THE U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY PROCESS
Although much of this book is intended to be a generic discussion of intelligence, the main reference point is the U.S. government. Therefore, a brief discussion of how national security policy is formed in the United States is appropriate.
STRUCTURE AND INTERESTS. The five main loci of the U.S. national security policy process are
1. The president, as an individual;
2. The departments, particularly the State Department and the Department of Defense (DOD), which has two major components: the civilian (the Office of the Secretary of Defense) and the military (the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, and the Joint Staff), and on certain issues, other departments may also be involved [including Justice, Commerce. Treasury, Agriculture, and, after the September 2001 attacks, the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS)];
3. The National Security Council (NSC) staff, which is the hub of the system; there is also a Homeland Security Council, but it operates at a somewhat lower level;
4. The intelligence community; and
5. Congress, which controls all expenditures, makes policy in its own right, and performs oversight.
The main national security structure was remarkably stable from its inception in the National Security Act of 1947 until the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which radically changed the top management structure of the intelligence community.
The five groups that carry out the intelligence process have varying interests. Presidents are transient, mainly concerned about broad policy initiatives and, eventually, their place in history. Richard M. Nixon, who was intensely suspicious of the permanent bureaucracy, argued—correctly—that a gulf exists between the president’s interests and those of the bureaucracy. Sometimes they work together; at other times they are at odds. The bureaucracy tends to be more jaded and, on occasion, to take the view that it can outlast the president, presidential appointees, and their preferred policies.
The principal interest of the State Department is maintaining diplomatic relations as a means of furthering U.S. policy interests. Critics of the State Department argue that Foreign Service officers sometimes forget which nation they represent, becoming advocates for the nations on which they have expertise instead of for the United States.
DOD is primarily concerned with having a military capability sufficient to deter hostile nations from using force or to defeat any threats as quickly as possible. Critics of DOD hold that the department overestimates its needs and threats and requires too large a margin against any potential foe. In response to the Vietnam War, the unofficial but influential rules for the use of force promulgated by Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger (1981-1987) and JCS chairman Gen. Colin L. Powell (1989-1993) set high requirements for domestic political support and force preponderance before any troops are committed. The protracted struggle in Iraq (2003- ) will probably result in a renewed debate over the Weinberger and Powell requirements. It may also reflect the debate between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006) and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki (1999-2003), who argued that more troops would be needed to occupy Iraq than had been allocated.
DHS is responsible for coordinating the activities of many long-standing agencies, including the Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization, the Border Patrol, and the Secret Service. It has also established new components. DHS seeks to prevent new terrorist attacks in the United States and serves as a bridge between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies on domestic security issues. DHS has had to deal with a difficult structure, as it tries to meld together the activities of several former independent agencies or offices taken from other departments, as well as the issue of determining what it is that DHS is responsible for. (See chap. 12 for a broader discussion of the intelligence implications of this doctrinal issue.)
The NSC, as constituted by law, consists of the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense. The chairman of the JCS serves as the military adviser; the director of national intelligence (DNI) is subordinate to the NSC and serves as the intelligence adviser. As a corporate group, the NSC meets irregularly. The Principals Committee (called the PC) is made up of the NSC members (less the president) and is presided over by the national security adviser. The Deputies Committee (DC) meets more often. The NSC staff, which reports to the national security adviser, consists of career civil servants, military officers, and political appointees who have day-to-day responsibility for conveying the wishes of the president to the policy and intelligence communities and for coordinating among the departments and agencies. The NSC staff is primarily interested in the execution of policy as defined by the president and senior presidential appointees.
The intelligence community has no policy interests per se, although it wants to be kept informed about the course of policy to make a contribution to it.
POLICY DYNAMICS. Policy makers often refer to the “interagency process” or “the interagency.” The term reflects the involvement of any and all necessary agencies and players in the process. The ultimate goal of the U.S. policy process is to arrive at a consensus that all parties can support. But consensus in the U.S. bureaucratic system means agreement down to the last detail of any paper being considered.
The process has no override mechanism, that is, no way of forcing agreement, of isolating an agency that refuses to go along. This safeguards the rights and interests of all agencies, because the agency that does not agree with the others on an issue today may not be the one that objects tomorrow. To ensure that an agency is not coerced, the interagency process emphasizes bargaining and negotiation, steering away from dictating from above or by majority rule. Bargaining has three immediate effects. First, it can require a great deal of time to arrive at positions that everyone can accept. Second, the system gives leverage to any agency that refuses to reach an agreement. In the absence of any override process, the agency that “just says ‘no’” can wield enormous power. Third, the necessity of reaching agreement generates substantial pressure in favor of lowest-common-denominator decisions.
On controversial issues, the system can suffer inertia, as agencies constantly redraft papers that never achieve consensus or that one agency refuses to support, effectively bringing the system to a halt. The only way to break such logjams is for the NSC staff or someone higher—meaning the president and senior appointees—to apply pressure. Without their intervention, the system would spin endlessly if an agency continues to hold out. Senior pressure renews the impetus to reach a conclusion or raises the prospect that officials in the holdout agency will be told to support what the president wants or to resign. But without pressure from above, holdouts suffer no penalty.
Neither the policy community nor the intelligence community is a monolith. Each has multiple players with multiple interests, which do not always coincide with one another. It is important to remember that executive departments are also not monolithic. DOD is clearly divided between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the JCS. Even though the concept of civilian control of the military is a deeply ingrained value, the two parts may not agree. As noted, in the period just before the invasion of Iraq, Army chief of staff General Shinseki held the view that the number of troops that would be needed to occupy Iraq was far larger than what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had planned. Under the doctrine of civilian control of the military, the secretary prevailed. The State Department is famously divided between the regional bureaus and the functional bureaus, with the regional bureaus tending to dominate. A similar dichotomy can be described for virtually all other departments.
THE ROLE. OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. Policy makers accept the intelligence community as an important part of the system. But the role of intelligence varies with each administration and sometimes with each issue within an administration. The way in which an administration treats intelligence is the key determinant of the role it plays.
Everyone accepts the utility of intelligence as part of the basis on which decisions are made. Again, translating this generality into practice is the important issue. Policy makers have many reasons to find fault with or even to ignore intelligence. They do not necessarily view intelligence in the same way as those who are producing it.
Policy makers also accept that the intelligence community can be called on to carry out certain types of operations. Again, the willingness to use this capacity and the specific types of operations that are deemed acceptable vary with the political leadership. These elected or presidentially appointed leaders must make the final decisions on operations and are held accountable, in a political sense, if the operations fail. To be sure, intelligence officers can and do get their share of the blame, but policy makers perceive that their own costs are much greater. But the nature of the relationship is captured in a rueful saying among intelligence officers: “There are only policy successes and intelligence failures. There are no policy failures and intelligence successes.”
WHO WANTS WHAT?
The fact that the government is not a monolithic organization helps explain why policy makers and intelligence officers have different interests. At a high macro level, everyone wants the same thing—successful national security policy—but this statement is so general that it is misleading. Success can mean different things to policy makers and intelligence officials.
The president and an administration’s senior political appointees define success as the advancement of their agenda. Even though a broad continuity exists in U.S. foreign policy, each administration interprets goals individually and fosters initiatives that are uniquely its own. The success of an administration’s agenda must be demonstrable in ways that are easily comprehended, because its successes are expected to have a political dividend. This is not as crass as it sounds. National security policy is created within a political system and process, the ultimate rewards of which are election and reelection to national office. Finally, policy makers expect support for their policies from the permanent bureaucracy.
The intelligence community defines its goals differently. Recall the three wishes posed by Sherman Kent (see chap. 6). The intelligence community also wants to maintain its objectivity regarding policy. Intelligence officials do not want to become, or even to be seen as becoming, advocates for policies other than those that directly affect their activities. Only by maintaining their distance from policy can they hope to produce intelligence that is objective. But objectivity is not always easily achieved. To cite one example, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George J. Tenet (1997-2004) was intimately involved in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in October 1998. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took responsibility for creating a security relationship between the two sides. As a result, the CIA had a vested interest in the outcome of the agreement, not because of any intelligence it had produced but because it had become a participant. In this sort of case, legitimate questions can be raised about the potential effect on subsequent analyses of the implementation of the agreement. Will analysts feel free to report that security arrangements are failing, if that is the case, knowing that their own agency is charged with implementing these same arrangements? The answer may be yes, but it is subject to serious question.
The policy maker-intelligence community relationship changes the longer the policy makers stay in office. At the outset of their relationship, policy makers tend to be more impressed and more accepting of the intelligence they receive. Even for policy makers who are returning to government service, albeit in different and usually more senior positions, this tends to be true. However, as the policy makers become more familiar with the issues for which they are responsible and with the available intelligence, they tend to have higher expectations and to become more demanding.
To some, the nature of the relationship between the DCI and the president also became a factor. Tenet enjoyed what was probably the closest relationship of any DCI to a president, usually seeing George W. Bush at least five or six days a week, and sometimes several times a day. This began on the president’s taking office in 2001, when he said he wanted daily briefings from the DCI. This was a dramatic change from the situation under Bill Clinton, when the DCI saw the president much less often. Clinton’s first DCI, R. James Woolsey (1993-1995), left office in frustration over his lack of access. A great deal of the DCI’s authority derived from the perception that he had access to the president when he needed it. So, for Tenet, the increased access to President Bush was a great gain. But some observers questioned whether such increased access had an effect on the DCI’s objectivity. Critics cited Tenet’s enthusiastic report on the likelihood of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. However, the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said no evidence existed that the intelligence had been politicized.
The same questions are relevant for the DNI. Like the DCI, the DNI needs to have access to the president. In some respects this may be even more important for the DNI because, unlike the DCI, the DNI has no large institutional base (the CIA) on which to fall back. The DNI may have to put more effort into keeping abreast of what the intelligence community is doing and which parts of it are also communicating with the president. There is no definitive answer. Frequent contact between the DNI and the president is bound to run risks, but no DNI would be likely to choose the alternative relationship. The DNI should trust his or her instincts and rely on professionalism to maintain the proper bounds on the relationship.