The Problems

Governments face several problems in deciding what to include in their official security strategies once they decide to develop and publish them. We have noted that there is also the problem of bureaucracy, i.e., achieving consensus on a complicated and controversial subject in order to produce a strategy on schedule. One solution to this problem is the lowest common denominator approach, that is, publishing a NSS that all of the important participants will approve because it says little of significance.

However, when the NSC attempts to produce a meaningful NSS, one that does not avoid difficult issues, it must integrate a number of critical and sometimes conflicting priorities. A model of this process is displayed below. Notice the stage in the process called "declaratory policy." That is where the final NSS is released. Before the NSC can produce such a policy, it must receive, "process" and retain a tremendous amount of information relevant to national security. In the best of policy-making worlds, the NSC would accomplish these complex tasks in an orderly and logical sequence and on time.

In reality, of course, the process is not nearly as neat and clean as this. The challenge for the NSC is to prevent the NSS from becoming what one expert refers to as "a Christmas tree on which every interest group hangs its foreign policy concerns." ³⁷ 

Analysis #5

Combining many different interests represented by different parts of the federal government, while also responding in a timely and effective manner to security problems, is the most significant problem faced by those responsible for producing the US NSS. Are these problems evident in the process of developing the NSS you selected for this module? What evidence do you find for this? If you do not find such evidence, what other problems do you see there?

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Developed by the Office of Continuous Learning and Professor Richard Doyle at the Naval Postgraduate School