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In general, if policy is going to be laid down by the White House the emphasis at the top of the State Department should be, not primarily on a highly professional diplomat of which there are plenty (and obviously not on a strong-willed foreign policy maker), but on a man or men who will devote himself (themselves) to the task of managing in credibly complex operations. (see below for some suggestions).

One tool developed in other complex enterprises to assist in management is the device of program planning and budgeting. There is great misunderstanding about this, reinforced by the wrong questions chronically posed by the Jackson sub-committee. No one who understands the problem believes that PPBS can be a substitute for the human judgmental factor in making the toughest decisions about U.S. foreign policy. PPBS applies to the allocation of resources; it can aid in decision-making by making explicit rather than implicit the marginal utilities of incremental investments in one or another program.

It can do more than this. It can (as we have been experimenting with in my current political-military exercises at M.I.T.) introduce into national security-type decisions relevant quantitative projections about costs, including economic, social, and opportunity. This process has the additional virtue of forcing consideration of worse cases in the event of such modest commitments as the dispatch of a few military advisers. The Department should experiment at a high level with the introduction of program planning and analysis techniques in the hands of sensible and sophisticated people. At worst it could assist greatly in the process of decision-making about the quantitative resources increasingly available to the U.S. government in its foreign programs. At best it could introduce an element of greater rationality into decision-making about larger matters, a process which has hitherto been reserved to the arcane and even mystical processes of unstated assumptions, euphoric predictions, and blind commitments.

The experience last year when Nicholas Katzenbach almost persuaded Tom Schelling to take on this function strongly suggests that no respectable figure will undertake the task without strong backing from the very top rungs of the Department, and an appropriately senior position from which to operate. (see below.)

b. The policy planning function itself is desperately in need of reconsideration. I myself have occasionally despaired of whether a policy planning staff can really function in a Department in which every officer assumes that he plans as well as acts. S/P operates on the suffrance, not only of the Secretary, but also of every bureau which may or may not cooperate, make use of its ideas, or even tolerate it. When the Secretary himself has no great interest in anything but short-term operations, there is literally no function for the policy planning council except as an adjunct to short-term operations (which is also the case when the Chairman of the Council is predominantly operational in his own orientation).

It may be that the problem of medium-term and long-range planning of U.S. foreign policy is so much a part of overall national strategic planning and goal-setting that the function belongs in the White House rather than the State Department. (This has of course been proposed in the past.) But the trouble there may be the same as in the State Department, namely, the

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prime consumers are themselves consumed with day-to-day crisis problems.*

My recommendation would be that the function of policy planning, along with the function of policy analysis, be first of all upgraded to a more senior level in the Department. There should be a "Deputy Undersecretary of State for Policy Planning and Analysis"; he should be someone with the absolute confidence of the Secretary and Under Secretary. His office should be staffed with the people of the calibre that staffed ISA and eventually OSD under the McNamara administration (the level of Paul Nitze, and the brain power of Hitch, Rowen, Enthoven, et al.). Under him should be two Assistant Secretaries of State, one for Policy Analysis, and one for Policy Planning (They are of course different functions, but bureaucratically they would both be strengthened by being carried by a strong senior official of the Department.) More use should be made in a reorganized Policy Planning staff of outside consultants and advisers: the task force method is often a useful way to bring into a problem area outsiders who can help planners to be innovative and courageous.

A related problem (which may or may not belong in the new area of the Department) is the general one of data-handling and early warning. One of the great shortfalls of the State Department as presently organized is its inability to anticipate problems in advance and, even when it does anticipate them, to generate serious policy actions with respect to them. The resources of computerization for data storage and handling, as well as techniques of simulation such as political-military gaming, can both be used as aid to the policy maker. They can prevent him from regarding every new crisis situation as totally novel and unique in history, and they can serve as a mind-stretching device to encourage badly-needed conflict-prevention policies.

c. Personnel. Apart from the obvious recommendation to bring in competent people from the outside to leaven the professional staff, the time of assignment in Washington should be lengthened in order that men may master their jobs and their constituencies. Consideration should be given afresh to the British custom of the permanent Under Secretary of State, who would be the prime diplomatic manager. The recruitment base should be broadened still further in order to get away from the stereotypes of the past. Finally, consideration should be given to applying to the Department as a whole a fairly drastic reduction-in-force, across the board. At a minimum, all the bureaus should be required to list the functions they could not perform if a 20%, 30%, or 40% cut in personnel were applied. That list of functions (all of which the bureaus in question would assert to be indispensable) should be objectively appraised by a panel composed equally of insiders and outsiders. It might be, as has happened with several U.S. embassies, that the quality of performance would go up in inverse proportion to the number of personnel.

*It may be of some interest that a new long-range planning staff has been started in the British cabinet office under John Thomson. Called the "Assessment Staff," its staff of 10 is to operate not only in the long-range planning field, but as a crisis management adjunct as well (which may not work).*

A. Introduction

Both "Policy Hill" of the Eisenhower administration and the "Little State Department" of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were centered on the White House. Widely dissimilar in nature, their common focus reflects the central importance and critical consequences of the United States' role in world affairs: national security decision-making is now a matter of constant and immediate concern to the President. As a result, our last two Presidents have been acutely conscious of their need to know more about what is going on in the national security area and to enhance their ability to direct it. To these ends, recent Presidents have created or maintained within their immediate White House environment mechanisms used to supplement, coordinate, and sometimes even replace the functions of the traditional departments. These mechanisms have reflected differing concepts of the Presidency and the differing emphases with which the Presidents have responded to the political, domestic and international pressures which they faced.

This chapter will begin with a description of the present system of White House support for the President and the uses to which it is put. Next, it will examine the elements and functions of recent White House national security staffs. It will conclude with an examination of alternative approaches to staffing the Presidency and their implications for the President, his principal advisors, and their departments.

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B. The Present White House National Security Staff

1. Characteristics of Present Process

It is easier to understand the workings of the present White House national security staff if certain general characteristics of the process under the present administration are understood. Many of these flow from the President's personality and concept of his office. Others reflect the personalities of key principal advisors or the inherent characteristics of their institutions.
Taken together they have shaped current "process" far more than statutes or organization charts. They include the following:

a. The President has readily at hand facilities which enable him to dominate the process: a vast array of information and intelligence, the most sophisticated communications system ever devised, and an in-house national security staff which minimizes his dependence on the bureaucracy and enables him to follow and guide the details of its operations.

b. The President himself is an active participant in any decision--large or small--which he believes will significantly affect US interests or his position as political leader of the administration.

c. The President often assumes tactical control of issues while engaging in a wide-ranging, informal, and closely held process of consultation. Decisions which emerge from this process are not likely to be a matter of formal record nor is their rationale necessarily explicit,

d. A desire for "open-options" characterizes decision-making, thus restricting the operational latitude of the departments and

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profoundly complicating the planning process.

e. As a corollary to the above factor, individuals--those whom "the President has personally calibrated"--are more important than institutions, including meetings of the "formal meeting-fixed membership" variety. This accounts, for example, for the relative insignificance of the National Security Council in this period.

f. The unprecedented seven-year continuity of the Secretaries of State and Defense has brought a highly significant stability of relationships at the inner circle of government.

g. For seven years the Department of Defense under Secretary McNamara was virtually autonomous. The Secretary solved his own problems, kept the President informed, and dealt with him personally when the situation required.

h. State's business has been everybody's business. By all accounts President Johnson has great confidence in Secretary Rusk, but the Secretary's relationship with his own Department is somewhat detached. Unofficial channels between the White House and State flourish.

i. The last administration has not been an activist one. The impact of Vietnam has overshadowed the process occupying a major portion of the time and energy of the principals, and placing a high premium on stability and continuity of policy in other areas of the world.

2. The Ensemble

The Special Assistant and the Executive Secretary of the NSC, supported by the NSC staff members and the Situation Room personnel, operate as an ensemble forming a Presidential national security staff.