Lost at the NSC
Mini Teaser: People are starting to talk of Obama creating an Eisenhower-lite foreign-policy team. This is a very good thing, if only a start. America no longer knows how to make good strategy. From the Nazi defeat in World War II to America’s triumph in the c
One insight here is the need to assign the greater part of strategic planning to a small team of highly capable individuals rather than rely on large bureaucracies. As business-strategist Richard Rumelt notes, individuals and small teams are by their very nature more likely to develop the insights that are central to strategic planning. Of course, given where U.S. strategy stands today, finding individuals with the cognitive skills for strategic insight may well prove challenging. Another insight is how closely the collegiate Chiefs of Staff system that served Anglo-American grand strategy so well in World War II parallels the Eisenhower NSC model. Our main point, though, is that in light of the complex security challenges facing the United States today, as well as the nation's mounting fiscal difficulties, the Obama administration, starting with the new president himself, should accord high priority to reversing the long decline in U.S. strategic competence.
Andrew F. Krepinevich is president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CBSA). Barry D. Watts is a senior fellow at CBSA.
1 Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 68-69, 86-87. In August 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans had "pledged to assist Russia ‘on a gigantic scale' in coordination with Britain," 53.
2 Strictly speaking, the British use the HCSC to identify individuals who can make the transition from tactics to operational art. But since the cognitive skills required for strategy appear to be the same art, those who can make the transition are also potential strategists.
3 Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91.
4 James S. Lay Jr., "National Security Council's Role in the U.S. Security and Peace Program," World Affairs, No. 115 (1952), 37.
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