Thinking About National Security

Strategy, Policy, and Issues

Donald Snow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317449201
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2016

Perhaps the most basic national security question that U.S. leaders and the body politic continuously face is where and under what circumstances to consider and in some cases resort to the use of armed force to ensure the country's safety and well-being. The question is perpetual—but the answer is not. This insightful text helps students make sense of the ever-changing environment and factors that influence disagreement over national security risks and policy in the United States.

The book takes shape through a focus on three considerations: strategy, policy, and issues. Snow explains the range of plans of action that are possible and resources available for achieving national security goals, as well as the courses of action for achieving those goals in the context of a broad range of security problems that must be dealt with. However, there is little agreement among policymakers on exactly what is the nature of the threats that the country faces. Snow helps readers frame the debate by suggesting some of the prior influences on risk-assessment, some of the current influences on national security debates, and suggestions for how future strategy and policy may be shaped.

Part I

Context

1 U.S. Policy in Transition

At the most basic conceptual level, national security is not all that complicated. Most national security problems can basically be understood and analyzed with principal reference to three core concepts suggested in the Introduction. National security issues can sometimes seem perplexing and unfathomable, but centering discussions on these basic notions allows a manageable conceptual economy and approach to the national security predicament.

This simplicity can be both beguiling and misleading. A good bit of the contextual setting of real life national security analysis tends to be either very technical (the detailed lethal characteristics of one’s own and adversaries’ weapons capabilities, for instance) or clandestine (such as intelligence analyses of adversary intent in particular situations) or both. While there are always important complicating influences that cannot be known or easily fathomed by the lay person, this should not obscure the fact that the basic dynamics of the national security equation can almost always be reduced to the core ideas. Because the devil is usually in the details, the average citizen may be at a disadvantage reaching detailed judgments in particular situations; it does not mean that citizens cannot reach sound judgments on core concerns. Those who suggest (and there are many of them) that national security judgments are beyond the grasp of the interested citizen are simply wrong or have some personal agenda that is served by shielding matters from public scrutiny.

The contemporary environment in which national security operates is highly contentious, largely on two grounds. The first and overarching source of disagreement stems from the general malaise of American politics. Among the consequences of that pathology is a tendency to polarize and make partisan all issues regardless of content. The area of national security is not exempt from the adversarial personalization and polarity of the public on all issues. Matters such as the ongoing controversy over the killing of American diplomats and intelligence officers in Benghazi and ongoing dissent about U.S. policy toward the Syrian Civil War are examples.

The impact of the hyperpartisan debate on discussions of national security may be largely artificial, born not so much out of concern over the topic du jour as it is with gaining political points in the partisan bloodletting that marks so much political dialogue in this country. There is, however, a more fundamental and legitimate basis of disagreement that is always part of the national security dialogue. This disagreement is more deeply philosophical and reflects basic differences in judgment arising from the subjective nature of so much of the fundamental subject matter. While it is necessary to mention the partisan poison that hangs like an obscuring fog over political discussions, it is necessary to “burn away” that fog and to examine the more fundamental issues that divide Americans and that form the enduring basis for the national security debate.

In order to pursue that understanding, this introductory chapter will proceed sequentially through a series of conceptual building blocks that cumulatively form the basis for evaluating current and future issues. It will begin by defining and placing in context the basic concepts around which national security questions gravitate, including some discussion of the implications of the concepts, the relationships between them, and how the seemingly endless debate of American policy toward Iraq illustrates these dynamics. It then moves to an assessment of the current state of the debate, in the process trying to cull the wheat from the chaff of ongoing questions and disagreements. Because part of the perspective that the citizens of any country have toward national security is influenced by idiosyncratic experiences and interpretations of those experiences, the discussion moves to a section on uniquely American influences and how Americans frame national questions and answers. It concludes with a brief assessment of the national security “equation” for the United States.

The National Security Equation: Variables and Constants

The national security enterprise does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, its context lies within a competitive framework in which the United States interacts with other countries and groups within countries and where the major objective of all participants is to maximize their security. The common elements in dictionary definitions of security are safety and a sense of safety. This suggests that there are two basic elements to security: physical safety (the objective inability of hostile others to cause one harm) and the feeling (or sense) of security. The former element of security is physical and, generally speaking, fairly objective and agreed upon. Americans, for instance, did not worry much about being physically attacked and conquered or killed by their enemies after the British quit trying during the War of 1812 until the Soviets perfected nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles capable of attacking and destroying the country (if with awful consequences to themselves) after 1957. Americans were physically safe for 140 years of American history and thus had little reason to concern themselves with this most elemental form of security.

The conditions that make people feel safe are an entirely different matter and the cornerstone of most national disagreement over security policy. The simple fact is that different conditions and situations affect different people in different ways. These differences form the basis of much honest (and occasionally not so honest) debate about what imperils the national condition and what must be done to rectify it. The disagreements at this level can often be very visceral and deeply felt and can inflame discussions among those who have them to the point of arousing the hyperpartisan passions that so trouble political discourse generally. As an example, the question of how important the physical security of Israel is to the American sense of safety is guaranteed to ignite very passionate advocacies on both sides of the issue of how important particular world conditions are to Americans.

There is another concern that is virtually unique to national security analysis and adds to the controversies that often surround it. That concern is the potential physical consequences of national security decisions. A bad judgment in most areas of politics may inconvenience or harm specific Americans and groups, but mistaken national security decisions could literally imperil the existences of Americans by placing them at irretrievable physical peril. Had John Kennedy guessed wrong during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the United States might have been largely destroyed and a significant part of the population killed. Such consequences hardly ever arise in any other policy area. The gravity of possible consequences very much colors the national security debate.

Within these parameters, the conceptual basis of national security can be laid out. Its basis is in the meaning and relationship between three basic concepts, interests, threats, and risk. Their relationship is sequential and cumulative. Understanding how they apply will not answer all the nuances of particular problems and situations, but they go a long way toward defining their meaning.

Interests

The idea of interests, or more specifically national interests, stands at the core of unraveling the rationale for national security concerns. The term “interest” is a difficult, slippery idea, because it is used to mean a variety of things, from a desire to know about something (have an interest in a topic) to a fee paid for the use of funds. In the parlance of international relations (and especially so-called realist interpretations of international dynamics), the qualifier “national” is normally attached to the core concept, helping to give it a specific meaning and establishing the idea at the base of national security concern. Within the hierarchy of things states seek to do in their relations with other states and groups are to maximize those conditions and situations in which they have interests. The most important interest a state has is its physical safety, and a variety of surrounding conditions and situations contributes to how safe a state’s citizens feel about their situation. Thus, a link between interests and security is established.

As the term is used in international relations, an interest refers to a matter of national concern and importance, a condition or situation the state deems important to its health and well-being. The French term raison d’etat (purpose of state) is often used as a synonym and suggests that the major purpose of a country’s government is to ensure that national interests are realized. National security strategy and policy is a basic avenue through which the national interest is pursued.

The problem with interests is that they are competitive. What this means is that not all interests of individuals and groups coincide: what one state or other entity views as a desirable, even necessary, condition may not be viewed in the same way by others. In some cases, this competition may take the form that the interests of the groups are mutually exclusive and conflicting: both cannot simultaneously enjoy their desirable conditions, and at worst, the realization of one group’s interests may only be achievable at the expense of another group’s interests. This condition is conflict of interest, and when the incompatibility between desired situations affects countries and has important, fundamental proportions and consequences, the results are very consequential and important to national governments. These kinds of situations are common within the relations between states and form the grist of national security concerns and efforts to ensure the national security. Without interests that come into conflict with the interests of others, national security would be a far less central concern than it is in a world where interests clash.

The idea of interest must, however, be refined with two additional, related qualifications. The first of these is the comparative importance of various interests in the national hierarchy of values: all interests are not of equal importance. The second, and related, qualification is the means that will be employed to realize particular interests: not all means are appropriate or proportional to the interests in whose defense they are proposed. Both qualifications are debatable and, to some extent, subjective, adding spice to the general cauldron of disagreement on national security topics.

Clearly, states have interests of varying importance, and this variation can be related to the basic distinctions regarding security more generally. Within the realm of national security, the most important interests relate to the physical security or safety of the country, and more debatable interests are attached to the conditions that make people feel safe. The importance of core, physical interests is generally well established and agreed upon; disagreement begins to occur when one moves to discussing the psychological conditions that make people feel safe and the degree of interest the state has in realizing those conditions, including what it may be willing to do in that realization. Much of the debate over national security can be isolated to this area of interests.

One of the most common ways to distinguish the importance of interests is through a simple dichotomy (that I have developed more extensively in the various editions of National Security for a New Era (Snow 2014)) between vital interests (VIs) and less-than-vital interests (LTVs). The distinction is intuitive. VIs, as the name implies, are situations where the failure to realize a value would be nationally intolerable (its realization is vital to national survival or well-being). There is a finite list of such interests (e.g. the sanctity of national borders), but they are generally well agreed upon and unchanging. LTVs, on the other hand, are conditions that might be unfortunate, inconveniencing, or even compromising of national values, but whose realization is not intolerable. The list of LTVs is long, changing, expandable depending on circumstances, and the area where there is the most disagreement, either based on whether an interest exists or on its importance. Almost all the divisiveness over national security policies surrounds LTVs.

The other distinction is about what means the state will use to realize its interests. In national security matters, this distinction centers on the question of whether the state should be willing to use force—and if so what kinds and extent of force—to realize its interests. Because the employment of armed forces is an extreme act, determining when the state should or will use force, generally or in particular situations, is a matter of ongoing contention. This is particularly true because of the expense of raising, maintaining, and employing different kinds and levels of forces.

The two distinctions come together. Generally speaking, the more important an interest is, the more likely force will be viewed as an appropriate tool to realize it. The general “line in the sand” is whether VIs exist in particular situations. The realist position is that armed force should be limited to situations where VIs are threatened, and while some find this too restrictive, it is a generally agreed upon standard (at least partly because most military professionals support it). As a result, debates about invoking American forces for use in particular situations will almost rhetorically be framed in VI terms, with proponents arguing they are and opponents denying that assertion. Indeed, it is not unfair to typify most of the national disagreement on national security matters as a lack of consensus about where the line between vital and LTV interests lies.

Threats

The second link in the chain is threats, a concept introduced and defined in the Introduction. Threats are the problem that arises from conflicts of interests between the United States, other states, and groups within or between states whose interests differ significantly from American interests. Incompatibility of interest, however, is not the sufficient trigger of national security concern. Rather, what makes a situation rise to a national security problem is when an adversary (someone whose interests are incompatible with one’s own) asserts the intention to realize his or her preference at the expense of one’s own. The threat is the mechanism by which another party asserts his intention to realize his interest at your expense (or vice versa).

Threats are related to but not identical to interests. Interests, particularly physical interests that translate into VIs, are generally reasonably stable and unchanging over time. Non-hostile regimes on American borders and the freedom and independence of most of Europe and northeast Asia are examples. Some interests are more transitory than others, of course, which is the source of disagreement about them. What, for instance, are American interests in East Africa, and how important are they? The answer is such interests are debatable and changeable. Threats, on the other hand, change, depending on a variety of factors. Western European freedom from harm was fundamentally threatened by potential Soviet aggression during the Cold War, but no equivalent threat exists today. A half-century ago, few Americans were very concerned about threats to stability in the Levant, but such threats clearly exist in the contemporary environment.

As noted in the Introduction, threats are also subjective. What conditions or changes are threatening to some people are less threatening (or not threatening at all) to others, and these conditions and the emotions they produce change as well. Most of this disagreement arises because different parties emerge at different times in different places who assert contradictory interests and who threaten to act upon those differences at American expense. The threat posed by international religious terrorism is clearly of this nature. At the same time, people can and do disagree about some more enduring obstacles to the realization of American interests that are enduring but at least somewhat ambiguous. Does China pose a threat to the United States, for instance? If it does, what kind of threat is it? And what can be and should be done to deal with the peril it presents?

Threats are the problems that arise from the existence and clash of interests between parties. There is a core both of interests and threats on which almost everyone agrees and thus on which there is concord about what to do about them. Posing a counter-threat to the Soviet ability to obliterate the United States with nuclear weapons was so compelling and obvious to most Americans that there was little dissent about policy to deal with it. The problems arise, of course, because disagreement exists about how important interests are, what means should be used to protect them, and about the nature and changing constellation of threats to national interests. The policy debate revolves around first defining what the problems are (interests and threats to them) and about how to respond to the perils the environment provides. Risk and risk management is the art and science that deals with this part of the equation.

Risk

The nature of threats means that risks vary as well. How many risks one takes, the dangerousness of those risks to national security, and the relative importance of individual risky situations depends on an assessment of the threat posed by each situation and by their accumulation. Since risk reduction requires the commitment of resources (capabilities) to deflect or remove threat, the degree of the capability a country must devote to making itself safe and feel safe also varies. There is an old political saw that “policy is what gets funded.” In that sense, the assessments of interests, threats, risks, and the capabilities necessarily devoted to those threats are at the heart of the political process, particularly since national security resources also tend to be very costly.

All areas of public policy, of course, can be assessed using the risk formula of Risk = Threat − Capability introduced earlier. There are potential negative consequences for not dealing with any political problem. What sets national security threats apart is that they emanate from sources that do not wish the country well and that may, given the opportunity and felt need, do grievous injury to the country.

The potentially damaging, even apocalyptical in some extreme cases, consequences of national security policy color discussions about the subject in ways generally ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Context
• Part II: Influences
• Index