NOTE

This draft was prepared primarily to serve as a chapter
in a study of the national security process. Other chapters
will deal with the White House staff, the Defense Department,
the general problem of policy guidance, and the international
and domestic environment within which the national security
process must function. The essence of all of these chapters
will be synthesized in an overall chapter. Some chapters,
including this one, may be distributed separately to readers
especially interested in a particular aspect of the national
security process.

CONTENTS

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Page</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>A. The Nature of the Problem</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>B. The Present Role of the Department of State in the National Security Process</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>1. The Secretary of State</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>2. The Internal Organization of the Department</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>3. State-White House Relations</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>4. The State Department's Relations with Other Washington Agencies</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>5. Overseas Operations</td><td>41</td></tr><tr><td>C. Major Problems of the Department of State in the National Security Process</td><td>46</td></tr><tr><td>1. Operations</td><td>46</td></tr><tr><td>2. Planning</td><td>52</td></tr><tr><td>3. Resource Allocation</td><td>60</td></tr><tr><td>4. Internal Organization</td><td>65</td></tr><tr><td>5. The Effect on State of Alternative National Security Systems</td><td>80</td></tr><tr><td>D. Conclusions</td><td>83</td></tr><tr><td>ANNEX I. White House Announcement of New Procedures for Overseas Interdepartmental Matters, March 4, 1966</td><td>90</td></tr></tbody></table>

# CHAPTER V
## THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY PROCESS

### Introduction

On January 20, 1969, a new Secretary of State will move into a large, rather gloomy, panelled office on the Seventh Floor of the New State Building and assume charge of the oldest, and possibly the most complicated, Department of the Federal Government. Like the new President whom he will serve, the new Secretary will presumably have well-formed views of what he wants to achieve. He will, however, inevitably encounter important managerial problems in making best use of the resources of his Department.

No paper can serve as an "operator's manual" and solve the new Secretary's managerial problem. What can be attempted is to describe the State Department as it is now, highlight some major problems and suggest some alternative arrangements which might be considered in fitting the Department into an effective system for formulating and executing national security policy. The choice among alternatives must of course be made by the new President and the new Secretary of State. Abstract analysis can hardly prescribe the personal preferences and work styles of the senior officials directly concerned.

A. The Nature of the Problem

If a cross-section of informed Washington observers were asked
which government agency most needed fundamental reform, a substan-
tial percentage would probably name the State Department. But here
their agreement would end. Some would criticize the alleged stand-
patism and old-fashioned ways of the Foreign Service. Others would
deplore the subordination of the Foreign Service to political appoint-
ees. Still others would see serious short-comings in State's leader-
ship of other agencies, but would differ on whether to blame these
short-comings on the Department's top management or on its subordinate
staff.

A full catalogue of current complaints against the State Depart-
ment would require several pages, but would not greatly advance the
present inquiry. The truth of the matter is that foreign ministries
are rarely popular, particularly in periods when the inability of
diplomats to discipline an intractable world is painfully apparent.
Hence, much of the criticism of the State Department amounts to
discontent with specific foreign policies or more fundamentally,
with the state of the world itself.

The fact that such criticism is frequently cast in organizational
or procedural terms is nevertheless significant. State does pose
managerial problems of unusual complexity, and disagreements over
how to solve these problems are inevitable. Their nature can be
out fully only by describing in some detail how the Department func-
tions today. It may be useful, however, first to set down some
fundamental problems which confront a modern Secretary of State in

2

administering his Department and giving it an appropriate role in
the Government at large:

1. **Scope**. What is the proper sphere of the Secretary of State and his Department? In what areas should he direct policy, in what areas should he merely seek to influence policy, and in what areas should he simply be generally informed? To what extent must he concern himself with defense policy? With foreign economic and monetary policy? With science and technology?

2. **Priorities.** Whatever his sphere of responsibility, how can the Secretary strike the best balance among competing interests and objectives, foreign and domestic? How can he ensure that all alternatives are weighed, that all relevant considerations are taken into account?

3. **Resources.** To what extent should the Secretary control or influence the allocation of public resources to various overseas programs, both civilian and military?

4. **Initiative.** How can the Secretary avoid merely reacting to events and steer a reasonably consistent long-term course in international affairs? Can foreign policy be planned? How can the gap between planning and action be bridged?

5. **Coordination.** How can the Secretary ensure that the actions of his Department and other agencies will be timely, mutually supporting and consistent with policy?

No organizational arrangements or procedural devices can ensure satisfactory answers to these questions, but some will be more likely to help than others. These questions will therefore be kept in mind in the following discussions of the present and possible alternative roles of the State Department.

B. <u>The Present Role of the Department of State in the National Security Process</u>

The new President and the new Secretary of State will doubt-
less make some changes, large or small, in the role of the Secretary
and his Department in the formulation and execution of national
security policy. They must, however, begin with what is already
in place. ¹ The present role of the Department is therefore direct-
ly relevant to the tasks which they will face upon assuming office.

1. <u>The Secretary of State</u>

The modern Secretary of State must be many things. He is the
principal advisor of the President on international affairs, the
President's deputy in coordinating most overseas activities, the
chief administrator of his own Department and through it our dip-
lomatic missions around the world. Second only to the President,
he is also chief diplomat and negotiator in dealing with foreign
governments, chief advocate and defender of the President's foreign
policy before Congress and the American people, and chief U.S.
representative on the all-too-many occasions set by the rigid
standards of traditional protocol.

The combined burden of these roles is crushing. It is,
moreover, increasing with the mounting complexity of international

1. Their problem, in the words of a curmudgeonly Foreign Service Officer, will be "How to build a brave new world with most of the same old people in it."

4

problems and the consequent proliferation of governmental organiza-
tions and programs. The incumbent Secretary of State has been able
to adjust to these burdens gradually over an eight-year period. His
successor will feel the full weight of the Secretary's many roles
all at once. Setting priorities in the use of his own time and
finding a way to pass some of his burdens on to his principal assist-
ants will be among the new Secretary's most urgent problems.

2. The Internal Organization of the State Department

All organization charts are inadequate, and the one put out
by the State Department is no exception. Nevertheless it provides
a starting point and is reproduced in slightly simplified form on
page 6.

a. The Top Command

State's top command consists today of the Secretary, the
Under Secretary, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs (who
by law could alternatively be designed "for Economic Affairs"),
a Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs and a Deputy Under
Secretary for Administration.

The Under Secretary is conceived of as the Secretary's *alter* ego, although there is also a rough and shifting division of labor between these two officials with some tasks or problems delegated from the Secretary to the Under Secretary.

No clear concept or principle defines the responsibilities
of the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, and his assignments
are largely determined on an *ad hoc* basis. The line between the

5

functions of the second and third ranking officers of the Depart-
ment is much less clear today than it was when the latter bore an
economic, rather than a political, designation. (A comparable lack
of clear definition exists with respect to the functions of the
Counselor and at least one of the two Ambassadors-at-large).

Contrary to what his title suggests, the Deputy Under Secre-
tary for Political Affairs does not normally report to the Under
Secretary for Political Affairs, but to the Secretary and the
Under Secretary. The Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs
has the relatively well-defined function of speaking for State on
political-military problems and in monitoring operations of the
intelligence agencies. A political-military staff reports directly
to him, but in the intelligence field he relies on a staff subor-
dinate to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The role of the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration is
roughly what his title implies. Some Foreign Service Officers
believe that two of his present functions might more appropriately
be located directly under the Secretary. Subordination of both the
Inspector General and the Director General of the Foreign Service
to the Department's chief administrative officer is seen by these
officers as evidence of the low state to which the Service has
fallen.

Over the years, designation of a general manager has often
been proposed as a means of tightening State's internal admini-
stration and easing the Secretary's burdens. The merits of this
proposal are discussed below, but it may be noted that none of
State's present senior officers functions as a general manager.

b. Staff Support of the Top Command. The State Department today is a line-oriented organization. Given their broad responsibilities, the immediate staffs of the top command are remarkably small. The Secretary regards the senior line officers of the Department as his staff and has taken care that no substantive staff units stand between him and them.

The Executive Secretariat is staffed by carefully selected substantive officers, but does not attempt to impose its own substantive views on proposals passing through it en route to the Secretary or one of his principal assistants. Its primary mission is to oversee the flow of paper between the top command and the assistant secretaries, the White House, other executive agencies in Washington, and the missions overseas. The Executive Secretariat also runs the Department's Operations Center and provides administrative services for the Seventh Floor.¹

The small, high-quality substantive staff recently created to support the Under Secretary in his capacity as Executive Chairman of the Senior Interdepartmental Group represents a new departure and, depending on the desires of the new Secretary, could mark the beginning of a new approach to the question of staff support for the Department's top command.

c. The Regional Bureaus

(1) General. The five regional bureaus constitute the core of the State Department. They largely dominate day-to-day operations.

1. In the State Department, "Seventh Floor" is a short-hand way of referring to the top command and their staffs, which are located on that floor. The prestigious connotations of the term are similar to those of the Pentagon's "E Ring."

8

Their functional scope is virtually unlimited within their areas of
responsibility. Much of the liaison with other departments is in
their hands. Generally speaking, the functional bureaus and staffs
are at a disadvantage in seeking to influence the operational
decisions of the regional bureaus.

The regional bureaus, staffed largely by career officers, are
also the heartland of the Foreign Service. Each bureau has its own
tribal characteristics and traditions. If policy inertia is a
problem in the State Department, it will be mainly encountered here.

Advising the President on the selection of the regional Assistant
Secretaries of State will be among the most important early actions
of the new Secretary. That the regional assistant secretaries
should be men of great ability is obvious. If the new Secretary
is to quickly grasp and use the State Department to effectuate the
new President's policies, these five men should also share the
Secretary's outlook on international problems and be capable of
working smoothly with him as a team.

(2) **The country directors.** For many years, the five regional bureaus were sub-divided into geographical offices, each composed of several country desks. A few years ago, most of the geographical offices were abolished and the desk officers re-designated "country directors." The change in title was intended to underline a change in function. The country directors were to be more senior than the former desk officers and to be given greater responsibility. They were to report directly to an Assistant Secretary, to deal with officials of comparable or only slightly lower rank in other agencies, and to exercise much of the same kind of interagency leadership in

9

Washington as an Ambassador does overseas. Unfortunately, this promising concept has not been fully realized and few country directors have performed the role envisioned for them. Most are only desk officers under a new title.

Several things went wrong. Some individual countries were not considered important enough to elevate each desk officer to the new dignity of country director. In such cases one man was made country director for several countries, an arrangement not greatly different from the old geographical offices. A tendency also developed toward increasing the number of deputy assistant secretaries who were in some cases given geographical responsibilities very much like those of the former office directors. Where the new concept was applied, country directors often found it hard to live up to their intended responsibilities. This may reflect the fact that many Foreign Service Officers advance to senior grades without acquiring much executive experience. Some blame must, however, be assigned to the failure of the country directors' superiors to adjust their own ways of doing business. A country director whose superiors treat him like a junior desk officer cannot easily deal with relatively senior officials in other agencies.

### d. The Functional Bureaus and Staffs

As the chart on page 6 indicates, five functional bureaus (International Organization Affairs, Intelligence and Research, Economic Affairs, Public Affairs, and Educational and Cultural Affairs) and five functional staffs headed by assistant secretaries or officers of equivalent rank (Congressional Relations, International

10

Scientific and Technological Affairs, the Policy Planning Council and the officers of the Counselor and the Legal Adviser) report directly to the Secretary and the two Under Secretaries. Two Ambassadors-at-large, the Chief of Protocol, the Inspector General of Foreign Assistance, and at least eight Special Assistants (some with staffs) enjoy similar direct access to the top. Only one bureau, that of Security and Consular Affairs, reports to a Deputy Under Secretary.

The large number of units reporting directly to the top is workable or not depending on the preferences and working style of the Secretary.¹ A new Secretary will at least want to consider, however, whether a somewhat more pyramidal structure would not be more manageable and impose less of a burden on him and his Under Secretaries. (Possible ways of grouping some of the functional units or modifying their relationships with the top command and the regional bureaus will be explored later.)

### e. The Foreign Service

An official of another agency once remarked that State probably has the best professional staff in the United States Government. But, he quickly added, the question arises of why the results are not better. Both observations have some basis in fact. The Foreign Service is a carefully selected, highly motivated, elite group, but discontent with its role and performance is widespread, both in its own ranks and among outsiders familiar with the State Department. A

1. The case for change is by no means clear, even in theory. Traditional management doctrine, it is true, strongly urged avoidance of an excessive span of control. At least one more modern doctrine, however, favors a horizontal over a pyramidal organizational structure, provided that the mission of each subordinate unit is clearly defined.

book could easily be written on the current state of the Foreign
Service (and in fact several have), but for present purposes it
is sufficient to point out two of the more important problems: poor
morale and deficient skills.

The morale of the Foreign Service is poor, at least in part,
because, rightly or wrongly, its members feel that their political
leadership holds them in low regard and is not greatly concerned
over their welfare. Uncertainty over the future role of the Service
reinforces the uneasiness of individual officers concerning their
personal career prospects.

Possibly adding to the morale problem and a serious problem in
its own right is the clear gap between available talent and the
skills needed to formulate and carry out the foreign policy of
the United States in the late 20th Century. The Foreign Service
is short of good executives, well-trained economists, specialists in
political-military affairs, and officers able to bridge the fields
of foreign policy, science and technology. Both through training
and recruitment, an intensive and sustained effort will be needed
to enable the Foreign Service to meet the requirements of the modern
world.

3. State-White House Relations

The relationship between the White House and the State Department
is both a personal and an institutional one.

Rapport between the President and the Secretary of State is
crucial to State's role in national security matters. Good rapport
at the top does not, however, ensure effective working relations

[illegible]

between the White House staff and subordinate levels of the State Department. Nor does the President's regard for the Secretary necessarily extend to the Department. Thus, President Johnson clearly has full confidence in Secretary Rusk, even though he (like some of his predecessors) is reliably reported as having a "dark view" of the State Department.

Because the relationship between the President and the Secretary of State is personal and confidential, it can be described only in very general terms. They meet several times each week on an ad hoc basis and talk frequently on the telephone. The Tuesday luncheon meeting,¹ however, is the only regularly scheduled opportunity for the Secretary to see the President, and he does so in the company of a number of other officials. The National Security Council is an even larger gathering and it has met only irregularly during the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, and has ceased to be the major arena for decision-making it once was.

The Under Secretary must often substitute for the Secretary in responding to Presidential requests for information or advice. He therefore needs the personal confidence of the President almost as much as does the Secretary.

More than a score of other senior officers of the Department are also Presidential appointees and at least in a formal sense may be said to enjoy his confidence. Few of them, however, have a personal relationship with him and some do not see him from one annual diplomatic reception to the next. This lack of a visible and

1. Described more fully in Chapter IV.

constantly renewed Presidential mandate reduces their ability to exert effective leadership over their counterparts in other agencies.

At its best, the network of informal contacts between White House staff members and State Department officers at all levels gives the latter a "feel" for Presidential thinking which would otherwise be largely absent. At the same time, this network helps the White House staff keep the President informed of developments and permits him to intervene before his options have been foreclosed.

Under President Kennedy, and to a lesser extent under President Johnson, the network was used to monitor and expedite the execution of Presidential decisions. At its worst, the State-White House network breeds confusion by transmitting wrong information about the President's views. Also, the network can decrease the sense of real responsibility within State.

The flow of paper between the State Department and the White House is much less important than the variety of personal relations described above. President Johnson is known as a "reader," but some State Department memoranda rank fairly low on his list of preferred reading. Possibly as a consequence, many such memoranda go no farther than the White House staff. Others reach the President under cover of summaries prepared by that staff, sometimes without the knowledge of the originators.

A considerable volume of paper nevertheless does move from the State Department to the White House, and a much smaller volume flows in the reverse direction. The most important policy papers requesting Presidential approval, or responding to Presidential inquiries, are signed by the Secretary or the Under Secretary.

Other official communications to the White House on less important matters generally go through the "Read-Rostow channel," that is, they are signed by Benjamin H. Read, Executive Secretary of the Department, and addressed to Walt W. Rostow, Special Assistant to the President.

A more extensive flow of informal, unofficial communications (draft cables, internal memoranda, talking papers, etc.) goes from State Department officers to members of the White House staff as a manifestation of the informal network discussed previously. Much of this unofficial documentation is entirely "legal," but some of it can only be described as clandestine. No one is ever likely to learn the true volume of the "bootleg copies" and unsigned "pieces of paper" passing from the State Department to the White House in a given week, but it is certainly substantial.

15

a. General

The emphasis below on formal procedures should not obscure the fact that most of State's interagency business is conducted through an informal network of personal relationships extending from the Secretary of State and his Cabinet colleagues down to the most junior officer on a country desk and his counterparts in other agencies.' In fact, the more formal arrangements for interagency coordination could not function in the absence of this informal network.

A distinction must also be drawn at the outset of this section between formal doctrine concerning the interagency role of the Secretary of State and his actual role. Current doctrine concerning the Secretary's role was enunciated by President Johnson on March 2, 1966, in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) No. 341. This document is classified, but its main points were covered quite fully in a public White House announcement which is reproduced in Annex I. The key operative sentence of this announcement reads:

"In order to assist him in discharging his responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs, the President has directed the Secretary of State, as his agent, to assume responsibility to the full extent permitted by law for the overall direction, coordination and supervision of interdepartmental activities of the United States Government overseas (less exempted military activities)."

Despite its sweeping terms, NSAM 341 has not yet brought about a drastic change in the Secretary of State's interagency role, nor would it have been realistic to expect it to do so. The new delega-

tion of authority to the Secretary did not represent a sharp
break with the past, but was an extension of his existing
responsibility for coordinating interdepartmental matters overseas.
In any case, no verbal formula, however authoritative, can swiftly
revolutionize well-established working relationships.

b. <u>The SIG/IRG System.</u>

President Johnson clearly recognized the need to go beyond a
verbal delegation of authority to the Secretary of State. NSAM 341
also created a new system of interagency committees to assist the
Secretary in exercising his new responsibility. The composition
and functions of these committees are described in Annex I.

The Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG), which is the capstone
of the new system, unfortunately got off to a slow start, because
its Executive Chairman, the incumbent Under Secretary of State, was
about to leave office and his successor (owing in part to his being
given a number of special assignments outside of the field of
foreign policy) was not able for several months to focus on this
aspect of his duties. The SIG, under its current leadership, has
been continuously active for only about a year.

The regional Assistant Secretaries of State approached their
new tasks as Executive Chairmen of the Interdepartmental Regional
Groups (IRGs) in different ways. Some took the new institution
seriously; others less so. The Executive Chairman of the Latin
American IRG quickly engaged the Group in the management of an
experimental planning, programming and budgeting system. No other
Chairmen have followed this example.

When the new administration takes office next January, the SIG/IRG system will be nearly three years old. Much valuable experience will have been gained, but, owing to the system's slow start and to the pragmatic, experimental approach of the officials charged with its management, it is still in an easily malleable state. If the new President decides to keep the system in some form, he and his Secretary of State must address several important questions, including:

(1) What kinds of business should be handled by the SIG and the IRGs? Thus far, the agendas of these Groups have been a mixture of informational, operational and planning items, with no clear emphasis in any particular direction.

(2) What should be the relation between the SIG and the President? At present, the President is informed of all SIG actions, and some of them are submitted to him for final approval by the Secretary of State (or occasionally by the Under Secretary with the knowledge and approval of the Secretary).

(3) Should the IRGs be more formally subordinated to the SIG? The SIG does not now function as a court of appeals from IRG decisions, although occasionally the Executive Chairman of the SIG will ask an IRG for advice on an item to be taken up by the SIG.

(4) Should the IRGs be supported by subordinate country or functional committees? This arrangement exists today in the Latin American area and partially in some other areas.

18

c. <u>**A Functional View of State's Interagency Relations**</u>

Before taking up State's relations with particular agencies
or groups of agencies, it may be useful to consider State's current
interagency role in broad, functional terms.

(1) <u>Operations</u>. An "ideal" national security process would
move in stately and orderly progression from policy planning
through programming and resource allocation to specific operational
decisions and actions. For better or worse, the Government has
never operated this way, nor is it ever likely to do so. Making
operational decisions is the heart of the national security process.
The interagency coordination of operational decisions, which is our
main concern here, is at least as important as are the interagency
arrangements for policy planning. More policy is made through
operational decisions than through policy planning papers.

Most operational coordination in Washington today is effected
by an informal network of consultation, based on established
conventions concerning which agency should take action on a given
piece of business and with which agencies it should clear. The
action agency of course as the initiative, and State enjoys this
advantage in the coordination of action on virtually all political
problems and some economic and political-military problems (notably
many of those involving government-to-government negotiations).

19

In border-line cases, State can more easily assume action if it
has handled closely related business in the recent past, if the
problem at hand was first raised in an Embassy message, or if
it clearly bears significantly on US relations with another country.

The State Department can claim clearance rights on a fairly
wide range of operational problems in which another agency has
action. Here again, past precedent and the bearing of a problem
on our international relations are major determinants of the
Department's rights.

The process of clearance varies greatly, ranging from
clearances "in substance" obtained in telephone conversations
between relatively junior officers, to clearances obtained through
face-to-face meetings of senior representatives of the agencies
concerned. SIG and IRG meetings are of course institutionalized
versions of such meetings when operational matters are discussed.
<u>Ad hoc</u> meetings on operational problems are (and will almost certainly
remain) more numerous than SIG and IRG meetings.

In their coordinating roles, the Secretary of State and his
subordinates have always relied much more on persuasion and on
specialized knowledge and experience than on authority, whether
statutory or Presidential. This is true whether State is the action
agency, or is seeking to influence action by another agency.

<u>Crisis management.</u> No system for coordinating routine operations
can be relied on to work well in all crises, when decisions must be
made rapidly and senior officials up to and often including the
President must be involved in matters of relatively small detail.

The Kennedy Administration instituted two useful innovations which have increased the State Department's ability to deal with crises and which have been continued and developed further under the Johnson Administration. These innovations are the State Department Operations Center and the crisis working groups and task forces.

The Operations Center gave State for the first time a true 24-hour comprehensive watch capability and a continuing point of contact with the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, and operations centers at CIA and USIA. The crisis working groups, housed in the Operations Center, are a means of rapidly expanding the personnel and capabilities of an ordinary desk and elevating it organizationally, thereby reducing the number of required clearances on any action and increasing the effectiveness of control by the Secretary or Under Secretary on behalf of the President. Working groups typically consist of the desk officers normally concerned with the crisis area, reinforced by other State Department officers and in some cases also by officers from other agencies. Interagency coordination in a crisis is effected either through the appropriate IRG or, more frequently, through an interagency committee, known as a task force which is drawn from the agencies represented on the IRG. The Chairman of the task force is usually also Director of the working group.

Creation of working groups and task forces is the responsibility of the Executive Chairman of the IRG. Policy recommendation from task forces (or conceivably, directly from working groups) could in principle go to the IRG or the SIG. In the interests of speed,

21

however, they are more likely to be handled informally at whatever
level appears to be appropriate.

The present system of crisis management appears to function
quite well in the great majority of crisis situations. Major
crises (such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war) have, however, been
handled by specialty improvised arrangements centered in the White
House. Crises at the lower end of the scale are often dealt with
by normal procedures.

**Monitoring.** In a perfect world, a decision by the President or
by subordinate officials acting in his behalf would always be
followed promptly by appropriate action. Several Presidents have
commented on how far this ideal is from reality. Clearly, some
system of follow-through or monitoring is needed to check into the
timeliness and effectiveness with which operational decisions are
carried out. A major purpose of any monitoring system should be to
reveal deficiencies in interagency coordination and recommend means
of curing them.

Under President Eisenhower, field missions were required to
report periodically to the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) on
their execution of OCB plans. President Kennedy, however, accepted
the general judgment that the OCB had produced more paper than
results and abolished the Board shortly after assuming office. In
announcing this action, President Kennedy said that he would center
responsibility for much of the Board's work in the Secretary of
State. President Kennedy also declared his intention of using the
White House staff to follow up on Presidential decisions in the
area of national security. This informal system of monitoring the

22

execution of operational decisions has been continued by President
Johnson.

Within the State Department, the Executive Secretariat performs
a selective monitoring role with respect to day-to-day actions on
problems of major concern to the Secretary and his principal
assistants. The Foreign Service Inspection Corps also is essentially
a monitoring device, but is concerned with the general thrust of
actions taken by field missions pursuant to directives from
Washington, rather than with individual actions. The Inspection
Corps examines the state of Embassy relations with other US government
agencies in a given country, but does not directly inspect the work
of those agencies. The Foreign Service Inspection Corps does,
however, collaborate informally with the separate inspection systems
of both USIA and AID.

(2) Planning

Planning is not part of the State Department's tradition.

Mention of the word in some Foggy Bottom circles produces a glazing of eyeballs or uncomprehending remarks, such as "Planning? Why I plan every day of the year." It is therefore not surprising that State's leadership of interagency planning is less than fully successful.

Two types of planning must be distinguished for present purposes:
policy planning which analyzes long-range problems on the assumption
that presently discernible trends will probably continue, and
contingency planning which considers what should be done if some event

23

occurs which radically departs from expectations and which may
require the US to take urgent action.

Even though policy planning does not normally address contin-
gencies directly, it must at least implicitly take them into
account. Similarly, contingency planning must reflect the broad
objectives laid down in policy planning.

(a) *Policy planning* in the State Department is in theory the
responsibility of both the operating bureaus and the Policy Planning
Council. In practice, the bureaus have until recently done very
little work of this sort except implicitly in connection with opera-
tional decisions. It has, however, always been possible to find a
staff officer in each regional bureau who would admit to having some
planning as part of his job. The creation of the IRGs has produced
a modest increase in policy planning activity in some bureaus.

Much of the work of the Policy Planning Council (S/P) involves
the participation of other agencies. Interagency working groups
help S/P in the preparation of National Policy Papers¹ and in a few
other selected projects. More frequently, specialists in other
agencies are brought in less formally on an individual basis.

Most S/P papers, and a smaller number of papers prepared in other
agencies, are discussed in the Interagency Planning Group which meets
weekly under the chairmanship of the head of the Policy Planning
Council. This group was formed in 1961 to fill part of the vacuum
created by abolition of the NSC Planning Board. It rarely expresses
collective judgments, but exists almost entirely for the self-education

1. See Chapter III for a fuller discussion.

24

influence the posture statements which the Secretary presents annually to Congress. State submits comments on both the DPMs and the posture statements, but these comments come fairly late in the game and are not always reflected in the documents which go forward to the President or Congress. State has not made a general practice of providing policy guidance to Defense on the problems treated in the DPMs and the posture statements before work on those documents, has gotten under way.

In recent years, an informal exchange of views has developed between planning officers in State (G/PM and S/P) and in the Joint Staff. State is now consulted informally on annual revisions of the Joint Long-range Strategic Survey (JLRSS) and on parts of the Joint Strategic Objectives Plan (JSOP).¹ State also collaborates with the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Special State-Defense Study Group which undertakes major long-range studies in the political-military field.

(b) Contingency planning in State has been principally the responsibility of the operating bureaus, with the Policy Planning Council theoretically in a monitoring and coordinating role. Neither the bureaus nor S/P did much about contingency planning, however, until 1965 when the Contingency Coordinating Committee (CCC) was established with representation from State, Defense and CIA. The CCC, under the chairmanship of State's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs, set priorities for political-military contingency

1. The JSOP deals with the period 5 - 8 years from now and is used in projecting future force goals. The JLRSS is concerned with the period 10 - 20 years in the future and is designed to assist in research and development decisions.

planning, established _ad hoc_ interagency working groups to prepare draft contingency studies and took part in the review of such studies.

The CCC was recently abolished and its responsibility for political-military contingency planning turned over to the regional IRGs, which were also specifically charged with studying political and economic contingencies. The newly established Political-Military Group was assigned a special monitoring role over political-military contingency planning.

This arrangement is too new to permit any judgment concerning its adequacy. One basic problem, however, remains largely unsolved. Most military plans (and by their nature, military plans are contingency plans) are prepared outside of Washington in the Unified Commands and, for entirely defensible reasons, are very closely held. In State, most contingency thinking (planning would be too formal a term) is in the heads of operating officers and not recorded fully on paper. In this situation, the obstacles to ensuring that responsible civilians are fully aware of relevant military considerations, and that military plans proceed from proper political assumptions, are truly formidable. Interagency collaboration in a few selected contingency studies can only begin to chip away at this problem.

Lacking the stimulus provided by the CCC, planning for contingencies which have no important military aspects has languished, except for occasional spurts of economic or political contingency planning generated by major international crises.

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(3) Resource Allocation. No cabinet officer can be sure that he will be given the resources needed to carry out the programs for which he is responsible. The Secretary of State suffers from the additional handicap of a wide disparity between his responsibility for operations and policy planning and his ability to influence relevant resource allocations.

The only budget submission over which the Secretary exercises full and direct control is that of the State Department proper, not including AID, ACDA, USIA or the Peace Corps. The resource problems posed by this budget (Shall consulate A be closed? Or should embassy B have an assistant general services officer?) rarely have major policy implications. The only operational programs included in the budget of State proper are some small cultural and educational programs.¹

The Secretary of State or his designated subordinates approve the requests for economic and military aid appropriations prepared in AID, Defense and Agriculture. State's role in this process, however, is largely reactive and, owing to staff limitations, rarely intensive. Procedures and staff capabilities for relating aid and other resource decisions to policy goals do not yet exist in the State Department, except possibly in the Latin American area. This deficiency is particularly glaring in the case of the Defense budget which inevitably has a major impact upon US interests and objectives overseas.

For several years, State with some support from the Bureau of

1. In FY1968, Congress appropriated $46 million for educational exchange programs. The appropriation for FY1969 is only $31 million.

the Budget, has been groping toward creating a planning, programming
and budgeting system (PPBS) which would embrace all of the major
agencies operating overseas (but not including military activities,
except military attaches and military assistance programs). Such a
system would facilitate a more rational weighing of alternative
means of achieving foreign policy goals and would in particular bring
to light interagency budgetary trade-offs, such as AID vs. CIA
counterinsurgency programs or AID public safety programs vs. internal-
security oriented military assistance programs. A foreign affairs
PPBS under State Department management would also automatically
give the Secretary of State considerably more control over the
budgets of the agencies included in the system. It would not, however,
solve his problem of gaining greater influence over the Defense budget.

Earlier work on the now moribund comprehensive country programming
system will be useful, if and when a full-fledged foreign affairs PPBS
is created. Currently, the Country Analysis and Strategy Papers
(CASPs) on Latin American countries amount to an experimental PPBS.
Also, the SIG staff is joining with the Budget Bureau in an experi-
mental joint review of all budget proposals for three selected
countries. The Director of the SIG staff and a senior Budget Bureau
official met in turn with the regional Assistant Secretaries of State
to discuss the FY1969 budget submissions by operating agencies in
their areas of responsibility.

d. <u>The State Family.</u>

The Secretary of State and his Department have special relation-
ships with AID, USIA and ACDA. Some might include the Peace Corps in

29

this "in-group," since the Corps was established as an Agency of
the Department of State. The Secretary of State has, however,
delegated most of his largely administrative authority over the
Corps to its Director, and the Corps, concerned over avoiding identi-
fication with official US policy overseas, would probably decline any
offer of full-fledged family membership. The heads of AID, ACDA
and USIA attend Secretary Rusk's small staff meetings; the director
of the Peace Corps does not.¹

The Secretary of State has direct line authority over AID and
ACDA. His authority over USIA is limited to directing its policy
and controlling the content of USIA's overseas information programs.
It does not follow, however, that State has less influence over USIA
than over AID or ACDA. USIA has by well-established tradition tended
to limit itself to operations, leaving policy to State. For its part,
State has developed a flexible, but effective system for providing
USIA policy guidance quickly.

The Secretary of State's authority over ACDA is diluted by the
fact that the Director of ACDA is, by law, an adviser of the President
as well as of the Secretary. Moreover, both State and ACDA are
policy-making and negotiating Agencies, so no opportunity has existed
for the kind of division of labor which has long characterized State-
USIA relations. Despite these circumstances, working relations
between State and ACDA are generally good. The Director of ACDA works
with and through the Secretary of State, rather than directly with the

1. Legal niceties aside, perhaps the best indication of who belongs to the State family is in telephone arrangements. State, AID and ACDA share the same government code (182) and all of their employees are listed in the same telephone directory. Part of USIA is on code 182, but only USIA personnel with titles appear at the back of the State-AID-ACDA directory. The Peace Corps brass also make the back of this directory, but their telephones are on code 128.

30

President. Possibly because of State's limited staff capabilities in the field, staff work on disarmament and arms control problems is generally done in ACDA. Formal interagency coordination in this field is entrusted to the Committee of Principals, chaired by the Secretary. The Committee also includes the Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Director of ACDA, and senior White House staff officers in the fields of science and national security.

State's relations with AID are much more complicated than are its relations with USIA or ACDA. In the case of AID, the operations-policy guidance division of responsibility would appear to make sense, but it has somehow not come off. State has not maintained an adequate capability to guide aid policy in the same comprehensive way that it guides information policy.¹ AID, on the other hand, has developed a substantial policy planning capability of its own.

Generalizations about State-AID relations are, however, difficult. Special arrangements have been established between State and AID in two of the four regions in which AID operates. State and AID's Latin American bureaus were merged several years ago and the new organization placed under the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Somewhat more recently, the State and AID bureaus for East Asia and the Pacific were physically co-located (placed "back-to-back" in the bureaucratic vernacular), but not combined organizationally.

1. During the Eisenhower administration, the head of AID's predecessor agency, ICA, reported to Mr. Douglas Dillon, who was first Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and later Under Secretary. Mr. Dillon was assisted in his task of supervising aid operations by a special staff in his own office. At this time, State's Economic Bureau also included an Economic Development Division. Both the special Dillon staff and the Economic Development Division were dismantled early in the Kennedy Administration.

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The latter of these two arrangements is generally credited
with improving working relations between the staffs concerned. The
former may well have gone too far. Critics argue that State-AID
integration in the Latin American field has confused lines of
authority, suppressed a useful adversary relationship between the
two agencies and imposed an impossible administrative burden on
the head of the combined staffs.

e. State-Defense Relations.

In the long history of human bureaucracies, there may be no
rival in range, volume or complexity to the current State-Defense
relationship. On any given day, hundreds of civilian and military
officers on both sides of the Potomac are engaged in scores of
collaborative or competitive endeavors, ranging from matters as
routine as trip plans for a Congressman to the most profound
strategic questions. The current extent of State-Defense relations
is of course an accurate reflection of both the magnitude and the
interlocking nature of the security and other foreign problems which
confront the United States today. Both State and Defense are
increasingly in one another's business.¹

Over the years, the tone of the State-Defense relationship has
greatly improved. More and more officers from both agencies have
been classmates at one of the war colleges. The successful State-
Defense exchange program has given further impetus to the growth of
mutual trust and cooperation. Close and friendly personal relations

1. The question of which Department has made the greatest incursion into the traditional domain of the other is not strictly germane to the present inquiry. It is interesting to note, however, that the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA) is often (and with some reason) referred to as "Defense's State Department." ISA's much smaller counterpart in State, the Office of Political-Military Affairs has yet to earn the parallel back-handed compliment of being called "State's Defense Department."

32

between the Secretaries of State and Defense must also be given a
share of the credit.

Problems traceable to the different missions and points of
view of the two Departments nevertheless persist. But this does not
mean that Defense always gives more weight to "military" and State
to "political" considerations. The civilians in the Department of
Defense, who must battle every day of the week to assert their
"supremacy" over the Joint Staff, are in fact often less "military"
than are their colleagues in the State Department. Also, foreign
policy considerations can as easily favor carrying a big stick as
walking softly. Economic consideration, too, bear unevenly on the
two Departments, with Defense understandably much more conscious
than State of the budgetary and foreign exchange costs of military
deployments.

The division of Defense along civilian-military lines inevitably
influences State-Defense relations. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and
the Joint Staff under them welcome, and on occasion actively seek,
opportunities to express an independent judgment to State. The
Defense Department civilians, on the other hand, try to ensure that
Defense speaks with one voice and would probably prefer to hold State-
JCS contacts as much as possible to civilian-controlled channels. In
this situation, subordinate State Department officers sometimes yield
to the temptation to play one side of Defense against the other.
Representation of both sides of Defense on the SIG and the IRGs would
appear at first sight to be a sure cause of complications in State-
Defense relations. The fact that, at least at the SIG level, such
complications have not been serious thus far must probably be credited
to good coordination within Defense and forbearance on the part of State.

33

f. <u>The Intelligence Community.</u>

State's relations with the intelligence agencies fall under two headings: monitoring clandestine overseas operations and analyzing foreign developments.

The first of these functions is managed in two ways: major decisions are handled by a State-Defense-CIA-White House committee chaired by its White House member. Lesser proposals are cleared by State at the Assistant Secretary level. Staff work on clandestine operations is handled within State by a small staff reporting to the Director of Intelligence and Research. Day-to-day liaison on such operations, however, is primarily the responsibility of the Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs, who also represents State on the interagency committee mentioned above.

State's role in the analysis of foreign developments is much greater. State suffers, however, from an almost complete lack of a basic intelligence capability, dating from its voluntary relinquishment in the early 1960's of the staff engaged in producing National Intelligence Surveys. State also has chosen not to compete across the board with CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the current intelligence field and limits its current intelligence output to memoranda on selected subjects.

In the field of intelligence estimates, however, State plays a major role, especially in political matters. The Director of Intelligence and Research sits on the United States Intelligence Board which approves National Intelligence Estimates (NIE's) and also

34

deals with other interagency intelligence problems. State submits
written or oral contributions to virtually all NIEs, and State
intelligence analysts participate actively in NIE working groups.

The quality of State's political inputs to the NIE process is
generally very good, although other agencies sometimes harbor the
suspicion that the positions taken by State are unduly influenced by
the policy views of State's operating bureaus. State's economic,
scientific and political-military inputs are spottier. A modest
effort, however, is under way to improve State's intelligence
research capabilities in these fields.

g. State and the Economic Departments.

In the late 1960's it is a poor agency indeed which does not see
its proper role in global terms. State must therefore cope with the
sometimes conflicting interests and aspirations of a large number of
agencies whose primary missions are domestic. Most of the resulting
problems, however, impinge upon only a narrow range of State's
responsibilities. For present purposes, we may concentrate on
State's relations with four powerful economic Departments: Treasury,
Commerce, Agriculture and Labor.

(1) Treasury, (along with the Federal Reserve Board) has successfully claimed a leading role in international monetary policy. State is given its day in court and broader considerations concerning our international relations receive considerable weight in interagency deliberations. In this field of foreign policy, however, the Secretary of the Treasury rather than the Secretary of State is responsible for coordinating the views of other agencies and recommending courses of action to the President.

35

Treasury also has the unpopular task of reminding State, Defense and the other national security agencies that many otherwise desirable actions abroad would have unacceptable consequences in terms of our balance of payments. To Treasury's credit, however, it does not generally take sides in interagency disputes (as, for example, the State-Defense disagreement over troop levels in Europe), but merely insists that the balance of payments implications of alternative courses of action be faced and necessary compensatory measures be taken.

The informal interagency committee on international monetary problems chaired by Treasury Under Secretary Deming has been cited as an outstanding example of an effective instrument for interagency coordination. The success of this committee can apparently be attributed to its small size (only Treasury, State, the White House and the Council of Economic Advisors), high level and informal, unbureaucratic procedures. Also, some credit must be given to the happy accident that its members have been unusually compatible, both intellectually and psychologically. Treasury (in these cases the Secretary) also chairs the National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Policies (NAC) and the Cabinet Balance of Payments Committee. Some observers believe that both of these bodies should be chaired by the Secretary of State;¹ others see nothing wrong in the present arrangement.

1. Advocates of this change, it might be noted, generally express doubt concerning the readiness of the incumbent Secretary to accept these chores. Congressional action, which might not be obtainable, would be required to change the chairmanship of the NAC.

36

[lc]

(2) **Commerce** understandably gives greater weight than does State to the expansion of exports and the protection of domestic producers from "disruptive" foreign competition. One might therefore expect to find a considerable element of controversy in State-Commerce relations. This is indeed the case in the field of textile import policy, but otherwise controversy is not more widespread. First, Commerce is not as narrow in its outlook as is sometimes alleged, nor is State as unresponsive to domestic economic interests. Second, the entire Government has been committed to a policy of trade liberalization, which has facilitated reconciliation of State's and Commerce's differing emphases. And finally, during the past few years, the center of trade policy formulation has moved out of the Commerce Department to the office of the President's Special Trade Representative.

(3) **Agriculture.** The Secretary of Agriculture, rather than the Secretary of State or the Administrator of AID has the leading role in a major component of our economic aid effort. As appropriations for AID have gone down, the grant or sale of agricultural commodities on concessional terms under the authority of Public Law 480 has assumed greater importance as a means of relieving economic distress and assisting in the development of many poor nations. The Secretary of State does not possess direct line authority over these programs (as he does over aid programs administered by AID). State must seek to influence them indirectly through AID's member on the Interagency Staff Committee (ISC) chaired by Agriculture and through

37

[110]

AID's staff on Food for Peace. Coordination between AID and Agriculture, it might be noted, has recently been improved by a joint programming arrangement, although there is still room for further improvement.

The great deficiency is the excessively involved clearance procedures to which P.L. 480 programs are subjected. Proposals, which are usually initiated in the field, are referred first to the ISC which operates under a rule of unanimity. After agreement has been reached among the representatives of Agriculture, AID, Defense, Treasury, Commerce and Budget on the ISC, a joint memorandum to the President is drafted for the signature of the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administrator of AID. Before reaching the President's desk, however, this memorandum must be passed on by the NAC and personally approved by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Budget Bureau.

The establishment of the SIG and the IRGs has had relatively little effect on the handling or substance of P.L. 480 programs. The White House announcement concerning NSAM 341 and the SIG/IRG system expressly stated that these programs "will remain the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture," thereby exempting them from the delegation of Presidential authority to the Secretary of State.

(4) Labor. The Secretary of State is served by a Special Assistant and Coordinator for International Labor Affairs, and each regional Bureau includes on its staff at least one officer specializing in labor. Labor specialists constitute the largest specialist corps in the Foreign Service. Despite this coverage, it is probably fair to say that the Department as a whole is not labor conscious. Specialists in the field must often wage an uphill fight against the

38

ignorance and near indifference of many Foreign Service Officers
to labor as an aspect of international affairs. From the point of
view of the Labor Department, the problem must appear less one of
substantive conflicts with State than one of getting State below
senior levels to consider international labor questions in its
policy planning and operational decisions.

h. <u>Science, Technology and Foreign Policy</u>

Only a few years ago, the above observations on State's relative
lack of labor consciousness could also have been applied to the
attitude of State's rank and file toward science and technology.
Today, the consciousness of the importance of science and technology
in foreign affairs is growing, but, outside of a small number of
specialists, the ability to act upon this emerging awareness is still
largely lacking. Several recent events may be cited as evidence of
State's growing interest in science and technology:

(1) Within the past year, the Director of the Department's
Office of International Scientific and Technological Affairs (SCI) was
raised to the rank (but without the title) of assistant secretary.

(2) The Secretary now attends occasional luncheons with leading scientists, organized by the Director of SCI.

(3) In the spring of this year, SCI, State's Policy Planning Council and the National Academy of Sciences jointly sponsored a day-long meeting of State Department officers and scientists designed to identify possible future developments in science and technology which might have important implications for foreign policy.

39

SCI maintains active liaison with the White House Office of Science and Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and a number of other agencies with responsibilities for non-military aspects of science and technology. The purpose of this liaison is, on the one hand, to assist the other agencies concerned in any problem which they may encounter with foreign governments and, on the other hand, to try to ensure that those agencies give proper weight to foreign policy considerations in their own planning and operations. The Secretary and his principal assistants are inevitably drawn into some of the more difficult of these problems. The Secretary is in addition a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Council and the National Marine Sciences Council, both of which are chaired by the Vice President.

Military science and technology (principally space and nuclear weapons) is the responsibility within State of the Office of Political-Military Affairs, rather than of SCI.

## 5. Overseas Operations

### a. The Ambassador and the Country Team.

The authority of the Ambassador over the various agencies represented in his Mission was sharply defined in a letter which President Kennedy sent all Ambassadors on May 29, 1961. The key portion of this letter reads:

> "You are in charge of the entire United States Diplomatic Mission and I shall expect you to supervise all of its operations. The Mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also the representatives of all other United States agencies which have programs or activities in. ...I shall give you full support and backing in carrying out your assignment.

Needless to say, the representatives of other agencies are expected to communicate directly with their offices here in Washington, and in the event of a decision by you in which they do not concur, they may ask to have the decision reviewed by a higher authority in Washington.

> However, it is their responsibility to keep you fully informed of their views and activities and to abide by your decisions unless in some particular instance you and they are notified to the contrary."¹

Individual Ambassadors of course vary in their ability and desire to convert this broad grant of authority into effective control over the activities of all American agencies. Like the President himself, Ambassadors must persuade as much as command. If nothing else does so, the right of other agency heads to appeal from an Ambassador's decisions inhibits his adoption of an excessively authoritarian style.

1. This grant of authority, it will be noted, is somewhat less sweeping than President Johnson's delegation to the Secretary of State in 1966 of "responsibility to the full extent permitted by law for the overall direction, coordination and supervision of interdepartmental activities of the United States Government overseas (less exempted military activities)." (Underlining supplied).

41

Many Ambassadors rely heavily on a committee of local agency heads, known as "the Country Team" in supervising and coordinating the work of the various agencies. The Country Team varies from country to country in both its composition and method of operation. For example, the military attaches are included in some Country Teams and excluded from others. Some Country Teams operate like an executive council with a formal agenda and recorded actions. Others are purely advisory, and all important decisions are the exclusive prerogative of the Ambassador. A few Ambassadors go so far as to reject the idea that there is such a thing as a Country Team, on the ground that the very concept subverts their authority as personal representatives of the President.

### b. Planning and Programming in the Field

Overseas Missions are properly operational in their orientation. With occasional exceptions, they do not undertake policy planning on their own initiative. They correctly expect policy to be formulated in Washington.

Since 1961, however, when President Kennedy dismantled the elaborately structured NSC-OCB system, most Missions have not been provided with authoritative and comprehensive statements of US policy in their countries of responsibility.¹ Some Missions have complained about this; others have welcomed the lack of constraining policy

1. The Country Guideline papers prepared in the State Department in the early 1960's had no standing with other agencies. They have in any case not been kept up to date.

42

guidance from Washington. Almost all (except those few enjoying the mixed blessing of a National Policy Paper) have had to derive relevant policy objectives from speeches by Washington officials, operational cables, directives applicable to specific agency programs, and their own sense of what objectives ought to be.

This means that the program recommendations and budget requests drawn up by overseas Missions often lack a secure policy base. The absence of clear guidance on broad strategy and objectives also makes it more difficult for the Ambassador to weave the various programs of his Mission into a coordinated whole. This task would be difficult in any case, because the programming cycles of the various agencies do not match and because Embassy staffs are not yet accustomed to identify and assess possible interagency trade-offs. Establishment of a foreign affairs PPBS would of course have a revolutionary impact upon programming in the field, as well as in Washington.

### c. Embassy-Military Relations

The 1961 Kennedy letter cited above covered the relations of Ambassadors with the US military in the following terms:

> "Now one word about your relations to the military. As you know, the United States Diplomatic Mission includes Service Attaches, Military Assistance Advisory Groups and other Military components attached to the Mission. It does not, however, include United States military forces operating in the field where such forces are under the command of a United States area military commander. The line of authority to these forces runs from me, to the Secretary of Defense, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and to the area commander in the field.

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Although this means that the chief of the American
Diplomatic Mission is not in the line of military command,
nevertheless, as Chief of Mission, you should work closely
with the appropriate area military commander to assure the
full exchange of information. If it is your opinion that
activities by the United States military forces may
adversely affect our over-all relations with the people
or government of ..., you should promptly discuss the
matter with the military commander and, if necessary,
request a decision by higher authority."

This directive has worked reasonably well when the Ambassador
and the military commander are stationed close together and have
roughly identical areas of responsibility. In this situation, the
Ambassador still must establish his dominant authority in matters
affecting relations with the host government, but once this is clear
a good basis for cooperation exists. In some instances, the military
commander has in effect become a member of the local Country Team.

Relations between Ambassadors and Unified Commanders are a more
complicated problem because of the vast disparity in areas of
responsibility and the limited opportunity for personal contact. In
countries where there is a MAAG the situation can become particularly
awkward. The MAAG Chief in effect has two masters and they will not
always agree. Strains can also arise between an Ambassador and a
Unified Commander when they have strong but differing views on
problems such as base rights or the status of US forces. Given the
number of built-in opportunities for trouble, it is remarkable that
relations between Ambassadors and Unified Commanders have been
generally good.

Deployments of US armed forces abroad in a crisis are not
explicitly covered by the 1961 Kennedy letter. The division of
responsibility between Ambassador and military commander called for

44

in the letter may not be practicable in fast moving crisis
situations, such as existed in Lebanon in 1958 and in the Dominican
Republic in 1965.

d. <u>Back-stopping in State</u>

No matter how well an Ambassador may do in managing his Mission
on the spot, his authority can rapidly be under-cut if his more
important recommendations are lost in a tangle of interagency
discord in Washington, or simply ignored. Since very few issues can
be carried to the President, the Ambassador is ultimately dependent
upon the support of Secretary of State and his subordinates,
especially the appropriate regional Assistant Secretary and the
Country Director.

The danger of course exists that an overly responsive Country
Director will become little more than the Washington representative
of the US Ambassador to the country on which he works. Few
Ambassadors, however, are likely to concede that this danger is
serious at this time. Ambassadorial complaints about inadequate
support from State are both numerous and loud. Whether the SIG/IRG
system will result in better back-stopping for Ambassadors still
remains to be seen.

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### C. Major Problems of the Department of State in the National Security Process

Our purpose here is to focus on four major problem areas-- operations, planning, resource allocation and internal organization--with emphasis on the identification and assessment of alternatives to present arrangements. Throughout most of the section, we will assume that NSAM 341 remains in effect and that the problem of the new Secretary of State will therefore be how best to discharge the responsibilities delegated to him by the President for the overall direction, coordination and supervision of interdepartmental activities of the United States Government overseas. At the end of this section, this assumption will be relaxed in order to examine briefly the effect of alternative national security systems on the Secretary's problems.

#### 1. Operations

##### a. Coordination in Washington

(1) **Structure v. Informality.** As was noted earlier, most operational coordination in Washington today is effected by an informal network of consultation. This is as it should be. The question is whether **all** coordination should be handled in this way. A loose, unstructured system is perfectly feasible. The case for formal coordination procedures for the more important operating decisions is nevertheless quite strong. The absence of formal procedures magnifies several defects inherent in large bureaucracies:

(a) The action agency, and even the action officer, can gain an unfair advantage over other legitimately concerned parts of the

46

Government. For example, if State, with its predominantly geographical internal organization, has action, US interests in a particular area may be given greater weight than are global interests or interests extending over large regions.

(b) Many action officers are chronically overwhelmed by day-to-day business and, left to themselves, may take an excessively short-run view.

(c) Because it makes life simpler, action officers and even their immediate superiors sometimes avoid carrying problems to higher levels as long as possible.

A more formalized method of handling selected operational decisions can moderate, if not eliminate, these defects. If NSAM 341 remains in effect, any such formal method of interagency coordination could be managed by, or on behalf of the Secretary of State through the SIG/IRG system.

(2) The SIG/IRG system already handles some important interagency operational problems and could probably handle more with a modest increase in supporting staffs and the assistance of interagency country committees. An expansion in SIG/IRG operational work would, however, bring to the fore several problems which are already at least potentially present.

(a) **SIG/IRG and the President.** A retired senior official has likened the SIG/IRG system to the Indian rope trick. "It has no top. You climb up the rope with your problem and both you and the problem disappear." The point of this semi-facetious remark is the lack of an automatic, formal link between SIG/IRG system and the President.

(16)

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For the President, the danger in the SIG/IRG system is that too much will be decided at lower levels and that his options will be foreclosed or reduced before he is aware of a problem. White House staff membership on the SIG and the IRGs and the reporting of important SIG decisions to the President represent efforts to deal with this problem, but these measures may not be enough. The President should continue the practice of occasionally pulling major operational problems out of the SIG/IRG system, either before or after SIG or IRG action, and dealing with them directly after hearing debate in an NSC meeting or in an *ad hoc* forum.

(b) **SIG/IRG and the Economic Departments.** Representatives of the economic Departments are invited to SIG and IRG meetings when items of interest to them are to be discussed. This arrangement, however, does not settle the question of SIG/IRG jurisdiction over the operations of those Departments. In part, the problem is partly one of law (as in the case of the Secretary of Agriculture for P.L. 480 matters). Nevertheless, within the limits set by law, there is probably room for clearer definition and more effective role for SIG/IRG in these matters if that is what the President and Secretary desire. A possible solution might be for the President to issue a supplement to NSAM 341 which would:

(i) Lay down more precise guidelines on the limits of the jurisdiction of the SIG and the IRGs.

(ii) Authorize the executive chairman of the SIG and the IRGs to decide their Groups' jurisdictions, such decisions to stand unless overturned by appeal to the heads of the concerned agencies in the case of the IRGs or the President in the case of the SIG.

48

Llo

If this "legalistic" approach to the problem of the economic Departments proved unworkable, the alternative would be to handle each operational decision concerning them on an _ad hoc_ basis.

(c) Appeals within the SIG/IRG system. An expansion in the operational work of the SIG/IRG system could increase the number of appeals from country committees to IRGs and from IRGs to the SIG. The system should be prepared to accommodate appeals, but its managers could hold down their volume by directing operational problems to the level most likely to settle them and, as at present, occasionally asking an IRG to advise the SIG on a given problem, rather than to take action on it. (A country committee might similarly be asked to advise an IRG.)

(3) Crisis Management. Present arrangements work well and only minor improvements appear to be in order:

(a) A special effort should be made to assign to crisis task forces and working groups at least some of the persons who have worked on a relevant contingency plan (if one exists).

(b) Crisis task forces and working groups should begin work by reading any relevant contingency plan (kept on file in State's Operatives Center). Their last action before disbanding should be to write a critique of that plan.

(c) Crisis task forces and working groups should not be created in every crisis, but only when normal procedures and staffing are clearly inadequate.

b. Coordination Overseas

(1) General. The clear authority of the Ambassadors and the flexible use of Country Teams has reduced most procedural coordination problems overseas to manageable proportions. The substantive results might, however, be improved if at least the more important

49

overseas Missions were provided with authoritative and up-to-date
statements of US policy toward their countries of responsibility.
The needs of some Missions could be met by regional or sub-regional
policy statements.

(2) <u>Embassy-military relations.</u> The guidelines provided in the
1961 Kennedy letter have proved generally workable, but problems
remain in two areas:

(a) <u>Relations between Ambassadors and Unified Commanders</u> pose
a complex problem of coordination, since State has no equivalent
to the Unified Commands. Some military decisions affecting
relations with specific countries are made at a regional level
where the Ambassador concerned has no direct recourse. ¹

A satisfactory solution to this problem may never be found. If
only on budgetary grounds, the creation of regional State Department
offices may be excluded from serious consideration. Giving the
Unified Commands representation on appropriate IRGs is at first
sight attractive, but would undoubtedly be opposed by Defense as an
unjustified deviation from the established military chain of command.
More frequent contact between Ambassadors and Unified Commanders
would probably help. If the necessary money could be found, more
frequent regional political-military conferences might pay off in
many ways, including improved coordination.

(b) <u>Crisis deployments</u> of US forces to foreign countries typically
occur in a setting of rapidly moving political and military events.
In such situations, division of responsibility between the US military

1. The present Political Advisers to the Unified Commanders, it
might be noted, are not regional outposts of the State Department, but
members of the staffs of the Commanders to whom they are assigned.

commander and the US Ambassador on the scene can be inefficient
and even dangerous. One or the other should be placed in charge
of all US operations, both civil and military.

(3) **Back-stopping.** The SIG/IRG system will probably help to improve back-stopping of Ambassadors, particularly as the IRGs are supplemented by country committees chaired by State's Country Directors.

### c. Monitoring

Basic responsibility for monitoring probably belongs with the
normal chain of command, but various supplementary devices could
also be used:

(1) Giving a secondary monitoring role to the body responsible for coordinating (1) policy planning or (2) operating decisions. Of these alternatives, the latter seems preferable. Planners are rarely informed on the details of operations. Also, operating decisions are more likely to conform to established policy if the coordinators of such decisions are also the monitors of conformity.

(2) Creating a link between policy plans, agency programs and budget requests. In theory, this approach would be highly effective, at least in controlling the general content of programs. (This subject is explored further in a later section of this paper.)

(3) Broadening the mandate of the Foreign Service Inspection Corps to cover all components of overseas missions. Expansion of the Corps to include qualified senior officers from the other agencies concerned would then be necessary. To emphasize the Corps' new role, the Inspector General might report directly to the Under Secretary of State in the latter's capacity as Executive Chairman of the SIG or

51

to the Executive Under Secretary of State if one is appointed.

## 2. Planning

### a. Policy Planning

(1) **General.** The Secretary of State must both be a policy planner himself and be concerned with the quality and utility of policy planning in his own and other agencies.

Good policy planning is primarily a matter of getting good people to study the right problems. It is also important, however, to free policy planners from excessive bureaucratic constraints and encourage them to challenge established doctrine. Policy planning officers should be functionally separated from day-to-day operations and have direct access to an appropriate policy-making level. An adversary relationship between policy planners and operators can in fact be very useful to the Secretary and his principal assistants as a means of surfacing alternatives to current policies.

Policy planning can of course be good without being useful. Policy planning should serve operations¹ in two ways: by helping the Secretary and other senior officials formulate the broad strategic framework for operational decisions, and by providing general policy guidance for operating officers in Washington and overseas. These two operational uses of policy planning are quite different. The kind of wide-ranging and provocative analysis that would best serve the first purpose would not usually be suitable as policy guidance. Conversely, most policy papers prepared primarily for guidance purposes would provide little intellectual stimulus for senior officials. Thus, different procedures may be required for these two

1. The problem of relating policy planning to resource allocation is reserved for a later section of this paper.

52

categories of policy planning.

(2) **Formality v. Informality.** The case for formal, structured procedures is much stronger in the case of planning for policy guidance than in the case of planning as an aid to strategic thinking. Policy guidance must be authoritative, and authority in national security policy must come from the President or someone empowered to act for him. The President or his representative would probably not wish to approve a comprehensive statement of US policy on a given subject, or toward a particular area, before that statement had been carefully reviewed by all agencies concerned. Such review can best be ensured by clearly defined procedures.

Since the chief purpose of a strategic analysis papers is education, formal interagency review is usually unnecessary. It may also be undesirable, if, as often happens, it brings into play the "lowest common denominator effect," which is the compromising differences at the expense of meaning. Strategic analysis papers require only one procedural arrangement: a regular forum at which appropriate senior officials can discuss the fundamental issues which such papers should raise.

The discussion of a strategic analysis paper may lead directly to the preparation of a related policy guidance paper, but the two processes should probably not be merged. An overly ambitious attempt to do precisely this may explain both the excessive cost of National Policy Papers (NPPs) and their limited success in raising serious issues to the level of the Secretary of State.

(3) The Roles of the President and the Secretary of State in Policy Planning. NSAM 281, which gave the Secretary responsibility for promulgating NPPs,¹ is still entirely appropriate even though it preceded NSAM 341 by two years. However, as suggested above, those Papers should no longer be regarded as an important means of stimulating new strategic thinking.

Strategic analysis papers are another matter. The President may wish to debate major issues of long-term national strategy, and the Secretary of State would presumably participate in such debates. The President may not, however, have time to meet on all subjects requiring the attention of senior officials. Meetings without him will almost certainly continue to be necessary. Consistent with the spirit and clear intent of NSAM 341, the Secretary of State should chair such meetings.

(4) Procedural Alternatives. The new President and his Secretary of State will face the question of whether and how to use a number of existing institutions and procedural arrangements for policy planning purposes. They may also of course decide to revive arrangements from earlier administrations, or to create entirely new ones of their own.

(a) Strategic analysis papers of direct interest to the President might be discussed in the National Security Council, or in a smaller ad hoc White House meeting. Prior discussion of such papers in the SIG and in either the Interagency Planning Group or an IRG might often be useful, since the participants in these various forums would overlap to only a minor degree. Moving a strategy paper to successively higher

1. Discussed in Chapter III.

54

forums should not be regarded as a review or clearance process,
although the differences of view expressed at a lower level might
be recorded and circulated to participants in the next higher level
discussion. When the SIG meets on a major strategic analysis paper,
the Secretary of State, as well as the Under Secretary, might wish
to attend. Alternatively, the Secretary might as at present convene
an *ad hoc* meeting whose composition would be determined by the subject
to be discussed.

Many strategic analysis papers need not be discussed at all three
levels. A few might go directly to the NSC or another meeting
chaired by the President. Others might stop at the SIG or an
*ad hoc* meeting chaired by the Secretary of State, with or without
having first been discussed by the IAPG or an IRG. Still others might
not go higher than the IAPG or an IRG.

The IAPG could be given a key role in the kind of flexible arrange-
ment described above. Subject to the general supervision of the
Secretary of State, the IAPG could set priorities and make assignments
for the production of strategic analyses. Papers dealing with a single
region could be delegated by the IAPG to the appropriate IRG, by
agreement between the chairmen of the two Groups. Any disagreements
could be settled by the Under Secretary of State in his capacity as
Executive Chairman of the SIG. The IAPG would in effect become a
"planning IRG." Staff support for the IAPG would be provided as at
present by constituent agencies, with State's Policy Planning Council
in a leading role.

An alternative arrangement, not entirely consistent with the spirit

55

of NSAM 341, would be to center the management of strategic analysis
papers in the White House. The IAPG might be turned over to White
House chairmanship and be converted into something like the NSC
Planning Board. Staff support would continue to be provided by the
constituent agencies and the IRGs might handle papers within their
areas of interest. The SIG/IRG system, if retained, would presumably
not play a major role in this important category of policy planning,
but might do so in planning for policy guidance.

Still another possible arrangement would be to create a White
House planning staff, which might undertake the drafting of some
strategic analysis papers itself, assign others to agency planning
staffs, and form interagency working groups to handle still others. The
principal disadvantage of this arrangement would be the danger of
creating a pyramiding of planning bureaucracies, since existing staffs
in State, Defense and elsewhere would presumably not be replaced entirely
unless the White House staff was expanded enormously:

Any of the above possible arrangements could be made to work.
The choice would be the President's. If he wished to control directly
the process of analyzing long-term options, he would presumably give
a central managerial role to his own staff. If he preferred to rely
on the Secretary of State to see that this job was performed
properly, the President would probably approve of the Secretary's
giving the central managerial role to the IAPG converted into a
planning IRG. If the President sought to keep a hand on the strategic
planning process without pulling too much of the process into his own
immediate office, he might prefer to revive the NSC Planning Board
under the chairmanship of a senior member of the White House staff.

56

Whatever arrangement is adopted, all major strategic planning
efforts, including the Secretary of Defense's Draft Presidential
Memoranda should be subjected to interagency discussion at an
appropriately senior level.

(b) Policy guidance papers, as we have seen, require more formal
handling than do strategic analysis papers and need not directly
involve the President. The principal procedural question concerning
such papers (assuming the Secretary of State's leading role) is
whether they should be produced through special procedures, as is
now true of the National Policy Papers, or turned over to the SIG/IRG
system.

The major justification for the present NPP procedures is the
belief that the Policy Planning Council, which is responsible for
NPPs, can take a more objective view of policy options than can
the regional Bureaus which are committed to current policy. This
argument, however, loses much of its weight if policy guidance
papers are no longer viewed as vehicles for presenting strategic
alternatives to senior officials. If the SIG/IRG system is retained,
there appears to be no good reason why it should not assume responsi-
bility for the preparation of policy guidance papers. Possible
problems of entrusting policy planning to operating officers could be
minimized by involving the IRG staffs in at least the review of policy
guidance papers. Much of the drafting work, however, would inevitably
fall on the Country Directors who would find this task an additional

57

reason to organize interagency country committees to share the burden.

Policy guidance papers would draw on relevant strategic analysis papers, to the extent that the analytical approach and conclusion of the latter were endorsed by senior policy officials.

b. Contingency Planning

(1) General. Unlike policy planning, contingency planning need not be the direct concern of the Secretary of State or other senior officials. Their interest is in having contingency planning done, and done well, not in being part of the planning process. By its very nature, contingency planning does not set the course of policy or guide day-to-day actions. Rather, contingency planning, if effective, does three things: (1) it increases the likelihood that all relevant factors receive proper consideration in a given contingency, if it actually occurs; (2) it educates those who do the planning; and (3) it identifies measures which might be taken in the near term, either to fend off undesirable contingencies or to improve the Government's ability to cope with them. The last of these functions is contingency planning's contribution to policy planning.

Normally, policy planning is best done by staff officers who are not involved in daily operations. The reverse is true of contingency planning. It should be done by officers who have an acute awareness of practicalities and who, moreover, are most likely to be charged with meeting a given contingency if it occurs.

(2) Alternatives. The interagency coordination of contingency planning could be handled largely by a special body, such as the

58

recently abolished Contingency Coordinating Committee (CCC), or
by the IRGs as at present. Centering contingency planning in the
White House may be ruled out, since it would tend to remove this
function from the operating level where it belongs.

There are no strong reasons in principle for preferring either
a special body or the IRGs. The IRGs might not be able to handle
contingency planning and at the same time assume major responsibility
for policy planning. Hence, if the IRGs were given a substantial
policy planning role, there would be a case for re-constituting
something like the CCC, either as an autonomous body or under the
general supervision of the SIG.

Since a large number of contingencies might profitably be
studied, the interagency machinery for coordinating contingency planning
should be able to handle a fairly large volume of business. In
addition, unless action officers in State, Defense and CIA are forced
to analyze contingencies jointly, there can be little hope of raising
the level of sophistication on both sides of the river. From State's
point of view, the problem is to inject political considerations into
the Joint Staff's planning. From the Pentagon's point of view, the
problem is to make State more aware of what is and is not militarily
possible.

Both jobs are formidable, and one may question whether any
committee operation, however extensive, can produce the desired results.
Also, the understandable reluctance of the Joint Staff to concede that
civilians have a need to know military plans poses an obstacle to full

59

communication. It might be desirable therefore to create a small,
fully-cleared, State-Defense contingency planning staff to support
the Political-Military IRG (or a revived CCC). This staff would have
access to all relevant planning documents and would have two
functions: (a) to comment on interagency planning studies in light
of their privileged knowledge of agency plans and (b) to comment
similarly on single-agency contingency plans at the request of the
agency concerned.

3. Resource Allocation

a. General

The fact that policies influence resource allocation (or alter-
natively, that policies require resources) is beyond dispute. It
follows that greater influence by the Secretary of State over the
allocation of resources to agencies operating overseas would greatly
enhance his ability to discharge the responsibilities delegated to him
by NSAM 341.

The traditional way to achieve this result would be for State to
devote more staff time and effort, both in Washington and the field,
to reviewing program proposals and budgetary submissions of the
operating agencies. More should perhaps be done in this direction.
Certainly, State is less involved in this sort of review today (as
well as less well staffed for it) than was true a number of years ago.
This approach, however, cannot be carried too far before it reaches the
point of rapidly diminishing returns.

A number of knowledgeable persons, both in State and outside, have concluded that a modern Secretary of State should be armed with a system which will, in an orderly way, relate the programs and budgets of the operating agencies to foreign policy objectives.

In short, they have advocated creation of a planning, programming and budgeting system (PPBS) covering State proper and at least some of the foreign affairs operating agencies.

### b. <u>Advantages and Disadvantages of a Foreign Affairs PPBS</u>

(1) <u>Advantages.</u> In ideal form, a foreign affairs PPBS would enable the Secretary of State to apply the optimum "mix" of interagency efforts to the achievement of specified foreign policy goals. In each foreign country and globally, the marginal "yield" of the last dollar spent on all programs would be equal and no improvement in total results could be realized by shifting funds from one country or program to another. Even if results fell far short of this ideal, the effort to relate programs and budgets to objectives would sharpen policy makers' awareness of choices, quantify some options which are now assessed in only qualitative terms and lead to trade-offs between programs which would increase the effectiveness and lower the costs of overseas operations. The principal advantage of a foreign affairs PPBS, however, would probably not be in the field of cost effectiveness, but in strengthening the authority of the Secretary of State by placing him at the center of the budgetary processes of the agencies covered by the system.

61

(2) **Disadvantages.** Despite the experimental work several years ago on a comprehensive country programming system (CCPS) and the current experiment with Latin American country analysis and strategy papers (CASPs), no one has a very clear idea how a foreign affairs PPBS would look. Direct borrowing from the successful Defense system is not possible. Foreign Affairs involves different, less quantifiable, problems, and there is as yet no foreign affairs counterpart to the single defense budget. Serious doubt exists concerning the magnitude and even the feasibility of trade-offs among programs managed by different agencies and financed by different appropriations.

The ability of the State Department as presently staffed to operate a foreign affairs PPBS is at least open to question. State has traditionally been almost blind to resource problems. Until recently, efforts by a few administrative specialists to develop a foreign affairs PPBS were viewed with contempt by almost all substantive officers of the Department who, misunderstanding what was proposed, sagely argued that diplomacy cannot be computerized.

### c. Special Problems

(1) **The question of scope** has two dimensions: subject-matter coverage and agency coverage.

Concerning subject-matter, the guiding principle should be to ignore areas of limited pay-off. This means that the system should not cover countries where we have no programs or relatively small ones. Nor should it attempt at first to deal with our participation in international organizations.

Concerning agency coverage, no agency operating overseas (except military commands) should be entirely beyond the system's reach, but

62

all agencies should not be treated the same. The system should
deal with the total activities in covered countries of a group
of core agencies: State, AID, USIA and the Peace Corps. Parts
of the activities of other agencies should be covered: e.g.,
military assistance and P.L. 480 programs.

The intelligence agencies pose a difficult security problem which
might be solved by setting up a separate intelligence PPBS reporting
to the US Intelligence Board. Coordination of this PPBS with the
foreign affairs PPBS could be achieved through State's representation
on USIB, supplemented by informal staff consultation.

(2) Why not a National Security PPBS? If policy can be planned and operations coordinated across the full range of national security policy, why should not resource allocation decisions be made within the same area, rather than within the smaller field of foreign policy? The answer is that they should. It does not follow, however, that a national security PPBS should be created.

To plan a merger of the Defense Department's well-established
PPBS with an only vaguely conceived foreign affairs PPBS is at best
premature. At worst, it could result in loss of the ground gained
in Defense and destruction of the new foreign affairs system before
it got well started.

This does not mean, however, that nothing can be done to
rationalize expenditures for purposes straddling the fuzzy line
between defense and foreign affairs. Special studies should seek
trade-offs in this border area and refer them for decision to an
appropriate interagency forum. If State is to play an appropriate
role in the conduct of such studies, it will need to develop a
systems analysis capability comparable to that already existing
in Defense.

63

(3) The role of the Budget Bureau. At a minimum, Budget would monitor any foreign affairs PPBS and participate in special studies in the borderland between foreign affairs and defense. In the early years of a foreign affairs PPBS, however, Budget could profitably play a much larger role. An informal State-Budget partnership in the management of such a new system would compensate for deficiencies in State's staff capabilities and help to overcome the predictable resistance of the other agencies concerned to unilateral State intervention into their budgetary process.

(4) The role of the SIG and the IRGs. A foreign affairs PPBS might relate to the SIG and the IRGs in the following way:

(a) Program memoranda could be based on policy guidance papers sponsored by the SIG/IRG system.

(b) Major issues surfaced in staff review of country programs and budget documents could be referred to the appropriate IRG (or occasionally SIG) for decision.

(c) Composite program and budget documents for entire regions, and selected documents for individual countries, could be reviewed by the appropriate IRGs, and possibly also by the SIG.

### d. Conclusions

Given the formidable obstacles to the creation of a foreign affairs PPBS, the best course for the Secretary of State in the immediate future appears to be to continue the present experimental effort in close cooperation with the Budget Bureau. Pending possible installation of such a system for a large part of the world, the Secretary

64

may wish to strengthen the abilities of his own staff to review
the programs and budgets of the operating agencies and to engage
in special studies reaching into the area where the problems of
foreign policy and defense overlap and interact.

4. Internal Organization

a. General

Like other large organizations, the State Department faces the
continuing problem of maintaining the best balance between staff
and line components. In addition, it has the special, but related,
problem of achieving the best adjustment between geographical and
functional interests and organizational units. The present dominant
position of the five regional bureaus represents a victory both of
line over staff and of geographical over functional interests. The
new Secretary may find it desirable to move the balance somewhat
in the other direction. He and his principal assistants may require
greater staff support in connection with his direction of interagency
activities overseas. Also, some organizational adjustments may be needed
to make certain that economic, political-military and other functional
considerations are weighed along with our political interests in
particular countries or regions.

A possible way of making adjustments along these lines is laid out
in the chart on page 66. The rationale for this organizational
structure is spelled out below.

b. The Under Secretaries

No decisions will be more important to the new Secretary of State
than will be the choice of the Under Secretaries and the designation of
their functions. Several major questions come to mind:

65

Should the Under Secretary be the general manager of
the Department, or the Secretary's *alter ego*? If the
latter, should someone else be general manager?

What, in any case, should be the function of the third-
ranking position? Should there always be an Under
Secretary for Economic Affairs?

The case for regarding the Under Secretary as the Secretary's
*alter ego* is very strong. The Secretary cannot avoid spending
considerable time on ceremonial matters, in appearances before
Congressional committees and in conferences outside of the country.
The Under Secretary must take over frequently and often with little
advance notice.

All of this may be granted, but why, it is proper to ask, cannot
an *alter ego* also be a general manager? The main reason is that the
amount of work would be too much for one man. A good case can in
fact be made for increasing the ability of the Under Secretary to
substitute for the Secretary by giving him a more prestigious title such
as "Deputy Secretary", or even "Minister of Foreign Affairs".¹ A
move of this sort would of course diminish still further the
feasibility of assigning the role of general manager to the Under
Secretary.

Up to this point, we have assumed that the Department needs a
general manager, but is this true? No categorical answer is possible.
Future Secretaries of State may prefer simply to assemble a good top

1. The mere act of changing the title, accompanied by a public declaration of the purpose of the change, would be more important than the precise title chosen.

67

team and to parcel out managerial tasks on an _ad hoc_ basis without
setting up any single person as a buffer between himself and his
Department. If so, only the President would be entitled to say that
this is wrong.

There are, however, advantages in any large organization in
having a chief of staff who can keep the flow of routine business
moving and free the top man and his deputy for consideration of
major problems. As the work of the Department of State continues
to grow, these advantages may bulk larger in the minds of future
Secretaries. The creation of a general manager would become almost
unavoidable if State were to be given central responsibility for
operating a foreign affairs PPBS in addition to the coordination of
all overseas operations. To carry sufficient authority both in and
out of the Department, the general manager should probably have the
rank of Under Secretary with an appropriate descriptive designation,
such as "Executive". The Executive Under Secretary would supervise
the day-to-day operations of the bureaus and would be directly
supported by the new Assistant Secretary for Policy Review and
Coordination (see discussion of staff support below). The Executive
Under Secretary would also help the Under Secretary on SIG matters
and chair the SIG in the Under Secretary's absence.

A good case can also be made for the permanent establishment of
the position of Under Secretary for Economic Affairs as either the
third or fourth ranking job in the Department. As we have seen, State
faces special problems in asserting the foreign policy interest against
the more domestic interests represented by the great economic
Departments. An able and vigorous Assistant Secretary for Economic
Affairs can and does deal effectively with those Departments, but his

68

hand would be strengthened if he carried the rank of Under Secretary. Especially if the post of Executive Under Secretary were created, there would be no need for an Under Secretary for Political Affairs.

### c. A Functional Tier?

A tier of functional Deputy Under Secretaries would reduce somewhat the burdens of the Secretary and the Under Secretaries and increase the attention paid to functional, as opposed to geographic, considerations. The Deputy Under Secretaries for Political Affairs and Administration already form part of such a tier. The Under Secretary for Economic Affairs would be a further extension of it, but would carry a higher rank because of his need to deal directly with the heads of the economic departments. The functional tier could be completed by adding a Deputy Under Secretary for Scientific, Educational and Cultural Affairs (who would assume the duties of the present Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs plus those of the Director of the Office of International Scientific and Technological Affairs) and a Deputy Under Secretary for Congressional and Public Affairs (who would combine the functions of the present Assistant Secretaries for Congressional and Public Affairs and also be specifically charged with seeing that domestic aspects of foreign policy problems received appropriate consideration.

A functional tier would not stand between the Secretary and the regional bureaus (or the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which would occupy a place in the Department's structure similar to that of a regional bureau). The senior functional officers would, however, monitor the activities of the regional bureaus and would be empowered to intervene when they believed it necessary. They would of course also be given primary responsibility for handling certain predominantly

69

functional problems. Each would engage in day-to-day liaison with
other agencies in his functional field, and several would play
major roles in helping the Secretary discharge his interagency
responsibilities.

The Under Secretary for Economic Affairs would have direct line
authority over the existing Economic Bureau. Other senior functional
officers would be supported by smaller staffs which also now exist.
The new Deputy Under Secretary for Scientific, Educational and
Cultural Affairs should probably be relieved of the chore of
administering the cultural and educational exchange programs. Having
those programs in State has been somewhat of an anomaly, since in
the field they are administered by the US Information Service and
since they are in fact the only operational programs in the State
Department. Their transfer to USIA would make good organizational
sense and relieve State of an unnecessary burden.

d. Staff Support of the Top Command

Staff in State has several important functions. It should subject
the geographically oriented recommendations of the line officers to
careful scrutiny to ensure that adequate weight has been given to
economic, political-military and other functional considerations. It
should also examine the repercussions of a given line officer's
recommendations in geographical areas outside that officer's sphere
of responsibility. And most important, staff should make sure that
the policy level is presented with all alternative courses of action
relevant to a particular problem. The importance of these staff
functions has increased with the growing complexity of international affairs.

70

A further potentially large burden was placed on State's staff
officers as a consequence of NSAM 341.

A common complaint concerning large bureaucracies is that
staffs proliferate excessively and interfere unduly with the line
organizations. The implication is the fewer staff officers, the
better. The State Department is living proof that this proposition
is not necessarily true. Whatever its other deficiencies, State
does not have too many staff officers.

The creation of a high-level functional tier would automatically
strengthen staff support of the top command. Other more modest
changes may also recommend themselves to the new Secretary.

The present Executive Secretariat might be given a broader, more
substantive mandate and renamed something like the Office of Policy
Review and Coordination (PRC). The head of PRC would have the rank
of Assistant Secretary and report to the Executive Under Secretary.
PRC would have two divisions: program appraisal and current
operations. Each would be headed by a deputy assistant secretary.

Logically, PRC should also have a planning division, but this
raises problems, since State already has a well-established planning
unit, the Policy Planning Council (S/P). One solution would be to
convert S/P into the planning division of PRC, but this would
deprive S/P of its direct access to the Secretary and might threaten
its important freedom to innovate. It would probably be better to leave
S/P where it is organizationally, but physically co-locate it with PRC
and assign it the task of supporting PRC in commenting on major policy
proposals (including the programs of operating agencies) which are
en route to the SIG or to the Secretary or one of the Under Secretaries.

71

To ensure close collaboration between S/P and PRC, the deputy chairman of the S/P might be made concurrently a deputy director of PRC.

The program appraisal division of PRC would have primary responsibility for supporting the Secretary and the Under Secretaries in reviewing the programs of various agencies operating overseas and in experimental work looking to the eventual development of a foreign affairs PPBS. One of its sections might help the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs to coordinate foreign economic policy. In time, the program appraisal division might also develop a modest systems analysis capability.

The current operations division would deal both with operational issues en route to the SIG and with those to be dealt with by the Secretary or an Under Secretary outside of SIG. After decisions had been taken on these issues, the operations division could monitor their execution. This division would be the principal point of contact between PRC and the staffs of the regional bureaus. It might therefore be organized largely along geographical lines. The operations center would be part of the operations division.

PRC's staff should be drawn from the other national security agencies as well as from State. Staff members from other agencies should serve for at least two years and should owe their loyalty to State, rather than to their home agencies.¹ They should not represent their home agencies or even be viewed as liaison officers between State and those agencies.

1. The feasibility of this objective has been demonstrated by the success of the State-Defense exchange programs. Officers participating in this program appear to experience no difficulty in working for new masters.

110

Great care would have to be taken to keep PRC from pulling work
into its orbit which might better be done by either the regional
bureaus or by one of the new tier of functional offices. PRC
should be a small, elite organization, dedicated to helping move
problems expeditiously toward solutions, while avoiding
advocacy of particular solutions. Its main purpose should be
to marshall alternatives among which the Secretary and other senior
officials can choose.

e. The Regional Bureaus

(1) **Staff support.** The regional assistant secretaries probably also require increased staff support, if only because of the extra burden of their being made Executive Chairmen of the IRGs. One deputy assistant secretary in each regional bureau (preferably *not* an additional deputy) should be placed in charge of program review and coordination. His staff would parallel that of PRC but on a smaller scale.

(2) **The Country Director** concept is sound and it should be given
a further trial. A fresh start should be made by reviewing the
organization of the regional bureaus to see whether the number of
multiple-desk country directorates and the number of deputy assist-
ant secretaries should not be reduced. Assignments as country
directors should be reserved for officers with demonstrated executive
ability. Finally, for many countries, an interagency country
committee should be formed under the chairmanship of the country
director. Such committees (which already exist for some countries)
would both enhance the effectiveness of the country directors and
contribute to the effectiveness of the IRGs.

73

(3) State-AID Integration. As we have seen, integration of State and AID staffs at the bureau level has not been an unmixed success in the one area, Latin America, in which it has been tried. It is doubtful that such integration would work even as well in other regions. Latin America is a very special area, in that international cooperation is more advanced there than in any other less developed part of the world; AID's programs there are pursuant to the Alliance for Progress which was set up by the Organization of American States. These factors favoring integration do not exist in other more diverse areas.

No such doubts can be raised concerning the broader application of State-AID co-location. On the basis of its success in the East Asian case, it should be extended to the State and AID bureaus for Africa and for the Near East and South Asia.

f. A Larger State Department?

One way to deal with interagency problems is to abolish the offending agencies. Thus, the argument has often been made (usually by exasperated State Department officers) that AID or USIA or ACDA (or even the Peace Corps) should be merged fully into the State Department. Close examination of these proposals, however, leads to the conclusion that in each instance merger would probably create more problems than it would solve.

Merger would, it is true, increase the direct line authority of the Secretary of State, but the need for such an increase is highly questionable in view of his present statutory authority supplemented by the broad delegation of Presidential authority effected by NSAM 341. Merger might facilitate creation of a foreign affairs budget, but there is no assurance that Congress would agree, nor in

74

fact can it be argued that creation of such a budget awaits merger
of several related agencies into the State Department.

Against these questionable advantages of merger must be weighed
several clear disadvantages:

(1) The managerial burdens of the Secretary and his principal assistants would be significantly increased. Staff skills needed to help absorb those burdens are currently in very short supply in the State Department.

(2) The special points of view pressed by AID and ACDA (and to some degree USIA) would probably be down-graded and might be submerged within the State hierarchy. The Secretary would be less sure of hearing the case for giving developmental or disarmament goals greater weight in some circumstances than short-run political considerations.

(3) The public relations value (both at home and abroad) of visibly autonomous aid, disarmament or information agencies would be sacrificed.

The case for merger would be further weakened if the recommenda-
tions for creating a tier of senior functional officers in State
and for strengthening the staff support of both the top command and
the original assistant secretaries were to be adopted.

g. <u>Other Problems</u>

A number of other problems deserve at least brief attention here.

75

(1) Taking Account of Domestic Considerations. At some point
in the decision-making process, proper account must clearly be
taken of the domestic consequences of various possible courses of
action abroad. The question is when and how.

Policy planning documents traditionally do not do this
explicitly, nor do most written recommendations for dealing with
operational problems. Resource allocation proposals sometimes do,
especially if they deal with large sums of money. In most
circumstances, domestic considerations are brought into the picture
rather late and often not very explicitly.

A good case can in fact be made for the submission of "pure"
foreign policy recommendations to the Secretary of State and the
President. By training and experience, few Foreign Service Officers
are qualified to deal with domestic considerations, and an attempt
to make them do so could be disastrous.¹

At the same time, domestic constraints on our actions abroad are
important and may become increasingly so. Arrangements for routinely

1. Secretary Rusk made his views on this point quite clear only a month after assuming office by telling a group of policy-making officers of his Department:

"We do not want policy officers below the level of
Presidential appointees to concern themselves too
much with problems of domestic politics in recommending
foreign policy action. In the first place our
business is foreign policy, and it is the business
of the Presidential leadership and his appointees
in the Department to consider the domestic political
aspects of a problem. Mr. Truman emphasized this
point by saying, 'You fellows in the Department of
State don't know much about domestic politics.'"

76

injecting these constraints into the policy-making process would
appear to be very much in order. The Secretary and his immediate
assistants should not, along with all of their other burdens,
have to be their own staff officers in dealing with the domestic
side of their duties.

A partial solution to this problem may be found in the up-grading
and combining of the Congressional and public relations functions.
In addition, a close working relationship might be established
between the office of the new Deputy Under Secretary for Congressional
and Public Affairs and the new Office of Program Review and
Coordination (PRC). Representatives of the former office might
sit in PRC and refer selected action recommendations or policy
planning papers to their home office for comment.

(2) **Intelligence.** The present independence of the intelligence
research function from the operating bureaus should be maintained
and the Director of Intelligence and Research should continue to
have direct access to the Secretary. Like the Policy Planning
Council (with which it should continue to have close relations)
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) should be free to
dissent from prevailing views and to carry its dissent, if necessary,
to the very top of the Department. INR's independence is also
important to its standing and effectiveness within the Washington
intelligence community.

The present location in INR of the staff which follows certain
operational intelligence matters is something of an anomaly. This

staff in reality serves the Director of INR much less than it does
the Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs and it should be
transferred to the latter's direct supervision.

(3) **Information Management.** At all levels of the State Department, the problem of getting quickly the information needed to deal with the tasks at hand is becoming more acute. The difficulty is not so much the non-existence of desired information as it is separating the relevant from the irrelevant. The Department is in danger of drowning in an ever-rising flood of words: cables and airgrams from our posts overseas, intelligence reports and studies of various sorts, press reports and the writings of private scholars.

A thorough study of the problem of information management in the State Department was completed a few months ago and preliminary work has begun on designing a modern information system suitable to the Department's needs. In his own interest, the new Secretary will want to check into the status of this work and see to it that it is given appropriate priority and support.¹

1. Unfortunately, the Secretary is unlikely to be able to solve his information management problem by recruiting an aide with the intellectual capacity of Mycroft Holmes, whose role in the British Government was described by his brother, Sherlock, in the following terms:

"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy,

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5. The Effect on the State Department of Alternative National Security Systems

a. General: The Range of Possibility

The discussion thus far in this section has proceeded on the assumption that the new President will not substantially modify NSAM 341 and that as a consequence, recent trends toward a national security system more clearly centered in the Secretary of State will continue.

Three broad alternatives to this assumption and their relative merits are considered in Chapter I. We are concerned here only with the general consequences of these alternatives for the future organization and functioning of the Department of State. These three alternatives are:

(1) A loose, unstructured system without State primacy. In such a system, the Secretary of State would be one of several equals. He would speak for the foreign policy interest in cabinet councils just as the Secretary of Defense would speak for the defense interest. He would, however, presumably retain his statutory authority over AID, USIA and ACDA.

(2) A White House-oriented system would by definition eliminate any significant degree of State primacy and place the management of all elements of the national security process (policy planning, coordination of operations and resource allocation) in the hands of a staff (or staffs) directly under the President. One variant of such a system would make the head of the staff (or staffs) a super-cabinet officer or deputy President for national security affairs.

(3) A mixed system centering some elements of the national security process in the White House and others in State, might also be constructed.

### b. Consequences of Alternative Systems

(1) An unstructured system without State primacy would have no place for the SIG and the IRGs in their present roles, although these organizations could survive as mere interagency discussion groups. State's requirements for staffs to support the SIG and the IRGs would disappear, as would the need for staffs to operate any evolving foreign affairs PPBS. The concept of the country director would automatically disappear, since it assumes at least some degree of State primacy. Country committees would suffer the fate of the SIG and the IRGs.

Somewhat surprisingly, the case for the various modifications in State's top command which were set forth earlier would be almost as strong in an unstructured system as in one clearly centered in the Secretary of State. The urgency of these changes might, however, be somewhat lessened, since the burdens on the Secretary and his principal assistants would probably decrease moderately with a reduction in their interagency responsibilities. Such a decrease, however, is by no means a foregone conclusion. Battling for the foreign policy interest without the advantages of primacy could prove just as burdensome as managing a State-centered system.

(2) A White House-centered system could have much the same consequences for the SIG, the IRGs, country directors and country committees as would an unstructured system without State primacy. One possible variant of a White House-centered system would, however,

81

retain State chairmanship of the IRGs and country committees, shift
chairmanship of the SIG to a senior member of the White House staff
and have the SIG support the NSC in much the same way as did the
NSC Planning Board during the Eisenhower administration. The net
effect of a White House-centered system on State's staff require-
ments is in any case not easy to predict. The Secretary and his
principal assistants would clearly be major participants in such a
system and might require about as much staff support as they would
in a State-centered system.

As was true of an unstructured system, the case for a number
of organizational modifications would still exist under a White House-
centered system, but might be somewhat less urgent than under one
centered in the Secretary of State.

(3) A *mixed system* should by definition differ less from a
State-centered system than would the other two alternatives. Depending
upon which functions were left in State, it would have greater or
lesser effect on the SIG, the IRGs, country committees and country
directors. The impact on State's staff requirements and on the need
for organizational modifications would also be variable, but probably
somewhat less than in the other two cases.

82

D. CONCLUSIONS

Any conclusions derived from the above analysis of the role
of the State Department in the national security process must be
highly tentative. The wishes of the new President and the new
Secretary of State, and their personal styles of work, will
obviously be controlling. The points set down in summary form
below must therefore be treated as items on a checklist of possible
actions, rather than as firm recommendations. In arriving at this
checklist, it has been assumed that the Secretary of State will
continue to be charged by the President with responsibility for the
overall direction, coordination and supervision of the inter-
departmental activities of the United States Government overseas.

1. <u>Operations</u>

a. Most interagency operational decisions should continue to be coordinated informally, but formal procedures are useful and desirable as a means of coordinating major decisions.

(1) The ability of the Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG) and the Interdepartmental Regional Groups (IRGs) to handle this coordinating task could be expanded by a modest increase in supporting staffs and by greater use of country committees subordinate to the IRGs.

(2) Care must be taken, however, to avoid the danger
that the SIG/IRG machinery might foreclose or reduce
the President's options by deciding issues prematurely.

83

(3) The jurisdiction of the SIG and the IRGs over economic problems should, if possible, be clarified.

b. Overseas, the coordinating authority of Ambassadors as defined by President Kennedy in May, 1961, has worked well, with two exceptions in the field of Embassy-military relations:

(1) Divided authority between an Ambassador and a military commander could be dangerous during the deployment of US forces into a foreign country in a crisis. One of the two should be placed in charge of all operations, both civil and military.

(2) More frequent contacts between Ambassadors and Unified Commanders might ease, if not solve, the problems inevitably arising from the fact that State has no regional level in its chain of command.

c. Monitoring of the execution of operational decisions must continue to be done principally by the normal chain of command, possibly supplemented by:

(1) Broadening the mandate of the Foreign Service Inspection Corps to cover all components of overseas missions and,

(2) Eventually, creating a foreign affairs planning, programming and budgeting system. (See 3. below).

## 2. Planning

a. In policy planning, a distinction should be made between strategic analysis papers, which help senior officials formulate the broad strategic framework for operational decisions

ELE

and policy guidance papers, which establish guidelines for
operating officers in Washington and overseas.

(1) Formal review and approval of strategic analysis papers is usually unnecessary and may be undesirable. Such papers require only a regular forum, or forums, in which senior officials can discuss the fundamental issues which such papers should raise. Possible forums include the National Security Council, the SIG, the IRGs, the Interagency Planning Group, and _ad hoc_ meetings chaired by the Secretary of State or the President.

(2) The Interagency Planning Group might be converted into a "planning IRG" which would both sponsor some strategic analysis papers itself and arrange for the IRGs to sponsor others.

(3) Policy guidance papers require relatively formal interagency review and clearance. Use of the SIG/IRG system for this purpose may be preferable to special procedures, such as those now followed for National Policy Papers.

b. Unless the IRGs become too burdened with policy planning tasks, they should continue to be responsible for contingency planning.

(1) The alternative is to revive the recently abolished Contingency Coordinating Committee.

(2) The volume of contingency planning should in any case be increased in order to raise State's awareness

85

of military factors and the Pentagon's appreciation
of political considerations.

3. Resource Allocation

a. Gaining greater influence over the allocation of resources to the agencies operating overseas would significantly enhance the ability of the Secretary of State to discharge his interagency responsibilities.

(1) In theory, creation of a planning, programming and budgeting system (PPBS) embracing all or most of the foreign affairs agencies would be an excellent way to advance toward this objective. The obstacles to a foreign affairs PPBS are, however, formidable and such a system would not in any case help the Secretary of State gain increased influence over the Defense budget.

(2) For the immediate future, the Secretary should probably: (a) strengthen the abilities of his own staff to review the programs and budgets of the operating agencies and (b) continue the present experimental efforts to develop a foreign affairs PPBS, working in close cooperation with the Budget Bureau.

b. If and when a foreign affairs PPBS is developed, it should focus on areas in which useful resource trade-offs among various agency programs might be achieved. Agencies covered should probably

86

be State, AID, USIA, the Peace Corps, plus parts of the activities
of other agencies (e.g., military assistance from Defense and
P.L. 480 programs from Agriculture).

c. The SIG and the IRGs could both review selected program and budget documents produced by a foreign affairs PPBS and resolve major interagency disagreements surfaced by the PPBS.

4. Internal Organization

(See chart on p. 66)

a. The Under Secretary should be the Secretary's *alter ego* and might well be given a more prestigious-sounding title (for example, Deputy Secretary or Minister of Foreign Affairs) to enable him to substitute more easily for the Secretary at international conferences and on occasions set by protocol.

b. The heavy burdens on the Secretary might be further reduced by creating the post of Executive Under Secretary, who would serve as general manager of the Department.

c. State faces special problems in asserting the foreign policy interest against the more domestic interests represented by the great economic departments. The third or fourth ranking officer of the Department should therefore always be an Under Secretary for Economic Affairs (rather than "for Political Affairs," as is the case at present).

d. Establishing a tier of senior functional officers near the top of the Department would counterbalance the possibly excessive current emphasis on country and regional interests and increase the likelihood

87

that all relevant alternatives would be considered in dealing with
major policy problems. Such a functional tier might consist of:

(1) The Under Secretary for Economic Affairs.

(2) The existing Deputy Under Secretaries for
Political Affairs and for Administration.

(3) New Deputy Under Secretaries for Scientific,
Educational and Cultural Affairs and for Congres-
sional and Public Affairs. Each of these latter two
officials would combine the functions of two existing
officials of Assistant Secretary rank.

e. Especially in view of the Secretary's large interagency
responsibilities, increased staff support of both the top command
and of the regional Assistant Secretaries appears to be desirable.

(1) The present Executive Secretariat might be
given a broader, more substantive mandate and
renamed something like Office of Policy Review and
Coordination (PRC).

(2) PRC would be a small, elite staff, organized
in two divisions: program appraisal and current
operations. Its main purpose would be to marshall
alternatives among which the Secretary and other
senior officials might choose. It should avoid
advocacy of particular solutions.

(3) The Policy Planning Council would work closely
with PRC, but would retain its organizational

88

identity and the direct access of its Chairman
to the Secretary.

(4) In each regional bureau, one deputy assistant secretary (preferably not an additional one) might usefully be placed in charge of program review and coordination. His staff would parallel that of PRC, but on a smaller scale.

f. The Country Director concept is sound. The status of Country Directors should be strengthened by:

(1) Reducing the number of deputy assistant secretaries.

(2) Increasing the use of country committees chaired by Country Directors.

(3) Reserving assignments as Country Directors for officers of demonstrated executive ability.

g. Merger of AID, USIA or ACDA into the State Department would probably create more problems than it would solve.

(1) Physical co-location of State and AID regional staffs is, however, a useful arrangement and might be applied more widely.

(2) Full merger of such staffs has not been an unmixed success in the one region in which it has been tried.

89

ANNEX I

The President today discussed with his Cabinet and other high officials a new procedure, which he has approved, for the purpose of modernizing and streamlining the executive branch of Government in the conduct of foreign affairs.

In order to assist him in discharging his responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs, the President has directed the Secretary of State, as his agent, to assume responsibility to the full extent permitted by law for the overall direction, coordination, and supervision of interdepartmental activities of the United States Government overseas (less exempted military activities). Up to now, the Secretary of State, assisted by the regional Assistant Secretaries, has performed a coordinating function in interdepartmental matters abroad. Now he has received formal and specific overall directive authority from the President. While the term "interdepartmental matters" has not been specifically defined, in the present context it covers those activities abroad involving more than a single department or agency, or which is of such a nature as to affect significantly the overall U.S. overseas program in a country or region,

To assist the Secretary of State in this new role, there will be a permanent interdepartmental committee, called the Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG), with the Under Secretary of State as its "Executive Chairman." The latter term is used to describe a chairman who has the authority and responsibility to decide all matters coming before his committee, subject to the right of any member to appeal

from his decision to higher authority. This is an important provision
which makes the difference between the normal committee and an incisive,
decision-making body.

The other regular members of the Senior Interdepartmental Group
are: the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Administrator of AID, the
Director of CIA, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the
Director of USIA, and the Special Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs. The Chairman will invite representatives
of other departments and agencies when they have an interest in the
matters under consideration.

The Senior Interdepartmental Group will function as a focal point
for decisions and actions on overseas interdepartmental matters which
are referred to it by the Secretary of State or by an Assistant
Secretary of State, or raised by the action of an individual member.
Any department or agency not a member may also raise matters for
action by the Group.

Beneath the Secretary of State and the Senior Interdepartmental
Group, the regional Assistant Secretaries of State will occupy
important focal positions in the channel of responsibility for overall
direction, coordination and supervision of interdepartmental matters
in the regions of their responsibility. The Assistant Secretaries
will serve as Executive Chairmen of Interdepartmental Regional
Groups (IRG), analogous in membership and responsibilities to the
Senior Interdepartmental Group. They will work closely with U.S.
Ambassadors and the country teams abroad and will assure the adequacy
in their regions of U.S. policy, plans, programs, resources, and

91

performance. It is at this level that the volume of work will be
done, leaving for the Senior Interdepartmental Group only the major
problems. As in the case of the Senior Group, the new arrangements
are for the purpose of expediting decision and action.

Thus, the overall purpose of the changes directed by the
President is to formalize relationships and clarify responsibilities
in the conduct of our overseas business, operating within the frame-
work of existing law. This action does not affect in any way the
statutory responsibilities of any of the key Government officials
involved or their relations with Congress. For example, the Public
Law 480 (Food for Freedom) program will remain the responsibility of
the Department of Agriculture. In establishing the Senior Group and
the Regional Groups, it creates a regular meeting place for the key
officials involved in overseas activities and assures decisive action
by giving unusual authority to the "Executive Chairman." These
meetings also assure the departments and agencies primarily involved
in overseas affairs a forum in which all views can be expressed in
advance of decisions. The departments and agencies with an
occasional interest will be invited to attend these meetings when
there are matters affecting them on the agenda, or they may propose
matters for the agenda. In any case, their representative will have
the same rights as the regular members when their business is being
considered.

While these procedures are not for the purpose of injecting
some kind of automaticity or production-line quality into the handling
of overseas affairs, they will, it is hoped, bring greater method into
the conduct of foreign affairs, permit a sharper and more rapid focus

92

It seems likely that any consultation with Senator Jackson regarding changes in NSC organization and procedures will be affected to some extent by the two articles on the future of the NSC which appeared in the *Post* and *Times* January 1 (copies attached), particularly the following passage:

> "Near the end of General Eisenhower's second term in office, however, the powers and prestige of the Council came under attack. Aides of Mr. Nixon traced the attack in part to Senator Henry M. Jackson, Washington Democrat."

The following thoughts are offered with the articles and Jackson's views in mind:

1. There is a great deal of relevant personal background to the Jackson hearings (e.g. Jackson's political aspirations in 1960, Vice President Nixon's *reported* interest at one point in heading the OCB) but I don't know the details. Many knowledgeable people believe that the 1960 hearings were politically motivated both personally and in a partisan sense--but it is reasonable to assume that Jackson still holds many of the views expressed in the reports of the subcommittee staff.

2. The *Times* and *Post* summaries of Jackson's criticisms are essentially accurate and incidentally, more sophisticated than either individual could have been expected to come up with in an overnight story. This fact, plus the authoritative tone of the stories is such that Jackson might conclude that they came directly from the President-elect.

3. The stories--particularly that in the *Times*--leave the implication that Jackson was opposed to the Council *per se*. This was not the case, although he certainly thought Eisenhower over did it. It would be well to indicate an awareness of Jackson's view of the Council as expressed in the report of his subcommittee staff:

> "The real worth of the Council to a President lies in being an accustomed forum where he and a small number of his top advisers can gain that intellectual intimacy and mutual understanding on which true coordination depends. Viewed thus, the Council is a place where the President can receive from his department and agency heads a full exposition of policy alternatives available to him, and in turn, give them clear-cut guidance for action."

-2-

4. Similarly, although the Jackson report stated that the Planning Board "now tends to overshadow in importance, though not in prestige the Council itself" it concluded that "some group akin to the present Board, playing a rather different role than it now does, can be of continuing help to the Council in the future..." Such a Board would be used namely to criticize and comment upon policy initiatives developed by the departments or stimulated by the President."

5. The Jackson staff report came out strongly against the OCB. He thought responsibility should rest with the departments with some follow-up performed by Presidential assistants. He did not preclude the possible need for formal interagency machinery but he was sceptical of its effectiveness.

6. In addition to belaboring the Eisenhower NSC system, the Jackson Report went to great pains to discredit the First Secretary of Government and "super-staff" concepts which were very live issues in 1960. (Eisenhower formally proposed a "first secretary" in his last budget message). The Jackson Report entitled "Super-cabinet Officers and Superstaffs" zeros in on something called a "Presidential Staff Agency for National Security Affairs." What the President-elect has in mind may seem (to Jackson) very much like this concept which he criticized on the following grounds:

a. lacking the operations perspective (i.e. an "ivory tower")

b. a new layer between the President and the "responsible operating officials"

c. a bureaucratic rival of the historic departments.

7. Just as it would be inaccurate to blame everything that went wrong from 1954-61 on Eisenhower's concept of the NSC, it is equally misleading to imply that Kennedy and Johnson ran their business according to the Jackson recommendations. Both of the latter disregarded a great deal of Jackson's advice.

-3-

a. They did not use the Council even in the limited manner he suggested.

b. They did not devote as much attention to planning either in the NSC or at State--as Jackson obviously believed desirable.

c. They undermined the authority of the Secretary of State.

8. Following on the foregoing, Jackson stressed the importance of the Secretary of State's role and is almost certain to regard with suspicion anything resembling a new NSC structure which would serve to dilute the direct President-Secretary relationship. Given the President-elect's interest in the NSC, it would be good tactics to indicate not only an awareness of what Jackson considered to be the weak points of the Eisenhower system, but also to note that he favored continued use of the Council and that he did not oppose planning per se, but rather, elaborate planning mechanisms which were detached from operational reality and which consumed too much energy as ends in themselves.

9. A good approach with Jackson might be to point to the two successive, and vastly different, eight year experiences from which the President-elect hopes to profit in making his own arrangements.

AG

Wednesday, Jan. 1, 1969 • THE WASHINGTON POST

# Nixon Restoring Role Of Security Advisers

By Don Oberdorfer

Washington Post Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 31—After weeks of discussions on meeting foreign crises, President-elect Nixon is preparing to carry out his campaign promise to “restore the National Security Council to its Pre-eminent role in national security planning.”

According to his key advisers this White House institution—in decline since the Eisenhower era—plays a key role in Nixon's plans for meeting and mastering the world problems of 1969 and beyond.

Nixon's other plans for overhauling the policy-making process are not fully formed. Nevertheless hints abound that they are likely to include:

* A shakeup and realignment of the State Department policy planning council, a subject of dissatisfaction among future officials of the State Department and White House.

* A modest increase in the White House national security staff to be headed by professor Henry A. Kissinger, accompanied by a decline in its public prominence. According to his colleagues Kissinger is likely to be more of a staff assistant and less of a policy-maker than predecessors McGeorge Bundy and Walt W. Rostow.

* Re-establishment of machinery to do the jobs of the National Security Council planning board and the operations coordinating board, both

of which were abolished by President Kennedy on grounds they interposed needless paper work and unimportant procedures between a president and his officers.

Established in 1947 during the Truman Administration, the National Security Council met almost weekly during the Eisenhower Administration to consider world problems and policy papers and discuss United States plans. During President Eisenhower's illnesses, then-Vice President Nixon acted as temporary chairman of the NSC.

Recalling this in his campaign speech on a "security gap" on Oct. 24, Nixon described the NSC process as "the controlling element in our success in keeping the peace throughout our eight White House years." Nixon added, "I attribute most of our serious reverses abroad since 1960 to the inability or disclination of President Eisenhower's successors to make effective use of this important council."

## Chosen Instrument

In recent discussions with his aides, as in his campaign declarations, Nixon has emphasized the need for order, cohesion and careful consideration of all options in foreign policy matters. A revived NSC appears to be his chosen instrument for attaining those objectives.

In the late 1950s the NSC came under heavy criticism on grounds its policy papers and some of its deliberations tended to hamper the quest for orderly procedures and agreed positions. A Senate subcommittee headed by Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash.) investigated and criticized President Eisenhower's NSC.

President Kennedy agreed with much of the criticism. He rarely used the group except as a ceremonial show after decisions had been made elsewhere. During the Cuban missile crisis in late 1962 Kennedy convened what he called the "executive committee" or "exec comm" of the NSC, in reality just another name for the top people whose judgments he needed and respected.

## Paper Work Restrained

A Nixon aide familiar with

Sen. William
John McGa

No. 2
Master

RICHARDSON

U.N. General
1965-66. His title takes over has cided.

Richardson to take over a tary of State and then flew to see Rogers in office in Boston ously consider but has not yet mind. Richardson reached; he was vacation in New

Richardson, one of the Rep. brightest prog viously had bee come Under Health, Educati fare. He declined reason he still is job at State: his leave the electi torney General w ects as a model plan only in t stage.

Rogers, it was especially eager to ardson as his alte State Department past working. Richardson served torney for Massac 1959 to 1961, a p which Rogers was nev General

# State Dept. Choices Promised Saturday

By Daniel Rapoport

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 31 (UPI)—President-elect Richard M. Nixon said today that he would make three or four top-level State Department appointments Saturday and that he hoped to have all sub-cabinet posts filled by his Jan. 20 inauguration.

But the President-elect added that he had instructed his cabinet officers to forego the deadline if it meant appointing someone other than the best man for the job.

Nixon discussed the progress in forming his Administration with reporters during a flight from Miami, Fla., to Los Angeles.

He and his wife Pat arrived for the Rose Bowl football game aboard Air Force 1, the Bocing 707 jet which served as President Johnson's personal plane, and which the current chief executive has made available to Nixon since he was elected Nov. 5.

The Nixons planned to spend a quiet New Year's Eve in their Century Plaza Hotel Suite. He said they had given up going out on the occasion "several years ago."

Chatting with newsmen,

Nixon observed that he and his cabinet appointees were running into some difficulties acquiring qualified individuals. He said most men between 35 and 50 found government salaries were low compared to the money they are now receiving. Also a factor were the stringent conditions he said he was insisting on to avoid conflict of interest.

Saturday's appointments, which he said would announce in New York with Secretary-of-State-designate William P. Rogers, will include undersecretary of state, the second highest post in the State Department; undersecretary of state for political affairs, and probably an undersecretary for economic affairs.

He said Rogers was planning to reorganize the top echelon of the State Department.

Nixon added that Defense Secretary-designate Melvin Lalrd was working on nine or 10 posts completing the armed services secretariat and that Agriculture-designate Clifford Hardin was well along in filling posts in his Department.

The appointment yesterday of multimillionaire West coast industrialist David Packard as deputy defense secretary was

[LC]

THE ROLE OF THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY

The National Security Act provides that the Council "shall have a staff headed by a civilian executive secretary." Under the Eisenhower NSC table of organization the Executive Secretary, "under the supervision of the Special Assistant," was the "head" of the NSC staff. In practice, however, the successive Eisenhower Special Assistants shared little of their substantive responsibility--to the extent they exercised same--with the Executive Secretary. In those days the administrative structure of the staff was so complex the Executive Secretary was compelled to spend most of his time administering it. The only part of the Eisenhower NSC structure that resembled the later Bundy staff was the small "Special Staff" which, while technically responsible to the Executive Secretary, in fact reported to the Special Assistant (with a carbon copy to the Executive Secretary!)

Under Bundy the entire NSC staff was like the "Special Staff." There was little pretense of a substantive role for the Executive Secretary. His administrative chores were reduced and he spent most of his time on the expanded information requirements, paper flow and liaison with the State Executive Secretariat and other White House elements. This pattern was perpetuated under Rostow.

I see no reason why the same relationship cannot be continued. There is plenty for the Executive Secretary to do in the information and paper management field particularly if the new Assistant wanted to bring about some badly needed improvements in those areas, not just at the White House in order to improve services to the President and the staff, but on a government wide basis.

The real problem here is that the anachronistic statutory provision for the Executive Secretary to be "head" of the staff. The real head under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson was the Special Assistant. I suppose that if

one sought to update the legislation and insert an "Assistant for National
Security Affairs" as the head of the staff, it might trigger a controversy
over super-cabinet officials--which, in my opinion, is what the Assistant's
role inevitably tends to become.

It would seem to me that the Executive Secretary's title could be retained
and the respective nature of the Assistant's, the Executive Secretary's and
other NSC official's responsibilities re-defined by Executive order or re-
organization plan. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson ever wanted to be this precise
about organization and therein, in my opinion, lay a great deal of confusion.
So long as the Executive Secretary understands that he is not in the chain of
command anymore than State's Executive Secretary is, there should be no problems.

In order for someone to discharge effectively the statutory administrative
responsibilities of the NSC as well as the liaison and information handling
activities traditionally associated with the Executive Secretary's job, the
old title is necessary. Otherwise his only authority is that informally
derived from his association with the Assistant. If the Assistant does not
want to be bothered with such business he must make the delegation effective,
i.e. the Executive Secretary needs his own legal status. This does not mean
that he must be a free wheeler but rather that he will have the authority to
do what the Assistant expects of him.

If the existing salary level of the Executive Secretary is a problem with
respect to other staff members, the new President is free to fix it by at what-
ever level he chooses just as past President's have done (see footnote (5)
bottom of p. 121, Excerpts from National Security Act).