Breaking the Tyranny of Crisis in National Security Planning

The National Security Council (NSC) is addicted to crisis. It makes sense: crisis demands action. Crisis dares you to ignore it at your peril. Future problems are far less scary as their costs and consequences seem lower. It's easy to mortgage one's future, and the NSC makes that decision time and time again. Not because they don't recognize the fault in this strategy but because they have no alternative. This problem is structural and systemic.

In the NSC, political "brushfires" receive top priority, often at the expense of more substantive, existential security issues. Decision makers of all stripes see the problem, both in the executive and legislative branches; however, the siren call of the demands of the present grips us.

To break this pattern, there must be a concerted effort to change the view of the time horizon. First, it's essential to understand better the benefits of having dedicated strategy and contingency planning efforts and emulating their structure in future NSC configurations. Second, the executive branch needs more strategists and planners across its departments. Third, as the only effective standardization tool across political administrations, Congress must be more involved.

Integrated Deterrence starts at the NSC

The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy details the necessity of "Integrated Deterrence" across all domains, regions, and the spectrum of conflict to ensure U.S. interests.¹ Central to this is the necessity for cross-departmental and agency coordination. The NSC is uniquely postured to be the lynchpin of U.S. interagency responses both for immediate crisis and long-burn issues. No other entity in the executive branch besides the President has the authority and capacity to be the coordinating body needed to meet this national security need.

In his multi-volume analysis of the NSC, Senator Jackson dedicated over one hundred pages to analyzing the decision process of the early Cold War USSR and the PRC, including extensive analysis of their multi-year strategy and planning efforts.² These regimes devoted significant effort to planning for the future, worrying National Security experts of the times. We face a similar concern today in the form of the PRC, which fully embraces a decades-long approach to building national capacity. At the same time, the election cycle seems to be the principal time horizon of U.S. decision-making. National leaders must have the discipline and foresight to structure the NSC to enable long-term strategy development and planning.

Hard-wiring the NSC for the future 

While the NSC has changed much since its inception under the National Security Act of 1947, one consistent theme has been a steady growth in operationalizing the NSC and increasing its role in crisis management.³ But, before 1960, this wasn't always the case. President Eisenhower led one of the most comprehensive overhauls of the NSC when he began his presidency by leveraging his years of managing cumbersome military bureaucracies. President Eisenhower set up several boards during his tenure, with the two key ones being the Planning Board and the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB).⁴ The Planning Board effectively filled the strategy and plan development role, while the OCB focused on operational deconfliction and implementation. Both were headed by groups of deputies from the departments and agencies, with one group responsible for the future and the other accountable for the crisis of the day. While the decision-making process was considered, even by President Eisenhower, to be overly bureaucratic and burdensome, it laid the basis for sustained competition with the USSR for the subsequent decades.⁵

The NSC's modern Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) structure relies on a functional or geographic focus of effort to generate all strategy, planning, and operations for their niche specialty. President Eisenhower's Planning Board and OCB division of labor was temporal in nature. This is a typical structure in military operations where a strategy team passes the baton to a planning team, which passes it to the operations team for execution before finally landing with a net assessments cell to determine effectiveness. The Planning Board did strategy and plans, while the OCB did operations. By isolating by time horizon, the Planning Board was able to develop a more integrated global perspective and avoid being pigeonholed based on arbitrary boundaries.

The more recent Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations have been able to emulate part of this process. During the second term of President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley set up a small staff element devoted to coordinating and leading strategy and policy planning elements from across the departments and agencies.⁶ Building on that concept, the Hadley-led NSC team established the National Security Policy Planning Committee (NSPPC) as an IPC with named undersecretaries and deputies from each major department and tasked them with strategy and plan development.⁷ President Obama's NSC went a step further and established the deputy-level "foresight process" to better focus on long-term trends while reducing the volume of D.C. meetings.⁸ President Obama's NSC's "Strategic Planning" IPC was also a vital component of this.⁹ However, these efforts were hampered by the pull of crisis, distracting senior leaders' attention or drawing key personnel to other tasks.

My first recommendation is to reconfigure the IPC structure of the NSC to align with temporal considerations by creating individual standing committees devoted to the separate tasks of strategy development, interagency contingency/long-term planning, and policy implementation effectiveness. The current functional and geographic IPCs would continue to focus on crisis and current policy implementation processes. Separating these functions would allow sufficient effort and personnel to give due diligence to their execution instead of piling on more responsibility to a small team. Backing these committees would be regularly scheduled Deputies Committee meetings, Principal's Committee meetings, and Presidential deep dives on their activities at monthly and quarterly intervals, respectively. Its success is wholly dependent upon the clout of the National Security Advisor to garner support and the willingness of the President to participate, in much the same way President Eisenhower's NSC succeeded because of his commitment to the process.

Need to grow strategy and planning capacity, but not the NSC staff 

As a goldfish grows to the size of the bowl it lives in, the insatiable need for crisis support only grows to meet the limitations of the people assigned to it. Leadership strength comes from the hard partitioning of people to focus on the future and not be seduced by the allure of the fire in front of you. The above recommendation to grow IPC capacity for strategy, planning, and assessment should come from trimming the existing pool of functional and geographic IPCs through consolidating mission sets or personnel reassignment.

The NSC is small and nimble by design. It is not an agency or a department. It has a mission focused on decision support for national security and the subsequent coordination that results. When it needs specialized expertise, it relies on others to provide it. With 50-100 permanent personnel and up to 300 temporary assignees, some consider it too large to be an effective coordination entity.¹⁰ Growing the number of personnel increases the amount of internal NSC coordination needed, possibly beyond the net gain in capability. In addition, more IPCs mean more competition for decision-maker attention. Keeping the number of IPCs as is or reducing them increases the likelihood that future-oriented IPCs will get their fair share of consideration.

More demands on NSC staff would be offset by growing capacity for strategy development, planning, and assessment in the other departments, particularly by tasking the one department that does it really well: the Department of Defense. The DoD has spent much of our nation's blood and treasure learning from the mistakes of poor strategy, planning, and assessment. It's an organization that stresses these concepts up and down the chain of command and emphasizes knowledge management and coaching. We must use the cadre of dedicated DoD strategists, planners, and assessors to teach the other departments how to succeed using these essential skills.

The result will be broader interagency synchronization and less work for the NSC. This support will be especially useful for departments less directly brought into the national security conversation, such as Treasury, Commerce, or Transportation. For example, military embeds could help the State Department create an optimized nation-building capability beyond USAID, Treasury develop an indications and warning capability for economic warfare or enhance their sanctions-targeting apparatus and provide Justice with the skills to build globally specialized lawfare units. Leveraging DoD expertise would build robust integrated deterrence capacity.

Congress as a forcing function 

You will likely not find a current or former national security official with extensive time at the NSC clamoring for more oversight from the legislative branch. They will eagerly waive Article Two of the constitution and recite the primacy of the executive branch in conducting foreign policy.¹¹ However, the critical flaw of the above recommendations on the NSC is that they're structurally weak. These items can be wished into existence today and erased tomorrow with the stroke of a pen. One must look to the force of law and the legislative branch to provide longevity for change. While adding direct congressional oversight of the NSC would be a bridge too far, Congress can and has used reporting requirements to force long-term considerations.

One of the many changes the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act brought was the requirement to generate a National Security Strategy (NSS).¹² Congress only specified what the strategy should address and its periodicity; they left it up to the executive branch to determine how the sausage got made.¹³ Over time, this reporting requirement found its natural home at the NSC, which forced National Security Advisors and senior staffers to devote personnel and senior decision-maker time to authoring and approving it.

As a final recommendation, Congress should levy additional long-term focused reporting requirements on the executive branch. Consider creating a 50-year outlook on national power expectations, an integrated 20-year defense and intelligence spending prospectus, or a limited series of interagency contingency plans (i.e., "whole-of-government" war plans). The NSC will unlikely spare the personnel and time to generate these products independently. Still, these products help build continuity across departments and administrations to help drive an end-state where the U.S. is better prepared for the future.

Conclusion 

Thinking about the future is difficult. Getting others to agree with you about the future is more difficult. Silencing the demands of crisis requires strength of character, which few organizations can muster, let alone one where the cost of failure is as steep as at the NSC.

However, the NSC is the only organization postured to drive the change we need to achieve actual "integrated deterrence." It needs to re-orient its decision time horizon and bring the rest of the government along. The DoD can help with this by assisting other departments in learning from its past. Congress can help by creating accountability mechanisms that persist over time. By plotting a more effective course for the future, we become less subject to the whims of crisis and are more effective in achieving our collective prosperity.

Disclaimer: The opinions and ideas of this piece are my own and should not be interpreted as representing the position of the DOD or the U.S. Navy.

About the Author: Commander Will Grenoble was the 2024 Navy National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds an M.A. in Defense and Strategic Studies, Highest Distinction, from the U.S. Naval War College as part of the Maritime Advanced Warfighting School (MAWS) operational planner program and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (N2) and Deputy Information Warfare Commander (DIWC) for Carrier Strike Group 2 (CSG 2) embarked on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69).