An evergreen assessment
Ancient wisdom that holds true today
I had no intention of posting anything today or this week, but I just read a passage I feel compelled to share. It is a true example of an evergreen analysis. For those who may not be aware, Evergreen refers to something that remains popular or relevant over time. In this case, it’s not popular, just relevant. Here is the passage:
It is my own conviction that Americans too often give this ‘organizational problem’ a priority which it does not deserve. Americans are prone to believe that if they can find an apt name and draw up an imposing organizational chart, then matters will more or less take care of themselves.
Ha! This applies to seemingly countless national security topics today, not the least of which has been in my sights for literally decades: the chant of “bring back USIA.” The author above wrote long before Field of Dreams came out and long before the book it was based on came out (1989 and 1982, respectively, for those who want to feel old).1
What was the “organizational problem”? Directly preceding the above, which appeared on page 244 of his book, were the questions, “Who is going to conduct such operations as I have been discussing? Who, in the sense not of particularly individuals, but of agencies or organizations?” The operations were countering, preemptively and reactively, Russian “political-subversive warfare.”
At the risk of spoiling the end, the answer was ultimately no one, which remains true today.
In words that fit today as then, he continued:
The blueprinted outfit will somehow, after it comes into neat existence, discover and fulfill its mission by an intuitive trial and error. This approach is the preset bureaucratism. The appropriate order is the reverse: first we must understand clearly what is to be done. Then we seek the instrumentalities for doing it. These we may find by adapting to the new use organizations which already exist, or we may feel that a new, specifically designed agency is preferable. The name doesn’t make much difference, and exact organizational charts can wait upon the teachings of experience. [italics in the original]
In Washington and elsewhere supporting Washington, too many chase definitions to identify and separate lines of effort rather than execute, improve, and coordinate the lines of effort themselves. Senior leadership enables, furthers, and protects this “bureaucratism.”
By the way, the book is from 1950: The Coming Defeat of Communism by James Burnham. Another book, a 1952 RAND Study, The Organizational Weapon, was published in book form in 1960 (333 pages excluding index) is also evergreen with analysis and recommendations that apply to the present with only minor edits, primarily find-and-replace.
Separately, a friend recently published an interesting article at the website 1945: Project Solarium 2.0: Can Eisenhower’s Cold War Strategy Work Today?
The term “Solarium Project” has been used so frequently in recent years that its original purpose and power have been diluted. Today, it’s often invoked as a generic term for strategic brainstorming.
However, the roots of the original Project Solarium – initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 – represent something far more profound and disciplined. It was a process that provided the foundation for a coherent, enduring strategy that ultimately helped the United States win the Cold War. To address the complexities of today’s global challenges, we should return to the original intent and rigor of Project Solarium and institutionalize it as a standard process to support the President in developing a National Security Strategy.
This new Solarium Project would synchronize all elements of national power and provide continuity of strategy, ensuring the safeguarding of US interests over the long term. It should be the foundation for an America First National Security Strategy.
It’s worth a read. However, I shared my reaction to the article with the author and on a listserv. I’m reposting that below for your comment:
I know Dave had limited space, but I’d like to know how “Solarium 2.0” that I’ve heard so often we need fits in with the national security strategy process we have now. I’d expect a statement like, “The NSS is lacking, we need to fix it / ditch it / whatever and Sol 2 is the way to go.”
Further, just like the “bring back USIA” mantra, the calls for Sol 2.0 leave aside other leadership and organizational realities present then and absent now. Sol 2.0 is another strategy of hope: if only we really thought about the problem, maybe we’ll do better. No, there is an absence of serious leadership to make the hard decisions.
Setting aside Ike’s farewell lament about the military-industrial complex that suggests Sol 1.0 wasn’t able to achieve what was hoped, a strategic lament in my book looking at the organizational defects not found in a superficial reading of history.
I suggest James Marchio’s “The Planning Coordination Group: Bureaucratic Casualty in the Cold War Campaign to Exploit Soviet-Bloc Vulnerabilities” (Fall 2002, Journal of Cold War Studies)
This article addresses three fundamental questions. First, why was the PCG established, and what did it do during its short existence? Second, why did it fail to achieve its objectives? Finally, what insight does this assessment of the PCG provide into the overall nature and shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration’s policies toward the Soviet bloc during one of the most critical years of the Cold War? How does its fate alter our understanding of the broader historical literature on the evolution of the Eisenhower administration’s security strategy? The evidence that has emerged over the last decade suggests that the PCG’s problems and its unrealized potential were indicative of flaws in the administration’s foreign policies that left Eisenhower and his staff no better prepared to respond to the unrest behind the Iron Curtain in 1956 than they were during the East German uprising in 1953.
And, Stephen John Kenneth Long’s PhD thesis from 2008 “Disorder Over Design: Strategy, Bureaucracy And The Development Of U.S. Political Warfare In Europe, 1945-1950” (University of Birmingham).
This was particularly the case for the United States in the early Cold War as it struggled to develop a coherent basis for its policies, its operations, and its national security objectives. Washington struggled to develop foreign policy on a unified, national basis partly because of the entrenchment of internal divisions within the government bureaucracy. Although the drafters of the National Security Act hoped to ameliorate administrative tensions and parochial attitudes in one organisational sweep, such attitudes proved intrinsic to the system and therefore persisted.
Relating this back to the “bring back USIA,” let me remind readers that USIA was never what it was supposed to be. Ejecting the capabilities from State was agreed upon with the promise it would be elevated to have a seat not just at the NSC table (it was on an invite-only basis, with Kissinger, as Nixon’s NSA, famously telling the USIA Director “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”) but an operational leadership role with interagency information planning, where both roles had been held by USIA’s predecessor agency, the International Information Administration.
Sol 1.0 itself may have been laudable, but its last effects were minimal. Perhaps this was because of the focused militarization of national security policy, as it established a Maginot Line that left the “grey areas” vulnerable, to quote 1955 Kissinger.
Since only the threat of “massive retaliation" can deter Soviet aggression, major reliance must be placed on the development of our Strategic Air Force and on increasing the power of our nuclear arsenal… But in the remainder of the world, the part which Mr. Finletter calls the "grey areas," Sino-Soviet moves can be prevented only by the threat of a general war. This in substance seems to be the rationale for our present military policy… In these circumstances a major or exclusive reliance on general war as a deterrent to Sino-Soviet aggression may come dangerously close to a Maginot mentality – a belief in a strategy which may never be tested but which meanwhile prevents the consideration of any alternative. If we accept an all-or-nothing military policy we may well find ourselves paralyzed in the years ahead, when the increasing Soviet nuclear capability undermines our willingness to run the risk of a general war for anything less than to counter a direct attack on the United States.
For Dave’s argument to be compelling, he needs to address the elephants in the room that inhibit if not outright block, as can be anticipated in not just in this administration but was denied currency (literal and figurative) in past D and R administrations, what Sol 1.0 and a prospective Sol 2.0 might recommend.
For the parting shot, here is another photo from the ride shared in my prior post.2 Back to the grindstone… Thanks for reading.
This, of course, refers to “if you build it, he will come.”
I dropped the lens cloth (doubling as a cloth sack for the glasses) after I cleaned my riding glasses at this pause. I realized it didn’t make it into my pocket later. I came up here a day or three later in the hopes I could find it, but I didn’t, perhaps because it was white. Months later, after the snow melted, I retrieved the lens cloth after someone hung it a branch to the left. That was nice of whoever did that. (Yes, I took it and washed it and still have it.)
Burnham! What a twist
Well said Matt. Hopefully the sea has changed .