February 25, 2020—Drain the NSC Swamp—and more!

“Mr. Kissinger grew the council to include one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators . . . By the end of the Obama administration, 34 policy professionals supported by 60 administrators had exploded to three deputies, more than 400 policy professionals and 1,300 administrators.” John Lehman

Click here for the apt views from this Former Navy Secretary during the Reagan administration, in his important February 17 Wall Street Journal article entitled “A Campaign Against Bureaucratic Bloat in U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Lehman’s article and the above specific quotation reflected on the National Security Council (NSC), now being scaled back by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien — a welcome renovation that should spread throughout the bloated and mostly dysfunctional federal government.

Reading his article and thinking about how it could and should be generalized, I was reminded of Norm Augustine’s bitingly humorous 1984 book, Augustine’s Laws, and particularly his Law XLIX, “Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.”

See the figure below. See also the above quotation from his Law L, humorously comparing regulation timelines with other lifetimes. Click here for a 1984 tabulation of his laws.

Norm served as Undersecretary of the Army and Chairman of the Defense Science Board, as well as CEO of Martin Marietta and later Lockheed Martin. He was well qualified to criticize the vagaries of our Defense Acquisition Processes as well as of our overall national security interests. And, in my view, the situation has only gotten worse.

No doubt the bureaucracy required to monitor such a growth of regulations must experience a comparable growth rate — and generally be composed of more and more administrators — as illustrated by Lehman’s article regarding the NSC. So, while Norm Augustine wrote about the growth regulations per se, bureaucratic growth probably merits the same analogy — “at the same rate as weeds.”

Consider several of John Lehman’s observations:

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947.
Following World War II, federal policy makers were at each other’s throats over whether to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union through the Baruch Plan. The branches of the armed services feuded over roles, missions and funding. (Notably, the US Air Force was founded as a separate service in 1947.)
President Truman and congressional leaders produced a few lasting achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
There were terrible blunders in China and Korea including President Truman’s radical strategy to shrink the Navy, while declaring Korea outside America’s vital interest, which led to the Korean War.
Defense Secretary James Forrestal conceived of the NSC to corral the dovish White House advisers around Truman, and it was established in the 1947 National Security Act — naming as members: the President, the Vice President and the Secretaries of State and Defense. Its defined function was to advise the president with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security, to be accomplished in required regular meetings.
President Truman resented and opposed the NSC. But when it became law, he made it his own White House staff for national security, bringing the State and Defense departments into presidential decision-making.
According to Lehman, the NSC’s power and influence reached its apogee under President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who agreed on strategy and intended to run national security from the White House. Unlike President’s Truman and Eisenhower, who borrowed career staffers from other agencies, they handpicked a far more diverse and notable policy staff, which included one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators.
As the NSC staff grew to the Bush-Obama numbers, it declined in usefulness as American foreign policy deteriorated into “endless wars” and so on. President Trump’s renovation of the NSC, as executed by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien could help streamline American security for years to come. He said last fall that he will trim the staff, “making it more effective by reaffirming its mission to coordinate policy and ensure policy implementation.” He added It “should not, as it has in the past, duplicate the work of military officers, diplomats or intelligence officers.”
Lehman indicated that since then the policy staff has been reduced by more than 50 and there’re more reductions to come.

Lehman closed by noting that

“Since October there have been major improvements in trade, NATO and Mideast policy. There is evidence of a new coherence and direction in White House national security decision-making such as the rapid and effective decision to deal with Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Perhaps this is a sign of a more nimble and functional security council.”

I applaud the downsizing improvements in the NSC and would argue that similar renovation is required in the entire national security establishment that has grown to be a massive, inefficient, mostly ineffective, dysfunctional bureaucratic structure that indeed constitutes unwieldy “bloats” that block progress in numerous areas that are critical to our national survival.

Not the least of these bloated areas result from the major reorganization following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States.

Although no doubt unintended, it hinders progress in many areas, not the least of which is associated with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its assigned leadership in countering the existential threat posed by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that can shut down the nation’s entire electric power grid for an indefinite period.

The consequences of such a lengthy loss of electricity would lead to the death of tens of millions of Americans due the chaos caused by starvation, disease, and societal collapse — actually the Congressional EMP Commission judged possibly up to 90-percent of all Americans.

Thus far, there has been little apparent improvement in the long-standing DHS lethargy since President Trump assigned it in the key leadership role in his March 19, 2019 Executive Order, especially as amended and improved by proposals championed by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and written into law in the December 20, 2019 National Defense Authorization Act for 2020 — the NDAA(2020).

Across the board, the federal bureaucracy dawdles in addressing this existential threat, even though we have long understood how to protect such complex systems against a high altitude EMP attack, based on the longstanding recommendations of the Congressional EMP Commission that included knowledgeable experts familiar with the EMP threat and how best to harden complex systems to those effects. Click here for my messages related to EMP Commission findings.

Moreover, we know based on our Lake Wylie Pilot Study that such hardening is easily affordable — continuing delays are due to political, bureaucratic and regulatory constraints. Click here for my November 19, 2019 recommendations for next steps in exploiting those findings.

Instead of moving rapidly to exploit the lessons from the past, the bureaucracy seems more inclined, ever so slowly, to grow even more bureaucracy to “reinvent the wheel” — perhaps in keeping with Norm Augustine’s comparison to the growth of weeds.

Bottom Lines.

It is foolish to continue to ignore lessons learned decades ago by those who hardened our strategic military systems — our strategic aircraft, sea and land based missiles, and their supporting command, control and communications systems that assure those high priority strategic systems remain under the positive control of the President.

And it is long past time for the national leadership to execute President Trump’s Executive Order, since enhanced and written into law by the NDAA(2020).

You might let your representatives know of this continuing failure — and that they should pay more attention to providing for the national defense, as they are sworn to do.

And, therefore, that they should “support efforts to drain the Washington Swamp!”

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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