Interesting premise, and some spot-on analysis. I would submit, though, that the lack of a rudder in NSS began not during the GW Bush administration, but rather during that of George HW Bush. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the “what now?” that resonated from NSS and NMS was palpable.

Maybe there was little other choice, but Dick Cheney as SECDEF under GHWB began the attempt to define a Base Force in the post-Cold War world, working with some very large assumptions regarding threat, roles, and missions for the DoD. All things considered, the result was more than passable.

The “peace dividend” of the Clinton years (1994-95) went a long way toward ignoring some of the more solid premises of the 1992 QDR that shaped the post-Gulf War Base Force, and the Bottom-Up Review (1993-ish?) was dismissive of what was required to maintain the conventional dominance, presence, and regional stability objectives of the 1992 document.

It is clear that the degradation of US national strategic planning began long before GWB, and it can be argued that in the wake of 9/11, his 2002 NSS was a substantial improvement over the drifting, unfocused, over-optimistic strategy of the preceding administration.

I would also argue that NSC-68 remains an anomaly in US foreign policy. JL Gaddis’s brilliant Strategies of Containment describes how such a document could remain a guidepost for five decades through presidential administrations of widely varied philosophies and approaches. The US position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was the one area in which such disparate men as Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter were forced to be realists.

Perhaps such a situation will evolve from the current shuffle of diplomatic and military challenges in this world of multi-polarity, regional hegemony, and powerful and influential non-state actors. Perhaps not. But if it did, it would become the “devil you know”, simplifying the task of identifying threats and preparing for them. (Notice I said “simplify” and not “make easier”).

URR

A well crafted NSS with a concrete end state as Galrahn suggests would go a long way toward helping coordinate the efforts of the various elements of national power in my opinion.

This coordinated effort is not something we are executing very well in Afghanistan (and to a lesser degree Iraq) right now. For example, it would be useful if the DoD and DoS personnel executing missions to shift the agricultural production in AFG could get real support from the SMEs at the Department of Agriculture in improving the shift from opium production to something not quite as detrimental to our overall efforts against terrorist funding.

V/R,