Burns / Baird / Blackwill America's National Security Architecture

Rebuilding the Foundation
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9645-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 217 Seiten

In August 2016, the Aspen Strategy Group examined how to reform America's national security decision-making process. The papers in this volume provide practical solutions to repair the key functions of Washington's executive departments, agencies, and advisory bodies responsible for shaping U.S. foreign policy and national security.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burns, Nicholas

Baird, Zoë

Blackwill, Robert

Cartwright, James

Dowdy, John

Feaver, Peter

Fergu, Niall

Price, Jonathon

Leseproben

The Eighth Annual Ernest May Memorial Lecture The Pearl Harbor System at 75 Douglas Stuart Stuart Chair in International Studies Dickinson College Editor’s Note: Douglas Stuart presented the annual Ernest R. May Memorial Lecture at the Aspen Strategy Group’s August 2016 Summer Workshop in Aspen, Colorado. The following is a paper written based on his remarks at the meeting. The Ernest May Memorial Lecture is named for Ernest May, an international relations historian and Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government professor, who passed away in 2009. ASG developed the lecture series to honor Professor May’s celebrated lectures. Iam very honored to have my name linked to Professor Ernest May, who personified the engaged academic. One of Professor May’s most important insights was that, whether one is a scholar attempting to explain a specific foreign policy decision or a policy maker engaged in the formulation of foreign policy, it helps to think of time as a stream—in which carefully selected lessons from the past inform the discussion of current issues and help shape plans for the future.1 But Professor May would also have been the first to admit that this is easier said than done. One big problem that both analysts and policy makers confront when they attempt to derive lessons from the past is deciding how far back one needs to go to make sense of any contemporary situation. We might call this the challenge of infiite regress. How far back do we have to go to explain the Obama administrations pivot to Asia? To the debates surrounding the Truman administration’s decision to create a network of military alliances in the Pacific in 1951? To Teddy Roosevelt’s deployment of the Great White Fleet in 1907? To the geostrategic arguments of Admiral Mahan in favor of the Open Door to Asia in the late nineteenth century? There have been a few instances in American history, however, where there is no doubt about how far back we need to go, because a specific event or decision clearly served as the starting point for a new era in U.S. foreign policy. One such event was the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This single incident set in motion a series of debates and investigations—including 25,000 pages of congressional testimony—which culminated in the development of a new network of policy-making institutions. More importantly, Pearl Harbor changed the way Americans thought about their place in the world by replacing the concept of National Interest, which had served as the basis for U.S. foreign policy since the founding of the Republic, with the concept of National Security.2 The articulation and management of the national interest was the responsibility of the Department of State for over 150 years. State was the first executive branch agency created by the new Republic, and serving as secretary of state was the most direct path to the White House between 1789 and the Civil War. Throughout the nineteenth century and up until World War II, secretaries of state managed what Steven Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley have called America’s “rise to globalism” by sophisticated diplomacy that privileged American economic interests and exploited the nation’s geographic location in order to be selective about foreign entanglements.3 State also benefited from the nation’s suspicion of a large standing military during peacetime, which made it difficult for the Departments of War and Navy to challenge the State Department’s dominance of the policy-making process. At times, the State Department’s inclination to formulate foreign policy without consulting the armed services was irresponsible. Professor May reminds us that in 1919, while he was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt tried to remedy this situation by proposing the creation of an agency that would facilitate cooperation between State and the Army and Navy, but his proposal was not even acknowledged by Foggy Bottom.4 By the 1930s, many influential academics and policy makers were expressing dissatisfaction with the concept of national interest as a guide to foreign policy.5 They tended to make three arguments. First, that many immigrants were manipulating the concept of national interest so that it actually served the interests of the nations from which they had emigrated. Second, that business and labor organizations were using their economic and political power to trick the American people into believing that their narrow and particular interests were actually the national interest. Finally, that Woodrow Wilson had conflated his interest in supranational governance with the national interest, leading us into a war that gave us nothing more than “death, debt and George M. Cohan.”6 These arguments all contributed to the pervasive isolationist mood during the interwar period, but by 1941, there was still no consensus about what concept should replace national interest as a guide to American foreign policy.7 Pearl Harbor provided the American people with an alternative to the concept of national interest, based upon five lessons. 1.That technological developments—most notably, improvements in the range and lethality of airplanes—meant, as one expert put it, that “delusions of defensive invulnerability are fairy tales…,”8 2.That the perfidy and innate aggressiveness of totalitarian governments made the global defense and advancement of democracy a national security concern. 3.That there was a need for a globalized American military presence and mechanisms designed to give military leaders a permanent, direct, and influential role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policies. 4.That there was a need for permanent globalized intelligence-gathering. 5.That there was a need for new institutions and procedures for high-level consultation and decision-making in the service of national security. These lessons not only helped establish national security as the alternative to national interest, they also helped create the standard against which future national security policies were to be judged—Preparedness. The U.S. must never again be “sucker punched” by another nation. To avoid another Pearl Harbor, America would have to permanently maintain what Thomas Hobbes called “the posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another.”9 This is a difficult posture for any nation to sustain, but it is particularly hard, and problematic, for a democracy with a history of selective engagement in world affairs. It is also worth reminding ourselves that the national preoccupation with preparedness was in place two years before the United States became focused on the Soviet threat. If the two wartime allies had somehow been able to resolve their differences in 1945, the United States would probably still have been looking for ways to preserve a globalized military presence and a worldwide intelligence network after World War II, in the service of preparedness. Once anti-communism took hold, it eclipsed—but did not eliminate—the more general concern about no more Pearl Harbors. That concern was still in place, and ready to reassert itself as a guide to U.S. foreign policy, after the Berlin Wall came down. Although support for globalized preparedness was nearly universal after World War II, the Truman administration soon discovered there was considerable room for disagreement about how to achieve this goal. New institutions were certainly needed, but what should they look like? During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt developed some institutions and procedures that served as postwar models. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was tasked with the collection of intelligence and acts of sabotage. The Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS), headed by a chief of staff to the commander in chief, was established to facilitate cooperation between the heads of the Army, Navy, Army Air Forces. The most important innovation was the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), which was created in the latter stages of the war to bring together representatives of the State Department, the Army, and the Navy to develop plans for postwar issues, such as the occupation of Germany and Japan. The frustrations that the State Department experienced in SWNCC presaged the problems of marginalization that have plagued Foggy Bottom since World War II. By the time Harry Truman took office in 1945, he had developed his own very strong opinions about what was needed to insure American preparedness. The top priority had to be armed forces unification, so that future presidents would have “one team, with all the reins in one hand.”10 He was convinced that Pearl Harbor was in large part attributable to failures of communication and coordination between the Army and Navy—failures that had also undermined the nation’s ability to develop and pursue a coherent grand strategy during the war. The leaders of the Army supported the call for armed forces unification, in part because they agreed with the president that it would make it easier for the two services to work together and in part because they saw unification as a way to mitigate the negative impact of postwar budget cuts. As Army Chief of Staff George Marshall noted, his service was always disadvantaged in peacetime in its competition for scarce resources with what he...