Angry Planet - The Bannon effect and a brief history of the National Security Council

Episode Date: February 22, 2017

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first month in office has ushered in a whirlwind of change. One bit of procedural change raised eyebrows among the national security crowd. At the end of January, Trump reshuffled the National Security Council by elevating chief strategist Stephen Bannon and demoting both the Director of National Intelligence and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Critics crowed over the elevation of Bannon, a civilian, since the move could allow domestic politics to influence national security and puts a political adviser at the same level as other Cabinet officials. David Axelrod – President Barack Obama’s chief strategist – said that he’d sat in the room but never participated as a full member of the NSC. To better understand the significance of this move, we sat down with retired Army Col. and historian Andrew Bacevich to give us the history of the National Security Council and the consequences of its recent changes.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. By providing a unprecedentedly large role for Bannon, who was really a political operative, He would seem to be also trying to ensure that he's going to get the recommendations that he likes. President Donald Trump ruffled feathers when he appointed chief strategist and far-right media mogul Stephen Bannon,

the National Security Council, tackling the implications of that move and a brief history of how the council came to be on this week's War College. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world. in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is American historian, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, and former U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevic. Mr. Bacevich is here today to talk to us about the National Security Council. So at the end of January, President Donald Trump shuffled the NSC, elevating strategist Steve Bannon and effectively demoting the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence.

Observers criticize the move, but what exactly is the National Security Council and why is it important? Are the changes as disastrous as some claim or just par for the course in a White House that promised dramatic change? Mr. Bacevic is here to answer some of those questions and help us cut through the noise. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad to be with you. So what exactly is the National Security Council? Can you give us some background on it? Well, the term is actually misused.

The National Security Council was created in 1940. by a piece of legislation. And the National Security Council is a committee of senior U.S. officials assigned the statutory responsibility to advise the President of the United States on matters related to national security. That committee consists of Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Treasury, I believe there are one or two more statutory members. The National Security Council first came to prominence under President Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Eisenhower was a military man. He believed in staff work. He believed in consultation. He met regularly with that committee of principles, Eisenhower himself, to solicit their advice on matters of basic policy. If I'm not mistaken, Eisenhower also created the post of National Security Advisor. But at that time, the National Security Advisor was something more like an administrative secretary to the council, had no real clout. It was not until President Kennedy became president in 1961, but the National Security Advisor became an important post. Kennedy appointed McGeorge Bundy to the position.

Bundy continued to serve in that position after Kennedy's assassination. and Bundy became something more than Symphony administrator. He became somebody who wielded real power. And since Bundy's day, the post of National Security Advisor, again, that's not really part of the National Security Council, has been an exceedingly important figure. Now, beginning in the 1970s, the National Security Advisors' staff began to,

grow. If I'm not mistaken, that staff now consists of something on the order of 400 different officials who work for the National Security Advisor and by extension help provide advice to the President and to the National Security Council. Why has this staff come to be so big and so important? The answer, I think, is that presidents beginning roughly with President Kennedy have sought to concentrate control over all matters of national security in the White House. And so the National Security Council staff has become, in essence, an alternative cabinet department that in a sense combine some of the functions of both the State Department and the Defense Department. All right. So where do the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence

fit into this? Like what exactly is their role on the National Security Council? The founding legislation back in the 1940s at the beginning of the Cold War designated the Joint Chiefs of Staff collectively as the senior military advisors to the President. And as such, the Joint Chiefs collectively played an important role in all matters related to national security. They were not statutory members of the National Security Council, but they were present with some frequency and certainly no major major. decisions occurred without the chiefs weighing in and for the most part with the chiefs having something close to a veto power. In the 1980s as a result of a piece

of legislation called the Goldwater Nichols Act rather than the Joint Chiefs collectively the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was designated by law as the sole senior military advisor to the president and by extension to the Secretary of Defense. The idea was let's do away with the committee approach to soliciting military advice. Let's empower one particular individual to be the source of military advice. The first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who really wielded the kind of clout envisioned in the Goldwater Nichols Act was Colin Powell back when he was JCS chairman in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So what is significant about the changes that Trump has announced

on that particular point is that it suggests that Trump wishes to marginalize the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in that sense, to marginalize the military itself as a source of advice. Now, whether that's his actual intention or not remains to be seen, but that appears to be the rationale. Right. Let's dig into the memorandum that he, that shuffled things a little bit. So we call the moving of the Joint Chiefs and the DNI a demotion, but really there's a principal committee for the NSC, and they've been removed from it. Is that correct, or am I wrong?

It's my impression, and I'm not 100% certain about this, that whereas the National Security Council in the days of Eisenhower involved formal, regularly scheduled meetings of those principles, with the president sitting at the head of the table, in asking the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, their views on a particular issue, that over time, such formal meetings of the entire National Security Council have become relatively infrequent. Instead, what has evolved is a complex process of staffing decisions, and papers so that there are committees subordinate to the National Security Council that include representatives from state, from defense, from the military itself, from other agencies that meet

to consider issues, consider papers, make recommendations that then float up to the national security advisor and to the president for a final decision. So things have become much more elaborate since the days of Eisenhower. And I think the complaint that is sometimes made about this far more elaborate procedure is that it's time-consuming, that it's difficult to get this apparatus to yield a decision in a timely way. It could be that one of the things that Trump is attempting to do, He does seem to be somebody who is impatient with process. Could be that he's trying to cut through some of this bureaucratic paraphernalia

so that decisions or recommendations, I should say, come to him more quickly. And, of course, by providing a unprecedentedly large role for Bannon, who was really a political operative, he would seem to be also trying to ensure that he's going to get the recommendation that he likes. Well, let's talk about Bannon then a little bit, because this seems to be the piece of this news that is scaring people. Is there a precedent for a political operative, as you called him, being on the NSC, and how do you think that will change the room?

Well, from what I've read, the answer is, yes, there's a precedent, and that, for example, Carl Rove sat in on some meetings that were related to security issues. but as I understand it, it was sort of sitting against the back wall and listening rather thaning at the table and actual being directly involved in the discussions. Why is the Bannon appointment significant? And quite apart from what you think of Bannon's worldview or mindset, he is a political advisor, a political operative. And at least in theory, maybe only in theory, national security decisions are supposed to be made apart from. from political or partisan considerations, at least theoretically, when the National Security Council convenes or when the National Security Advisor comes into the Oval Office and says, Mr. President,

here's what we think you should do, at least theoretically that is being driven by considerations of the national interest, not about what's going to benefit a particular party or advance president's political fortunes. Now, I think all of us understand that. Politics are never excluded from any kind of decision-making, but Bannon's appointment to be part of the principles committee is an overt rejection of that notion of national security decisions being apolitical. And do we have any sense, just based on what you've read and what you know, how Bannon might use the military for political purposes? Well, I mean, if we take seriously, and I guess we should take seriously, some of his

comments about Islam in particular, it would seem that he, you know, buys into this paradigm of a clash of civilizations between the Islamic world and the West. I think Bannon likes to use terms like Judeo-Christianity. and to the extent that that conviction informs his position, and to the extent that his position ends up carrying weight in the making of national security decisions, then the relatively small, albeit not insignificant war, that we have been engaged in in the greater Middle East for many years now, could well become much, much bigger. What other parts of this memo are unusual to you? Does anything else strike you as strange?

I don't think so. I mean, the two things that struck me were the apparent marginalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the insertion of a political advisor smack dab into the middle of national security decision making. You touched before on the idea that a lot of this may be just to help cut through the bureaucratic method. and make decisions happen more quickly. And I'm wondering if there's ever been a time where in the past, the bureaucracy has hampered military decisions and slowed things down and made us make mistakes. Well, I think there's no question that there have been times where the bureaucracy has slowed things down,

whether or not that resulted in mistakes, might depend on one's point of view. But if we were called the era of Bill Clinton, for example, and Clinton's own relations with the military, particularly in the first part of his first term, were very, very rocky. But the military, quite clearly, I think, attempted to obstruct Clinton's inclination to intervene in Bosnia. In the wake of the Somalia debacle, the famous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993, when the Rwanda genocide broke out, The military clearly inhibited the inclination on the part of the Clinton administration to mount some kind of a military operation to put an end to the genocide there. So there's no question that the military can put, I should say, has in the past put a break on an administration's inclination to intervene.

It doesn't mean that it always will prevail in that regard, but it has. some considerable club. Can you expand on that a little bit? I'm wondering what mechanisms they used to slow things down? Well, one mechanism would be to leak, leak their disapproval, leak projections of complications, testify before Congress in ways that raise questions about an administrative, administration's intentions. You know, I think these are par for the course.

This is the way politics gets played in Washington. There's a little bit of an illusion, I think, that our system of civil-military relations is such that, you know, presidents give orders and the general salute and say, yes, sir, we'll take care of it. I think the reality is that the interaction between the civilian leadership and the military leadership is far more complicated and can be very contentious. Another example that just came to mind, you'll recall that in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was some considerable amount of foot-dragging on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as that war appeared on the horizon. Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, tried to solve that problem by circumventing the Chief of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, marginalizing them in the process of war planning and dealing. directly with General Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, who Rumsfeld believed and believed correctly that he could control. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff bit back. Famously, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki appeared before a Senate committee and testified

as to his professional military opinion that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousands of soldiers. Well, the war plan, the Bush administration had put together, did not foresee sending several hundred thousand soldiers to Iraq. Indeed, it was predicated on being able to invade the country and overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime with a fairly small force. So when Shinseki went public with this dissent, he was immediately slapped down by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, by Rumsfeld himself. And in many respects, Shinseki was humiliated and pretty clearly was humiliated because the civilian leadership was intent on demonstrating that it would not put up with what it viewed as military obstructionism.

Now, in that case, Shinseki, in retrospect, we would say, was clearly correct in his estimation. Do you see them as a counterbalance? It feels like, as we're reading and we learn more every day, that Trump is battling his own intelligence community. I think demoting the DNI is part of that. And, like you, as you said, they use leaks and other methods to kind of rein him in. and it feels as if the military and the intelligence community are beginning to act as a check on executive power. Do you think that's true or am I completely off base? I mean, it's too soon to tell.

But I think that it's quite plausible. My own hope, if not expectation, is that President Trump is going to find that he's facing all sorts of constraints. some domestic, some foreign, that together will limit the mischief that his administration might otherwise perpetrate. And I think that one of those constraints is likely to be the military itself. And in that regard, matters could well end up being a positive force. But again, we're really going to have to see how all these matters shake out. All right, I've got one more question for you, and it's pure speculation.

Observing all of this, you've long been a critic of U.S. military policy, especially in the Middle East. How worried are you, especially looking at someone like Steve Bannon, now sitting on the National Security Council? We're not even a month into Trump's presidency, and, of course, it's been a roller coaster month in all kinds of ways, not least of all, the fact that Flynn has already imploded. and been fired, but one of the things that you have to appreciate is that actually this administration has not faced a significant crisis yet. Now the North Korean missile test is small beard in that regard. And I do worry, should something major erupt, now we're in the near future, when clearly The administration hasn't even organized itself to make a serious decision.

I worry that in that interval, somebody like Bannon could essentially hijack the process. And with access to a president who is impulsive, who knows remarkably little, could persuade that president to do something that would be really, really stupid. one would hope that over time, when offices in the administration are filled, when procedures are put in place, that the likelihood of that kind of an event occurring would diminish. But right now, I think it is a concern. And for that reason, we need to hope and pray that there will be no major crisis that confronts this administration, at least for some interval of time.

But there always is. something always comes up. Presidents are always tested. Oh, no, there will be major crises. I mean, you are correct. But I'm just wishing and hoping that they won't occur for a little while yet. Andrew Basevic, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about the National Security Council and laying it all out for us. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedickick. Matthew Galt hosts and Rangles the Guess,

and it's produced by me, Bethelhabday. Please keep your iTunes reviews coming. If you say something nice and clever, I just might read it on air. Please post any ideas for future shows or feedback you have to our Twitter page. We're at war underscore college. Thanks.