Administration Of National Security

This second edition of The National Security Enterprise provides practitioners’ insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the US national security decision-making process. Unlike some textbooks on American foreign policy, it offers analysis from insiders who have worked at the National Security Council, the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence community, and the other critical government entities. The book explains how organizational missions and cultures create the labyrinth in which a coherent national security policy must be fashioned. Understanding and appreciating these organizations and their cultures is essential for formulating and implementing it. Taking into account the changes introduced by the Obama administration, the second edition includes four new or entirely revised chapters (Congress, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury, and USAID) and updates to the text throughout. It covers changes instituted since the first edition was published in 2011, implications of the government campaign to prosecute leaks, and lessons learned from more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. This up-to-date book will appeal to students of US national security and foreign policy as well as career policymakers.

The U.S. national security decision-making system is a product of the Cold War. Formed in 1947 with the National Security Council, it developed around the demands of competing with and containing the USSR. But the world after the collapse of communism and, particularly, the tragedy of September 11, is vastly different. A threatening but familiar enemy has given way to a complex environment of more diverse and less predictable threats. As the creation of the Homeland Security Council and Office of Homeland Security indicate, the United States must now reevaluate standard national security processes for this more uncertain world.In this timely book, William W. Newmann examines the way presidents manage their advisory process for national security decision making and the way that process evolves over the course of an administration's term. Three detailed case studies show how the president and his senior advisors managed arms control and nuclear strategy during the first terms of the Carter, Reagan, and G. H. W. Bush presidencies. These studies, enhanced by interviews with key members of the national security teams, including James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, reveal significant patterns of structure and adaptation. They provide a window to how decision making in the modern White House really works, at a moment when national security decisions are again at the top of the agenda.Specifically, Newmann investigates this pattern. Each president begins his administration with a standard National Security Councilÿbased interagency process, which he then streamlines toward a reliance on senior officials working in small groups, and a confidence structure of a few key advisors. Newmann examines the institutional pressures that push administrations in this direction, as he also weighs the impact of the leadership styles of the presidents themselves. In so doing, he reaches the conclusion that decision making can be an audition process through which presidents discover which advisors they trust. And the most successful process is one that balances formal, informal, and confidence sources to maintain full discussion of diverse opinions, while settling those debates informally at the senior-most levels.Unlike previous studies, Managing National Security Policy views decision making as dynamic, rather than as a static system inaugurated at the beginning of a president's term. The key to understanding the decision-making process rests upon the study of the evolving relationships between the president and his senior advisors. Awareness of this evolution paints a complex portrait of policy making, which may help future presidents design national security decision structures that fit the realities of the office in today's world.

"After our examination of the new strategic environment of the next quarter century (Phase I) and of a strategy to address it (Phase II), this Commission concludes that significant changes must be made in the structures and processes of the U.S. national security apparatus. Our institutional base is in decline and must be rebuilt. Otherwise, the United States risks losing its global influence and critical leadership role. We offer recommendations for organizational change in five key areas: ensuring the security of the American homeland; recapitalizing America's strengths in science and education; redesigning key institutions of the Executive Branch; overhauling the U.S. government's military and civilian personnel systems; and reorganizing Congress's role in national security affairs"--P. xiii.

Why has U.S. security policy scarcely changed from the Bush to the Obama administration? National Security and Double Government offers a disquieting answer. Michael J. Glennon challenges the myth that U.S. security policy is still forged by America's visible, "Madisonian institutions" - the President, Congress, and the courts. Their roles, he argues, have become largely illusory. Presidential control is now nominal, congressional oversight is dysfunctional, and judicial review is negligible. The book details the dramatic shift in power that has occurred from the Madisonian institutions to a concealed "Trumanite network" - the several hundred managers of the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints. Reform efforts face daunting obstacles. Remedies within this new system of "double government" require the hollowed-out Madisonian institutions to exercise the very power that they lack. Meanwhile, reform initiatives from without confront the same pervasive political ignorance within the polity that has given rise to this duality. The book sounds a powerful warning about the need to resolve this dilemma-and the mortal threat posed to accountability, democracy, and personal freedom if double government persists. This paperback version features an Afterword that addresses the emerging danger posed by populist authoritarianism rejecting the notion that the security bureaucracy can or should be relied upon to block it.

In this brilliant examination of the management of national security over the past 40 years, a former officer of the National Security Council explores the creation of the NSC, its changing function, and its uses and misuses by presidents, along with specific suggestions for corrections.

This book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It is a philosophical and conceptual book for helphing people think deeply, clearly, and insightfully about complex policy issues. This books reflects the viewpoint that the best policies normally come from efforts to synthesize competing camps by drawing upon the best of each of them and by combining them to forge a sensible whole. While this book is written to be reader-friendly, it aspires to in-depth scholarship.

Discusses the Iran-Contra affair and its implications.

On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.