. In fact, it has assumed tasks of multinational planning, decision, and action that few wartime alliances have performed.”³ It evolved quickly from a simple guaranty pact into a highly integrated transnational institution. As with any alliance, members pledged to come to each other’s defense in event of war (although the limits of this Article 5 promise have traditionally been overlooked).⁴ NATO went further. It established joint command structures, mechanisms, and peacetime deployments as well as a formal North Atlantic Council (NAC) for regular consultation and deliberation. Institutionalization underwrote the presumption of automaticity in the mutual commitment. In the early days some, especially Dwight Eisenhower, thought the peacetime forward presence of U.S. forces in the integrated defense plan would be temporary as Western Europe recovered and created, in effect, tripolarity.⁵ Instead, permanent peacetime deployment was assumed after the 1950s as Washington pushed the strategic concept of flexible response on the allies.

Fatefully, NATO’s unique institutionalization was not replicated in Asia. There was no NEATO for Northeast Asia. In principle, there was multinational military action in Korea, via the UN Command, but in practice, especially after the 1953 truce, deterrence in Korea was a bilateral affair between Washington and Seoul. Starting in 1955, with the French withdrawal from Indochina, there was a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) but it never developed beyond a hollow shell. Indeed it was almost immediately moribund, although it did take twenty years to die officially after proving irrelevant to the main conflict of its time, the second Indochina war.

In one sense there was less need in Asia for the unprecedented military integration of NATO because the main asset to be defended, Japan, was protected by a water barrier, unlike Germany and France, and the geography of the peninsula limited the conventional force that Communist powers could bring to bear on the short front. The other military challenges in Asia were primarily revolutionary movements, as in Vietnam, against which maximizing a conventional force was not the main problem. The absence of a clearly mobilized and articulated multinational deterrent, however, did enable North Korean miscalculation in 1950. Today the absence of a multinational security organization also reflects the continuing hesitancy of countries in the region to commit to united deterrence of Chinese expansion.

Postwar demobilization proceeded even as the 1947 Act was passed – conscription lapsed in that year, although it was soon renewed when the Berlin Blockade began in 1948 – but much of the organization of U.S. military forces to backstop bipolarity was in place or nascent by the time of the 1947 Act. Forerunners of the system of unified and specified commands that came to implement the global sweep of U.S. military operations in the Cold War grew out of the preceding war and subsequent occupations: the army’s European Command and Far East Command, and the Strategic Air Command formed in the Army Air Force the year before the Act made the service independent. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which had grown out of the Joint Board in early 1942, became permanent. Similarly, modest centralization of foreign intelligence functions already occurred with the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) before the Act made it into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Many postwar planners hoped for fundamental changes that would truly unify the armed services and consolidate organizations, but resistance (especially from the navy) kept the final legislation from going that far.⁶ For the institutions to carry out U.S. policy, the National Security Act clarified, codified, and extended the institutional evolution that originated in World War II.

The bumper sticker for the main effects of the 1947 Act would be “coordinating pluralism.” Some officials, frustrated by the complexity of overlapping and independent units involved in planning and operations during World War II, hoped for dramatic consolidation of functions. After the pulling and hauling that produced the Act this did not happen; duplication and overlaps largely survived, although they became subject to higher-level oversight, and over time, some greater discipline. Three new organizations, however, were crucial management innovations. Establishment of the Department of Defense (DoD) did not merge the separate services, but it did create a civilian hierarchy that could arbitrate, choose, or direct among the services more effectively than before.⁷ Establishment of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) did not merge the intelligence functions of the military services’ and State Department’s intelligence units, but it did create more coherent mechanisms for getting information and analysis to the top. Establishment of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Epigraph
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The durable National Security Act
• 2 Improving strategic assessment in the executive branch
• 3 Bent but not broken?
• 4 Contradictions in U.S. security planning for a global environment and a process approach to solving them
• 5 What have we learned about how presidents organize for national security decision making, 1947–2017?
• 6 Toward a smaller White House national security staff
• 7 How we decide what we need
• 8 Global challenges and American grand strategy for the 21st century
• 9 Security challenges in the post-unipolar era
• 10 Global challenges, U.S. national security strategy, and defense organization
• 11 The diffusion of power and the organization of the U.S. national security establishment
• Conclusion: Looking ahead - The future of national security reform
• Afterword: National security reform for a new era - An agenda for policymakers
• Index