Nss Quotes

To the betrayers, liars and the thieves; your fate will be waiting in the dark of night, burrowing like a snake. And it will come for you when you least expect it. It always comes when you least expect it.” ~NSS

In tone, the administration said that the NSS was all about championing America, but I wondered what America that was: the national/nativist state defined by blood, soil, and shared history? Or America the creedal nation, the Madisonian embodiment of Enlightenment ideals? I suspected that it was the former, since the champion, Donald Trump, had already alleged that American elections were “rigged,” three million people had voted illegally (all against him), the seat of government was a “swamp,” the free press was the “enemy of the people,” crime was at record rates, and the American judicial system was a “joke.” In all that, he sounded a lot like an Internet troll on a botnet controlled from Saint Petersburg. Or like Vladimir Putin. Whom he never could quite admit had worked to get him elected. But Putin had. And then some.

Whatever actually happened or was said, McChystal's refusal to defend himself - to give me any ammunition to use on his behalf - made it impossible for me to save his job. But to this day, I believe he was given the bum's rush by Biden, White House staff, and NSS who harbored deep resentment toward his unyielding advocacy the previous fall of counterinsurgency and a huge troop surge in Afghanistan; who interpreted his public comments back than as "boxing in" the president; and who continued to oppose the strategy approved by the president and the way McChrystal was implementing it. I am convinced the "Rolling Stone" article gave the president, egged on by those around him in the White House, and himself distrustful of the senior military, and opportunity he welcomed to demonstrate vividly - to the public and to the Pentagon - that he was commander in chief and fully in control of the military.

The NSS wants to run the show, day to day and minute to minute,” one former senior military official told me, “so they have no time—they’re almost incapable of strategic thinking. It’s often just crisis du jour over there.” Meanwhile, military recommendations go unheeded because senior White House staff have come to assume that a risk-averse Pentagon exaggerates every difficulty and inflates every request for troops or money.

The requirement for the United States to craft a national security strategy (NSS) document was first codified in the National Security Act of 1947, and amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. The 1986 amendment requires the President to submit the document on an annual basis to Congress to provide a comprehensive report on U.S. national security strategy. Both pieces of legislation mandate that the strategy include a "comprehensive description and discussion of worldwide interests, goals, and objectives...that are vital to the national security of the United States." It would also address foreign policy, world wide military commitments, U.S. national defense capabilities, short- and long-term uses of the elements of national power, and the requirement to have the strategy transmitted to Congress in both classified and unclassified form. A number of national security strategies were developed over time prior to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, to include what many believe was the most significant grand strategy of the era, NSC-68, the key containment strategy against Soviet and Chinese communism. All were crafted during the pre-Goldwater-Nichals Act period at the classified level.

I seek to illuminate what has hitherto been obscured as well as downplayed in the scholarly literature. In my argument, in the absence of the NSS and the permanent defense preparedness around which it has formed, there would be little to distinguish U.S. innovation from that found in most other advanced democracies. Whether one should applaud or regret such an outcome is not germane to my argument. Certainly, it is conceivable that once established, a transformative innovation capacity could be unmoored from its originating NSS institutions and its geopolitical drivers. But we must also factor in particularities of the domestic institutional setting, which make that outcome most unlikely—namely, the domestic strength of antistatism.

in order to attract private actors to carry through their innovation projects and policies, various components of the NSS have to create, and periodically update, a whole system of incentives and organizational arrangements—ranging from the funding and design of technology development to intellectual property and procurement reforms. Over time, this motivating process draws the NSS further and further into promoting commercial technology from which both sectors can draw benefit. But throughout this process of give and take, the NSS continues to set the goals, make the rules (for example, by setting performance standards), and define the problem sets for industry and university researchers to tackle. The outcome is what I characterize as a system of governed interdependence—neither “statist” nor “free-market” in its approach to inducing transformative innovation.

although the security imperative and the NSS to which it gives rise provide the driving force behind transformative technology development, governed interdependence is the obverse of statism (or top-down direction of the economy); it conceptualizes the collaborative and negotiated character of public-private sector relations as NSS components seek to achieve their goals (an example being the increasing emphasis that defense programs place on developing products and services that serve both military and commercial markets). I emphasize that the governed interdependence concept applies to situations in which a government body works with or through private actors and entities to achieve its own objectives, but at the same time maintains control over the goals to be pursued and the rules of participation. This does not mean that outcomes will always yield the results desired or that there will not be spectacular failures.

Another significant problem arises from our national leaders’ disagreement over what actually constitutes policy objectives. [...] In practice, the many NSS’ [National Security Strategy] have presented national interests in ambiguous or broad terms or as statements of the obvious, making the value of the exercise suspect. There are respected public officials and scholars who feel strongly that the US must articulate its national interests if we are to successfully chart our future. One such group even developed a hierarchy of interests ranging from “vital interests,” “extremely important interests,” and “important interests,” to “less important or secondary interests.” I saw this problem first hand as a member of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, established by Congress to assess the 2010 QDR. Early on, panel members discovered they could find no meaningful and authoritative description of the nation’s vital national interests. Members recognized that without such a description the panel could not effectively assess the QDR. To contend with the issue the co-chairmen established a subcommittee, which it was my privilege to chair, to determine “enduring national security interests of the United States and examine how emerging trends may affect those interests over the next 20 years.” This subcommittee concluded that: At the root of the Department‘s force-planning problem is a failure of our political leadership to explicitly recognize and clearly define these essential strategic interests. To be sure, it would have been easier for the Department had post–Cold War presidents provided more specific guidance on this subject. But what presidents actually do with America‘s military, on a bipartisan basis and over time, indicates what they believe must be done to protect America. It is, therefore, possible to discern the strategic thinking that has guided our country from the strategic practices it has followed. (Excerpt from article “From Grand Strategy to Operational Design: Getting it Right”)

It is time for the US military to scrap all existing planning manuals and to start afresh. Few officers read these voluminous and poorly written documents except to meet academic requirements. The new manuals must begin with recognition that there are three approaches to decision-making, not one. These are intuitive, analytical, and systemic. None is better or worse than the others are; officers must know which to use in the situation at hand. The analytical approach cannot remain the default choice. To conclude, the US national security community must overhaul the way it currently acquires policy, which it needs to develop the nation’s grand strategy and in turn its military strategy. The 1988 NSS did this best. To translate strategy successfully into campaign plans and operational plans the national defense community must adopt a systemic approach to operational design. In doing so, the community will replace analytical checklist-like procedures with discourse. The latter method enables planers to discern what makes an unfavorable situation a problem, thereby uncovering the counter-logic needed to resolve that problem. (Excerpt from article “From Grand Strategy to Operational Design: Getting it Right”)