BUREAUCRACY, POLITICS,
AND STRATEGY

Henry A. Kissinger

Bernard Brodie

SECURITY STUDIES PROJECT

University of
California

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Angeles

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Copyright 1968 by the Security Studies Project
All Rights Reserved

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FOREWORD

This volume brings together several essays which were presented over the last few months in the various forms of seminars, lectures, conference papers, or newspaper articles. Though originally prepared for different audiences, the essays nevertheless have in common the subjects of politics, strategy, and the study of war.

The first essay, "Bureaucracy and Policy Making: The Effect of Insiders and Outsiders on the Policy Process," was originally presented by Professor Henry A. Kissinger as a seminar in the Security Studies Project series at UCLA in the Spring Quarter, 1968. The last essay by myself, "Theories on the Causes of War," was delivered at UCLA on November 11, 1968 as part of the Faculty Lecture Series on "War and the Human Race."

I should like to thank the Ford Foundation for the support which made possible both Dr. Kissinger's seminar and the publication of these essays.

Bernard Brodie, Director
Security Studies Project

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BUREAUCRACY AND POLICY MAKING:
The Effect of Insiders and Outsiders on the Policy Process

Henry A. Kissinger

The most frequent question that one is asked when abroad, or by people who are concerned with international affairs and have not seen policy made, is "What is American policy?" Foreign policy is additionally complicated in the contemporary period by the fact that the actual decision-making process leads to a fragmentation of the decisions. Also, research and intelligence organizations, either foreign or national, attempt to give a rationality and consistency to foreign policy which it simply does not have. I have found it next to impossible to convince Frenchmen that there is no such thing as an American foreign policy, and that a series of moves that have produced a certain result may not have been planned to produce that result.

Foreigners looking at American policy have a tendency to assume that anything that happened was intended, and that there is a deep, complicated purpose behind our actions. I wish this were true, but I don't believe that it is. In fact, I think that in any large bureaucracy it probably cannot be true and this is probably the case with the Soviet Union also. We probably ascribe more consistency to Soviet foreign policy than really exists. The only foreign country which I believe has understood American policy making at all well is Great Britain. Most foreign countries that deal with us wait until we have done something, and then try to prove to us that what we have done is either illegal or undesirable.

Once the American decision-making process has disgorged an answer, it becomes technically very difficult to change the policy because even those who have serious doubts about it become reluctant to hazard those doubts in an international forum. There is no telling what would come out of a re-evaluation of existing measures. If one wishes to influence American foreign policy, the time to do so is in the formative period, and the level is the middle level of the bureaucracy--that of the assistant secretary and his immediate advisers. That is the highest level in which

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people can still think. Above that, the day to day operation of the machine absorbs most of the energy, and the decisions that are made depend very much on internal pressures of the bureaucracy. Great Britain seems to me to have correctly identified this, and attempts to influence us through a whole set of personal relationships. This does not prevent such things as the Skybolt Affair and others, so it is not an infallible process, but the British system works better than that of any other foreign country.

Why is it so difficult to change policy? Part of the reason is mechani-
cal, and part of it seems to me to be psychological. The mechanical
reason is that as the bureaucracy becomes large and complex, more time
is devoted to running its internal management than in divining the purpose
which it is supposed to serve. The two things tend to merge in the minds
of the top decision makers.

When I first started advising at high levels of the government in the
early days of the Kennedy Administration, I had the illusion that all I
had to do was walk into the President's office, convince him I was right,
and he would then naturally do what I had recommended. There were a
number of things wrong with this view. Most of the people who advise
the President are plausible, so he constantly sees individuals who sound
very convincing. His time is so budgeted and the pressures on him are
so great, that it is almost impossible for him to know whether he should
listen to one convincing individual or the other.

Also, even if by chance I persuaded him that his whole bureaucracy
was wrong and I was right, he would then have the next problem of going
about implementing what had been suggested. And that is not a negligible
issue. There is only so much that even the President can do against the
wishes of the bureaucracy, not because the bureaucracy would deliberate-
ly sabotage him but because every difficult issue is a closed one. The
easy decisions are made at subordinate levels. A closed issue is charac-
terized by the fact that the pros and cons seem fairly evenly divided and/
or because the execution really depends on certain nuances of application.
Unless you can get the willing support of your subordinates, simply giv-
ing an order does not get very far.

I have reason to believe, for example, that after the Nassau meeting
President Kennedy intended to extend to France the same sort of consider-
ation that had been given to Britain at Nassau. Indeed, he was prepared
to put France into the same position, with some nuclear assistance as
well, since that formal offer would not have meant anything unless France
had some help on its nuclear warheads. It is also clear that the State
Department and certain groups in the Defense Department were opposed
to this. In order not to force this issue, President Kennedy kept his

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intention relatively vague. Why fight the State Department before you
even know what de Gaulle will accept? There existed a wide margin
within which the State Department people could operate in interpreting
their directives, not because they were deliberately trying to undermine
the President's intentions, but because they sincerely did not understand
his intention. Certainly, one of the contributing factors to the failure of
our post-Nassau diplomacy was the fact that while presidential emis-
saries were saying one thing to the French, State Department embassies
were saying something else to other European countries. Leaving aside
the question of whether Kennedy's intention was correct, one can never-
theless illustrate the difficulty that even a president can encounter when
moving in a certain direction without the willing and perhaps even enthu-
siastic support of most of his bureaucracy.

When the bureaucracy is large and fragmented as it is, decisions do
not get made until they appear as an administrative issue. One cannot
convince a high level official that he has a problem until it appears un-
ambiguously in the form of an administrative conflict. There is no such
thing, in my view, as a Vietnam policy; there is a series of programs
of individual agencies concerned with Vietnam. These programs are
reconciled or not, as the case may be, if there is a conflict between the
operating agencies. In the areas where there is no conflict between
agencies, it would be very unusual to get a high level consideration of
a problem. When conflict exists, the environment becomes receptive.
For example, when General Westmoreland asked for 200,000 troops,
that forced a high level review. But the day to day operations of a war
or of an alliance diplomacy will not generally engage the President and
the Secretary of State.

In the late 1950s it was axiomatic among my colleagues that the United
States was lacking a sense of national purpose, though in the early 1960s
this was remedied. The top officials are too busy to deal with anything
except the several thousand cables that arrive in Washington every day.
Typically, they are too busy to plan ahead. Planning involves conjectures
about the future and hypothetical cases. They are so busy with actual
cases that they are reluctant to take on theoretical ones. As an illustra-
tion: in 1963 or 1964 the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department
produced a long document about American national purposes which some-
body leaked to the Senate Foreign Committee. That Committee subse-
quently called Secretary of State Rusk to testify about this document.
That was the first time that Mr. Rusk had ever read it, and his feelings
are easy to imagine. This is the typical fate of policy planning in the
State Department. In my experience I do not recall a single instance in
which, when a decision had to be made at a high level, a policy planning

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paper was discussed or a member of the policy planning staff was asked to join. I report this as an empirical fact. I don't believe it has happened in the Vietnamese war at all.

I think most policy planning staffs in our government are created as sops to administrative theory and spend their time projecting the familiar into the future. They are not used for real innovation or even for developing criteria by which one can judge progress properly. This creates considerable rigidities. The executives become extremely conscious of the morale of their staffs.

Modern policy makers face a problem which is quite unique. I recently wrote an article about the foreign policy of Bismarck and discovered in the process that the German Foreign Office in the 1870s had exactly four permanent officials, roughly the scale at which all foreign offices operated at the turn of the century. It would never have occurred to any cabinet minister as late as the outbreak of World War II that he knew less about his problems than his subordinates. Yet, in the contemporary world, policy makers have to make decisions on a range of issues in which they may not give many hours to the same problems that their experts have spent years studying. This creates a congenital insecurity and a quest for administrative consensus behind which executives take refuge. It also leads to a situation in which rather than the executives using the bureaucracy, the opposite may be true: the bureaucracy often tries to use the executives. I think the history of the MLF is a good example.

Our governmental process works reasonably well in relation to specific technical issues and also when there is an adversary procedure. If one department is strongly for something and another department opposed, then the President or cabinet officer has a chance of elaborating an overall purpose. The system goes awry if you have a small, dedicated, unopposed group. I would argue that the MLF was put over by five or six highly motivated, highly intelligent individuals, in a government where a considerable number of people were indifferent and nobody was really opposed. The process by which it was done involved, at least in its early phases, a fairly deliberate manipulation by the bureaucracy of the senior executives.

For example, sentences were put into a Presidential speech which in themselves were perfectly sensible, but the full import of which was perhaps not understood. These were then used to start study groups which were subsequently used to present a new claim for a little more progress, and so on until the point where the prestige of the United States had become heavily committed to something the implications of which, in my judgment, had never been submitted to the adversary procedure.

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No systematic case was made for the opposition to the MLF during the most formative period of the relevant U.S. policy.

Because of this gap between expertise and decision making, a great deal of communication occurs by means of a briefing. Now, briefings reward theatrical qualities. They put a premium on the ability to package information and to present a fore-ordained result. Every briefer worth his salt says, "Interrupt me at any point with a question." Usually the victim of the briefing is very proud if he can formulate a question. The briefer has heard the question a hundred times before, and it is like throwing a fast ball across the middle of the plate to Mickey Mantle. He gives a glib response which is overwhelming. All this creates a state of mind where the policy maker may have the uneasy feeling of knowing he is being taken, even though he doesn't quite know how. This magnifies the sense of insecurity.

Because management of the bureaucracy takes so much energy and precisely because changing course is so difficult, many of the most important decisions are taken by extra-bureaucratic means. Some of the key decisions are kept to a very small circle while the bureaucracy happily continues working away in ignorance of the fact that decisions are being made, or of the fact that a decision is being made in a particular area. One reason for keeping the decisions to small groups is that when bureaucracies are so unwieldy and when their internal morale becomes a serious problem, an unpopular decision may be fought by brutal means, such as leaks to the press or to congressional committees. Thus, the only way secrecy can be kept is to exclude from the making of the decision all those who are theoretically charged with carrying it out. There is, thus, small wonder for the many allegations of deliberate sabotage of certain American efforts, or of great cynicism of American efforts because of inconsistent actions. In the majority of cases this was due to the ignorance of certain parts of the bureaucracy, rather than to malevolent intent. Another result is that the relevant part of the bureaucracy, because it is being excluded from the making of a particular decision, continues with great intensity sending out cables, thereby distorting the effort with the best intentions in the world. You cannot stop them from doing this because you do not tell them what is going on.

Now, finally, this explains why sometimes outsiders can play an influential role. In the majority of cases, the outsider will say nothing that the bureaucracy has not already developed on the inside. The most frequent question that one is asked, if one is a consultant in Washington, is: "Have you had any new ideas lately?" This notion that foreign policy consists in constantly sparking new ideas, as if constant originality is the essence of foreign policy, is in itself open to question. I do not

5

believe that de Gaulle is a considerable statesman because he comes up with a new thought every Thursday. Most ideas that masquerade as new ideas in Washington have been around for quite a long time. The utility of the outsider is that he can inject at a higher level certain ideas that have been around. He is not part of the bureaucratic battle. He is not a problem person whom the decision-maker has to placate. He can be listened to without the implications that are almost inseparable from listening to the bureaucracy. One corollary conclusion I would draw is that the outside adviser should never advise unless his opinion is asked, and he should get out as soon as it is delivered. When he himself becomes an advocate of his policies, that is, as soon as he becomes a bureaucratic problem, he loses his effectiveness, and he is gradually degraded to the level of other bureaucrats.

The tendencies which seem to me to be inherent in the nature of modern bureaucracy tend to be compounded in the United States by the particular cast of mind of our top policy makers, many of whom come from the legal profession. Lawyers are notoriously reluctant to take on hypothetical cases. All planning involves hypothetical cases and therefore there is a tendency among the legal professionals to deal with problems on their merits.

Secondly, the lawyers and some of our business executives are comfortable only with adversary proceedings; without them, they don't know how to guide policy. In the areas where I have seen American negotiations being carried out, I do not recall a detailed negotiating position ever existing before a date for the conference was set. And this reluctance to spell out what we are after is due to the fact that professional negotiators want to see what the other side has to offer before they commit themselves. Therefore, in periods of preliminary diplomacy, our position is very rigid and tough, but this changes rapidly when a negotiator has been appointed because he acts as spokesman for the other side. It is not his problem to worry about the overall picture. He worries about the success of the negotiations, and you make the negotiations succeed by taking very seriously into account what the other side has to say. Therefore, one notices a tendency in American foreign policy to spasms of rigidity and spasms of tactical flexibility.

Another group that deserves mention is the business executives whom Secretary McNamara excluded to some extent. They have the conviction that their special skill consists in making decisions between administratively produced proposals on the basis of some general rule of thumb or a strong will. Within the government they lack the familiar framework of the experience they have accumulated over a long period with their businesses. They become as often prisoners of the bureaucracy as its leaders.

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In all of these observations I must consider Secretary McNamara as an exception--a man of unusual intelligence, toughness of mind, and long range conceptions. In his case, however, a number of very serious problems existed. One was a very curious bent for theoretical combat which would allow him to leave no stupid argument go unchallenged, even if no practical conclusion followed from it. Secondly, he had a tendency to want to be right at all times and to be so far superior to most people with whom he was arguing that he would win even without fully convincing them. I feel that Secretary McNamara gained control over procurement and over procurement-type decisions in the Pentagon at the eventual cost of losing control over major policy decisions. He lost control over these because he not only unified the Defense Department (which is one of his great achievements) but he also managed to unify the military services in a common dislike of the sort of control he was exercising, so that for the first time the civilians were confronted with unified JCS views on most policy issues. As long as the JCS remained divided, a certain element of civilian choice existed, but when they became united and started seeing every issue theologically as defending their special prerogative, McNamara's profundity in analysis had to give way to a very practical problem: how many times a month could he go to the mat with the JCS? He had to decide very deliberately which issues he could confront them with. If one wants to explain why it is that McNamara's theories about the war in Vietnam were not always matched by implementation, especially toward the end, the primary reason was that he felt that confronted with issues of ABM, troop deployment, force levels, renewal of the strategic force, and Vietnam strategy, he could only handle so many of these cases simultaneously. He picked those which he thought were crucial at the moment. Therefore, McNamara does not illustrate the general observations with which I started, but he nevertheless shows that it is not enough to be in charge of a Department. The management of the bureaucracy does tend to play a very large role.

* * *

COMMENT: I think your indictment of Mr. McNamara is correct, but too narrow. The problem with Mr. McNamara is that he lacks an appreciation of the unifying influence of theory (be it political, mathematical, or economic) and he deals too much in the concrete. This is his flaw, but let us give him his due. What he did in one year was change the war plan of the United States, communicate this unequivocally to our allies, who found it a magnificent reinforcement of our commitment abroad, and assert command over the most stubborn parts of the military bureaucracy.

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MR. KISSINGER: Let me comment briefly. I did not mean to say that McNamara addressed himself only to procurement. McNamara, in the nature of the decisions that had to be taken during the first four years of his being in office, addressed himself primarily to general doctrinal issues, and to putting some sense and order into the problem of force levels of the various services. He did this with extraordinary ability. In the process, whether avoidably or unavoidably, and largely unavoidably, he made so many enemies that in the actual conduct of policy he then had to pick his objectives. I disagree with you when you say that the doctrine he developed was considered by our allies as a magnificent reinforcement of the American commitment. I consider it a taking on of a theoretical argument that had no great consequence and produced considerable difficulty. However, that is a question of judgment that any defense secretary has a right to make and has nothing to do with the bureaucratic process. I feel that political sensitivity was not included among McNamara's great qualities and therefore he would not always be conscious of the political impact abroad of theoretical arguments he was making. I often felt he was doing things with which I agreed but in such a way as to be counterproductive. However, that was a question of personality rather than of structure.

QUESTION: Could you comment on the ways in which a new president may or may not be able to shake the inertia of the system in regard to the problem of Vietnam?

MR. KISSINGER: I have the impression that much of Vietnam is going to be shaken up before a new President comes in. As a general rule, I believe a new President, in the areas where he wants to effect change, must do so within the first four months. He need not complete it within this time, but he must give enough of a shake to the bureaucracy to indicate that he wants a new direction and he must be brutal enough to demonstrate that he means it.

It was easy under the Eisenhower administration to ridicule the formalism of the decision-making process. In effect, it was somewhat ridiculous--there were many documents which were really diplomatic treaties between the various departments, and which enabled each department to do what it had wanted to do in the first place. But it had the great advantage of a regular procedure for getting decisions made. Under Kennedy this procedure was dismantled, and he substituted for it a sort of nervous energy and great intellectual activity, which worked well because he was an enormously intelligent man, surrounded by a very lively group of people, so that all sorts of ideas were floating into the very receptive White House.

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