The State of the

National Security State

DAVID JABLONSKY

T he 1947 National Security Act established the basis for the American na-
tional security state in the Cold War. The fundamental framework of that
state still exists over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Should it continue,
particularly in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks? If not,
why not, and how should it be altered?
The purpose of this article is to set the stage for answering these ques-
tions. Two themes dominate. The first involves the proper mix of change and
continuity, a key concern in a transitional period. This theme is examined against
the backdrop of three interconnected aspects of American history since 1945:
core US national interests; the concept of US national security and its foreign and
domestic components envisioned as serving those interests; and the US grand
strategy designed to support the concept of national security. The second theme
is on the form and function of government: How well since the onset of the Cold
War has the form of US government functioned in order to meet the requirements
of US grand strategy designed to further America’s core interests?
The Cold War
National Interests and National Security
Lord Palmerston described core national interests in 1848 as the “eter-
nal” and ultimate justification for national policy.1 The United States has three
such interests: physical security, promotion of values, and economic prosperity.2
Physical security entails protecting the territory and people of a nation-state
against attack in order to ensure survival with fundamental values and institu-
tions intact. It was the core interest most often associated in the early decades of
the republic with the concept of national security. James Madison referred in The
Federalist to “security against foreign danger” as the primary reason for shifting
power to the central government.3 In the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of

4 Parameters
national security came to include the other two core interests as well—promotion
of values and economic prosperity.4
During and after World War II, US leaders expanded the concept of na-
tional security and used its terminology for the first time to explain America’s re-
lationship to the world. For most of US history, the physical security of the
continental United States had not been in jeopardy. But by 1945, this invulnera-
bility was rapidly diminishing with the advent of long-range bombers, atom
bombs, and ballistic missiles. A general perception grew that the future would
not allow time to mobilize, that preparation would have to become constant. For
the first time, American leaders would have to deal with the essential paradox of
national security faced by the Roman Empire and subsequent great powers: Si vis
pacem, para bellum—If you want peace, prepare for war.
Allied to the concept of preparedness was the emerging idea that na-
tional security required all elements of national power, not just the military, to be
addressed in peace as well as war. “We are in a different league now,” Life maga-
zine proclaimed in 1945. “How large the subject of security has grown, larger
than a combined Army and Navy.”5 A year later this was echoed by Ferdinand
Eberstadt, a key architect of the emerging institutional changes in Washington,
who observed that most policymakers dealing with national security believed
“that foreign policy, military, and domestic economic resources should be
closely tied together.”6 This linkage of national security to so many interdepen-
dent factors, whether political and economic or psychological and military, ex-
panded the concept, with the subjective boundaries of security pushed out further
into the world, encompassing more geography and thereby more issues and prob-
lems. In this context, developments anywhere could be perceived to have an au-
tomatic and direct impact on US core interests. By 1948, President Truman was
applying to the entire world the words directed in earlier times to the Western
Hemisphere: “The loss of independence by any nation adds directly to the insecu-
rity of the United States and all free nations.”7
This expansive concept of US national security led increasingly to the
dominance of military-security concerns and a transcendent military establish-
ment. A major factor was the Soviet military buildup. The 1949 Soviet explosion
of a nuclear device reinforced the image of an external threat. Equally important,

Dr. David Jablonsky (Colonel, USA Ret.) is the Professor of National Security Af-
fairs in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College.
He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the US Army War College, has an M.A. from
Boston University in international relations, and holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Euro-
pean history from Kansas University. Dr. Jablonsky has held the Elihu Root Chair of
Strategy and the George C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies at the War College, and
currently holds the Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair of National Security Studies. His most
recent books are Paradigm Lost? Transitions and the Search for a New World Order and
Roots of Strategy, Volume 4.

Winter 2002-03 5
the Soviet detonation supported the key argument made the next year in NSC-68
that the US nuclear capability had been neutralized and that there was a resultant
need to drastically expand standing conventional forces. The Korean War ap-
peared to bear out the assumptions of NSC-68. The result was a massive military
increase with the expectation of an indefinite period of intense danger to US na-
tional security. Whereas the military budget for FY 1950 had accounted for less
than one-third of government expenditures and less than 5 percent of GNP, by FY
1953 that budget represented more than 60 percent of government outlays and
more than 12 percent of GNP.8 At the same time, the rise of McCarthyism made it
difficult to question the need for a national security establishment focused on a
virtual state of war in peacetime. The Soviet Union, as Colin Gray has pointed
out, became the all-consuming focus of US national security:
The capabilities, declarations, and actions that comprised US national security pol-
icy made sense only with reference to the Soviet threat. That threat, as variously de-
fined over the years, was not a factor helping to define the purposes of US policy,
grand strategy, and military strategy. It was the factor.9

A kind of adverse synergism linked the more expansive concept of US

national security to Soviet-American relations. At the same time, the ambiguity
of the new term “national security” helped create a means for politicians and offi-
cials to bridge the gap between domestic and foreign policy. The result was a con-
cept of national security, as Daniel Yergin has observed, that fundamentally
revised America’s perception of its relationship to the rest of the world.
The nation was to be permanently prepared. America’s interests and responsibilities
were unrestricted and global. National security became a guiding rule. . . . It lay at the
heart of a new and sometimes intoxicating vision.10

Grand Strategy
US grand strategy involves the use of national power in peace and war to
further a strategic vision of America’s role in the world that will best achieve the
nation’s three core interests.11 Out of the post-1945 vision of national security
emerged a grand strategic consensus for US global involvement to contain the So-
viet Union on the Eurasian landmass. This consensus survived arguments over
whether the resultant policy should be particularist or universalist and whether the
primary threat was the ideological menace of communism or the geopolitical form
of the Soviet great power. Even the Vietnam War could not break the consensus,
producing traumatic questions on the wisdom of that intervention but not of con-
tainment. There was, however, a price to pay for the consensus. The ability of each
administration to remain in office after 1945 became dependent on reducing the
tension between the foreign and domestic components of US national security, a
tension increasingly exacerbated by the requirements of containment. The appli-
cation of national ways and means to implement grand strategy during the Cold
War fell into two distinct patterns—cost minimization and risk minimization. Stra-

6 Parameters
tegic actions designed to minimize cost tend to escalate risks, while those aimed at
minimizing risks tend to drive up costs. The alternation between these two patterns
had profound social, political, economic, and military implications.12
The cost-minimization approach to containment was favored by George
Kennan because it allowed the United States to choose not only the time and place
of responding, but the appropriate elements of power as well. The basic require-
ment of the strategy was to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. At
the heart of this approach was Kennan’s belief that any attempt to generate enough
means to meet all possible threats in implementing the grand strategy could bank-
rupt the country or at the very least have seriously adverse societal impacts.13
The Truman Administration officially promulgated the strategy of con-
tainment in the March 1947 Truman Doctrine. But despite the apparent open-
ended, global commitment implicit in that strategy, that Administration quickly
adopted the cost-minimizing pattern of implementation. The basic problem with
the pattern, however, as Korea and Vietnam would prove, was that the strategic
premise of making rational distinctions between vital and peripheral interests did
not take into consideration psychological insecurities, always a problem in an
open, pluralistic democracy. Losses of peripheral areas to Soviet domination
might be psychologically damaging in more vital ones. For such scenarios, mini-
mizing costs appeared to add the possible loss of deterrent credibility to the con-
comitant increase in risk. These insecurities, as John Lewis Gaddis has pointed
out, “could as easily develop from the distant sound of falling dominoes as from
the rattling of sabres next door.”14
The second pattern of strategic ways and means—risk minimization—
also emerged in the Truman years, outlined in NSC-68. That document officially
enshrined the strategic objective of containing the expansion of the Soviet Union
for an indefinite period until the Kremlin “[modified] its behavior to conform to
generally accepted international standards.”15 NSC-68 outlined a risk-minimizing
strategy based on the fundamental assumption that the United States could gener-
ate enough means to defend its interests wherever they existed. Accordingly, there
was no need to differentiate those interests that were vital from those that were not.
But as risks were lowered, the costs inevitably increased. Additionally, the deci-
sion to respond wherever aggression occurred placed the United States in a reac-
tive mode, leaving it to potential adversaries to determine how and under what
circumstances American resources would be expended. When the Korean War
dragged on, public frustration mounted. With the prospect of indefinitely high ex-
penditures of men and materiel for a type of conflict alien to American tradition,
this public frustration began to erode the authority of the Truman Administration
to pursue its approach to grand strategy.
The Eisenhower-Dulles “New Look” was a cost-minimizing reaction to
the risk-minimizing strategy of the last years of the Truman Administration. Ei-
senhower also believed it was the only way to achieve balanced national security
focused on all three core national interests. Like Kennan, he perceived that any

Winter 2002-03 7
attempt to generate enough means to protect undifferentiated interests against all
possible threats would require a degree of fiscal austerity that would alter Ameri-
can society—that any attempt at absolute risk-free security might destroy what
the United States was trying to achieve. For Eisenhower, ever conscious of the
tension between foreign and domestic policy, national security and economic
stability went hand in hand. He believed that if the American public perceived the
cost of internationalism as indefinite national sacrifice, the result would be isola-
tionism. No one more eloquently than this former soldier tied together the do-
mestic and foreign implications of the national security state as it emerged in the
long twilight war:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and
are not clothed. . . . The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick
school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of
60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of
concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of
wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more
than 8,000 people.16

Subsequent approaches to containment oscillated between the two pat-

terns of cost-minimizing and risk-minimizing. These shifts reflected public per-
ceptions of how well each administration balanced the domestic and foreign
elements of national security policy while realizing the grand strategic objective
of containment. Even when risk minimization required active peacetime forces
larger than the United States had ever before maintained, they were not so large
or costly as they might have been. Reliance on nuclear weapons caused military
planners to be comfortable with lesser conventional capabilities than they might
otherwise have been willing to accept. And perceived technological advantages
in conventional weapons meant the United States didn’t have to match the Sovi-
ets plane for plane and tank for tank.17
Form and Function
After 1945, the form of the US government adjusted to the functions re-
quired by the changing concept of national security. The American experience in
World War II had indicated that institutions designed for an old era would not be
adequate for the new. Postwar hearings on the Pearl Harbor disaster concluded
that US intelligence procedures were insufficient for modern-day security chal-
lenges, particularly with the new American status as a global power. Another leg-
acy of the war was the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an ad hoc wartime creation designed
to provide some unity of advice to the President and to act as a counterweight in
dealings with a similar institution long used by the British. Not only did the Joint
Chiefs still lack formal authorization after World War II, but there was also in-
creased pressure for a major reorganization that would make the air force inde-
pendent and unify the armed services.

8 Parameters
 To counter the unification momentum, Secretary of the Navy James
Forrestal called on Ferdinand Eberstadt, a pioneer in Wall Street mutual fund ac-
tivities and a close friend, to chair a committee on the postwar organization for na-
tional security. The Eberstadt Report of September 1945 emphasized “a complete
realignment of our governmental organization” to prepare the United States for
“waging peace as well as war.” The focus was on adversarial collaboration: “Sepa-
rate departments provide a greater representation of specialized knowledge, they
provide a greater aggregation of experienced judgment and insure representation
of varying viewpoints.” A “Council of Common Defense,” later renamed the Na-
tional Security Council (NSC), would allow top-level advisers in the Executive
Branch to continually exchange information and opinions and to coordinate the
formulation of national security policy. The report also recommended the formal
establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a National Security Resource Board
to link industrial readiness with military preparedness. Finally, Eberstadt and his
committee called for a central intelligence agency focused only on foreign threats
and three coordinate—not unified—services, each headed by a civilian.18
The Eberstadt Report became the framework for the National Security
Act of 1947. The legislation represented a series of compromises within the Ex-
ecutive Branch and between that branch and Congress, all of which delayed the
full linkage of government form and function. Prior to the National Security Act,
the unification controversy had helped to stimulate the expression of an enlarged
concept of national security. After 1947, the controversy initially held back a
more forceful expression of America’s immense power. Increasingly, debates by
the services took on the form of theologians’ disputes concerning holy texts and
strengthened the tendency of each service to create its own defense policy. The
result was that the initial creation of grand strategy to meet evolving national se-
curity needs after World War II took form much faster than US defense policy.19
As national security became increasingly defined in military terms,
there was a growing militarization of the American government and an increase
of presidential and Executive Branch power normally associated with wartime.
In the wake of the Korean conflict, the State Department shifted its focus more
and more to military security.20 A similar structural and organizational reorienta-
tion took place at the White House, primarily through the development of the
NSC. In the early Truman years, that organization was merely one part of the Ex-
ecutive Office of the President, sparingly used by the Chief Executive. After
1950, the NSC became the government’s principal steering mechanism, with real
decisionmaking invariably involving the Assistants to the President for National
Security Affairs. That post increased exponentially in importance during the
Kennedy Administration, reaching new peaks in the Nixon and Carter years
when the National Security Advisers often brushed aside the Secretaries of State.
By the end of the Cold War, the business hours of Presidents were occupied pri-
marily with the problems vetted and brought to them through the NSC system. In
fact, as Ernest May has pointed out, by that time “the main business of the United

Winter 2002-03 9
States government had become the development, maintenance, positioning, ex-
ploitation, and regulation of military forces.”21
This militarization of the government meant that by the 1950s, with the
exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, the heads of domestic agencies had
become second-tier officials. The dominant positions in Washington included
the heads of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Central In-
telligence Agency, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President’s Na-
tional Security Adviser. At the same time, the 1949 amendment to the National
Security Act began a series of evolutionary changes that would culminate in the
1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act with an emphasis on centralized, accountable au-
thority and joint unified commands that was far removed from the original
Eberstadt structure.
With the military focus on national security, the US public came to ac-
cept a mix of real and potential infringements on its civil liberties. There were
also domestic costs in the effects of the twilight war on government programs
ranging from the Fair Deal and the New Frontier to the Great Society. And yet no
“garrison state” emerged, due primarily to the inclusion of nuclear deterrence as
part of the grand strategy and to the consequent abandonment of attempts to keep
all relevant sectors of the economy fine-tuned for mobilization and war.
All in all, the evolving form of the US government after the National
Security Act of 1947 was a creative, military-focused response to the evolving
Cold War concept of national security set against a backdrop of Soviet milita-
rism, global reliance on the United States, and dizzying developments in nuclear
and other military technologies. In achieving the grand strategic function of con-
taining the USSR, the US national security state grew, at least in part, in pace with
the Soviet “total security state.” Yet those factors sometimes cited as contribut-
ing to US weakness as a nation actually curbed the power of the national security
state: Despite a compelling external threat, the openness of American political
institutions to pressures from interest groups and the nature of national ideology
worked together to restrain the power of the government over the society and the
economy. On the other hand, the often-cited strength of the Soviet state inherent
in its ability to mobilize societal means for external objectives appears to have
been the long-term reason for its demise.22
After the Cold War
National Interests and National Security
The end of the Cold War required the United States to think more deeply
about the concept of national security than had been required for two genera-
tions. The core interests remained the preservation of the United States as a free,
economically prosperous nation with its fundamental institutions and values in-
tact. But forces and trends were in train that would drastically complicate the
concept. Revolutions in technology, communications, information, and trans-

10 Parameters
portation altered the place of time and distance in the consideration of fundamen-
tal US interests. These revolutions fueled a growing global interdependence,
particularly regarding economics and the environment. At the same time, a
multi-centric world of transnational actors ranging from multinational corpora-
tions to terrorist groups began to emerge and challenge the primacy of the
state-centric international structure.
Nevertheless, the physical security of the United States was still per-
ceived in Cold War globalist terms, focused on foreign national threats. Mean-
while, the US promotion of democracy and American values worldwide,
facilitated by communication advances, was linked to free trade, American eco-
nomic prosperity, global stability, and thereby US national security.
The demise of the Soviet Union diminished the Cold War linkage of
homeland defense with national security. Compounding this development, Ameri-
can administrations after the Cold War continued to associate national security
with the use of military forces overseas. For the Clinton Administration, this took
the form of more indiscriminate global military applications across a wide opera-
tional spectrum, including nation-building and refugee control as well as major
theater war. For the Bush Administration, the focus initially centered on threats
abroad to vital US interests, particularly in the form of a possible collapse of Rus-
sian power or a growth in the military and economic power of China.23
By 2001, however, there were numerous signs of future adjustments
that would have to be made in the concept of US national security. In December
1997, the National Defense Panel warned of a growing terrorist threat against the
United States.24 This was underscored in the September 1999 Phase I and April
2000 Phase II reports of the US Commission on National Security in the 21st
Century, which focused in part on mass-casualty terrorism directed against the
US homeland as an increasingly likely threat. The Commission’s final Phase III
report in March 2001 emphasized the need to modify the concept of national se-
curity that had evolved since World War II. “We have taken a broad view of na-
tional security,” the Commission concluded. “In the new era, sharp distinctions
between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ no longer apply. We do not equate national se-
curity with ‘defense.’”25
The events of 11 September 2001 confirmed this broader view. Sud-
denly, with the force of a Pearl Harbor, the direct linkage of the American home-
land to US national security returned. The result is a national sense of anxiety,
uncertainty, and vulnerability similar to that of the early years of the Cold War.
As in those years, the American public is coming to realize that a global war on
terrorism will require a state of constant mobilization and readiness for a pro-
tracted Orwellian conflict in which war and peace are virtually indistinguishable.
Nevertheless, the question remains whether the United States, as it did in the late
1940s, can fashion a confluence of political, structural, military, and technologi-
cal changes supported by a widely accepted grand strategy. It will not be easy.
During the Cold War, core US national security interests for the most part com-

Winter 2002-03 11
plemented each other. That, as Richard Betts presciently warned in 1998, is no
longer necessarily the case in the age of globalism:
The interest at the very core—protecting the American Homeland from attack—
may now often be in conflict with security more broadly conceived and with the
interests that mandate promoting American political values, economic interdepen-
dence, social Westernization, and stability in regions beyond Western Europe and
the Americas.26

Grand Strategy
For a decade after the end of the Cold War, US grand strategy continued
to be basically one of global engagement because of the continued conviction that
security at both ends of the Eurasian landmass provided a stable world order in
which the symbiotic relationship between liberal values and an open world econ-
omy could continue to flourish in support of US national security. During that de-
cade, in the absence of an overriding ideological and military threat, the United
States added commitments to the Balkans, Central Europe, and the Persian Gulf in
what one team of analysts termed an “uneasy amalgam” of selective engagement,
cooperative security, and primacy.27 The terrorist attacks of 9/11 demonstrated the
hostility that had developed toward this mixed grand strategic approach.28
Those events also indicated a potential for the strategy of isolationism
to reemerge. It is a vision that still resonates despite a half century of worldwide
engagement, particularly in its conception of a remote and powerful America
that can withdraw from dangerous and corrupting global influences. More terror-
ist attacks on the US homeland, particularly of a catastrophic nature, could en-
hance this outlook if the American people focus on the paradoxical fact that US
global involvement designed to promote world order and international stability
is the principal cause for such attacks. A similar paradox existed in the Cold War
with the advent of Soviet nuclear weapons, strategic bombers, and missiles: there
was always the danger that US strategic engagement in Europe, the Middle East,
and Asia might lead to nuclear strikes on the US homeland. The foundation for
that Cold War engagement, however, was the direct link between the stability of
those regions and the survival of the United States—a consensus, briefly attenu-
ated by Vietnam, that in order to maintain homeland security, it was necessary to
confront foreign problems early on in an extended defense perimeter far from
American shores. That forward presence and intervention in troubled regions
now tend to create animosities which, as demonstrated on 9/11, can redound to
harm the American homeland.29
To counter isolationist tendencies, a new US grand strategy will have
to resolve two problems carried over from the Cold War. The first is the core versus
periphery issue. Core proponents like Kennan argued in terms of cost minimiza-
tion that the United States should be only selectively engaged, where American
vital interests are at stake. To the contrary, Paul Nitze and the so-called universalist
proponents who created NSC-68 argued in terms of risk-minimization that local

12 Parameters
conflicts on the periphery are important because of their linkage to the broader
grand strategy of containment. “In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of
atomic warfare,” NSC-68 concluded, “it is not an adequate objective merely to
seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is be-
coming less and less tolerable.”30 This idea of world order as an end in itself has
become more appealing since 9/11. Failed states are no longer seen as just
humanitarian concerns, but as long-term breeding and training grounds for terror-
ists. Such states as well as protracted civil conflicts over issues like Palestine and
Kashmir are increasingly perceived as directly linked to core American security
interests, involving risks to the US homeland that are viewed as just as dangerous
as a nuclear strike in the Cold War—and more likely. Consequently, any grand
strategy that hopes to sustain American public support for a global war on terror-
ism will have to emphasize the risk-minimization strategic vision of protracted
global involvement.31
This approach leads, as it did in the wake of NSC-68, to the problem of
cost. In the Cold War, the development of nuclear weapons helped soften the pub-
lic impression that a risk-minimization strategy would entail higher costs. There
is no such buffer after 9/11. If costs for a global war on terrorism are to be held to a
level acceptable for American public support, a multilateral approach will have
to dominate American grand strategy. In any event, an effective unilateral war on
terrorism is just not possible. Combating international terrorism requires allied
military and police forces operating within their national borders focused on
transnational law enforcement ranging from the tracing of bank accounts to the
sharing of information on criminal organizations. Equally important, coalitions
can provide legitimizing power to emphasize the enormous gap between the
worlds of democratic societies and the terrorist criminal underground, thereby
reducing the ability of terrorist groups to emphasize grievances against a narrow,
self-aggrandizing America focused only on its own national interests. At the
same time, the prospect of catastrophic terrorist attacks justifies a certain degree
of unilateral action, as was demonstrated in the Afghanistan War, particularly if
there are obvious global benefits as there were in the British Navy’s efforts to re-
duce international piracy well before the signing of international conventions to
that effect in the mid-19th century. In the Cold War, there were also times when
the United States found it both necessary and desirable to strike out alone; but
then, as now in the global war on terrorism, the United States discovered that it
cannot win on its own.32
The multilateral approach is just one of several characteristics required
for a grand strategy in an age of terror. To begin with, a grand strategic vision
must manage public expectations. Crisis and consequence management must be
tied to deterrence in order to prevent the acknowledgment of inevitable terrorist
attacks on the US homeland from slipping into national resignation. This will not
be helped by the current call for a “war” against terrorism—a term that not only
elevates the status of common criminals, but raises expectations for decisive

Winter 2002-03 13
“If costs for a global war on terrorism are to be
held to a level acceptable for American public
support, a multilateral approach will have
to dominate American grand strategy.”

military action against an easily identifiable foe, creating the impression that
the primary US effort will be military. All this is reminiscent of the type of
militarization that occurred in the Cold War when some efforts, notably in Viet-
nam, weakened nonmilitary elements of national power, including the diplo-
matic alliances upon which the United States depended for its grand strategy
of containing the Soviet Union. That such multilateral considerations are impor-
tant in an age of rogue states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), and the doctrine of preemption is illustrated by the ongoing debate in
the Bush Administration concerning military action against Iraq.33
Such developments are also a reminder that terrorism will constitute
just one part of an overall US grand strategy that must address a host of other
threats ranging from the degradation of the environment to potential peer com-
petitors. Nevertheless, the anti-terrorism issue will permeate and at times domi-
nate the larger strategic effort. For example, allied support on this issue, not
unlike that required during the Cold War, may cause the Bush Administration to
make policy compromises and unexpected commitments on other issues that
could range from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the inspection pro-
tocol of the Biological Weapons Convention to treaties concerning the Interna-
tional Criminal Court and a comprehensive nuclear test ban. At the same time the
global war on terrorism may offer larger grand strategic opportunities, such as in-
creased cooperation with the other great powers, most notably China and Russia
in terms of WMD nonproliferation and cooperative threat reduction. And the re-
newed focus on homeland security will provide the potential to deal more effec-
tively both conceptually and structurally with the international and domestic
elements of US national security, increasingly intertwined since 1947.
Finally, efforts against terrorism will compel US grand strategists to take
a long-term look at the effects of globalism. From the traditional American per-
spective, globalism naturally and inexorably furthered the three core US interests.
The 9/11 attacks, however, demonstrate that it also produces international eco-
nomic and psychological effects that can pit these core interests against each other.
To combat this effect, an overall US grand strategy will have to address the prob-
lems of failed or failing states in nation-building terms that will require decades if

14 Parameters
not generations to solve. This effort will also need to move beyond near-term
coalition needs to gradual and increasing commitments to democracy and human
rights in repressive regimes around the world. Above all, it will require selective
US global engagement made possible by a mix of US preponderance and coopera-
tive security that will allow a more effective integration of foreign and domestic
national security issues emphasizing minimization of both cost and risk—all nec-
essary to sustain US public support for another grand strategic vision of a pro-
tracted twilight struggle.
Form and Function
Form and function can grow apart in governments as a result of historical
change. Nowhere is this more evident than in Vienna, where the resplendent Hof-
burg continues to serve as the governmental edifice for a republic smaller than the
state of Indiana. A similar trend appeared in the United States in the decade after the
Cold War when an unwieldy mixture of departments and agencies designed after
World War II for a vastly different world was enlisted in an ad hoc approach to key
post-Cold War issues ranging from counter-proliferation and WMD defense to
counter-terrorism and homeland defense. As a consequence, many of the new na-
tional security missions were, in Ashton Carter’s description, “institutionally home-
less,”34 without clear authority, necessary resources, and appropriate accountability.
The events of 11 September 2001 confirmed that the foreign and domes-
tic distinctions of the Cold War national security system could no longer apply to
the evolving concept of national security in terms of structure, organization, and
the interagency process. Homeland security, for example, emerged as a blur of do-
mestic and international requirements united only by the fact that the requirements
could not be met by one organizational entity alone and that many of the players
would be agencies not normally involved in national security issues, such as the
Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture. At the same time, it
became abundantly clear that issues such as catastrophic terrorism could straddle
the Cold War divide between the governmental organizations devoted to counter-
ing foreign threats and those focused on combating domestic crime and protecting
civil rights. That divide is deeply etched as two different institutional paradigms
into the American governmental structure. The paradigm of national security, rep-
resented by the creation of the CIA in 1947, requires the aggressive, active collec-
tion and analysis of foreign intelligence to forewarn the appropriate authorities
before an incident occurs. The law enforcement paradigm, represented by the con-
tinuing domestic role of the FBI, concerns reaction to voluntarily provided infor-
mation after a crime in order to facilitate apprehension and prosecution in court
based on rules of evidence and with the overarching consideration of protecting
the rights of citizens. As a result, both agencies traditionally have been reluctant to
exchange information—the CIA because sources and methods might be revealed
in court, and the FBI because informant information might be revealed, compro-
mising future action.35

Winter 2002-03 15
 The Bush Administration responded immediately to these types of
problems in the wake of the terrorist attacks. On 20 September 2001, the Presi-
dent selected Tom Ridge as the director of a small Office of Homeland Security
within the White House. This proved to be unworkable in most estimations, since
Ridge lacked authority over the agencies concerned and their budgets. Conse-
quently, President Bush proposed on 6 June 2002 the creation of a Cabinet-level
Department of Homeland Security to unite essential agencies in what he termed
“the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s.”
The new agency would absorb a huge part of the Executive Branch, including all
of the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency,
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs Service, and the Transporta-
tion Security Administration, the new organization in charge of airport security.
This would comprise 169,000 employees and incorporate $37.4 billion from the
existing agencies. The FBI and CIA would maintain their current functions, but
the new department’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis unit would be “a cus-
tomer” of both agencies. The purpose of the proposal, the President emphasized,
was not to replace the earlier national security structure, but to build upon it to
align governmental form and function. “Truman’s reforms are still helping us to
fight terror abroad,” he concluded. “And now we need similar dramatic reforms
to secure our people at home.”36
This evolutionary approach to the national security structure poses
form and function problems for the US military. Abroad, the transformation pro-
cess of the American armed forces is increasingly shaped by the new focus on ter-
rorism and the need for offensive capabilities sufficient to mount preemptive
attacks on terrorist groups and to provide a credible deterrent to rogue states
linked to WMD support of such groups. At the same time, the requirement for the
military to perform across a broad operational spectrum has not disappeared, par-
ticularly in terms of peace operations in areas vital to long-term solutions for the
causes of terrorism. Problems with military overextension abroad are accentu-
ated at home by evolving security requirements. Already, defensive measures for
critical homeland infrastructure have made inroads into reserve component per-
sonnel and units destined for overseas missions. Such problems could be com-
pounded by new domestic terrorist attacks, which at the very least could cause
more US troops to be assigned to Northern Command, the new unified command
established for homeland defense. At the most, such attacks might trigger a fun-
damental examination of more extensive domestic military support to civil au-
thorities, unshackled by Posse Comitatus.37
In any event, the sweeping proposals of the Bush plan are likely to cause
months of critical discussion and turf battles. Currently, 88 congressional com-
mittees and subcommittees have jurisdiction over some aspects of homeland se-
curity, and the new department will incorporate parts of eight major agencies.
Moreover, consolidation does not automatically mean effective integration. The
Department of Energy is a classic example of an agency created (in 1979) to bring

16 Parameters
a variety of governmental offices under its control; after almost 25 years it still is
criticized for its ineffectiveness. Compounding the normal complications associ-
ated with mergers, half the federal work force may be eligible for retirement in
the next five years.38 Under such circumstances, it will be difficult to facilitate a
common culture oriented on homeland security in the way the 1986 Goldwater-
Nichols Act institutionalized the concept of jointness. Finally, critics point out
that the proposed structure does not address the problem of information-sharing
between the FBI and the CIA, and that the new organization will still depend on
these and other governmental agencies for much of its intelligence and enforce-
ment capability.39
All this notwithstanding, the proposed Department of Homeland Secu-
rity is a positive move to align national form and function. Seventy percent of all
corporate mergers end in “outright failures.”40 But whereas those results create
only disappointed stockholders, the failure of the Bush Administration’s home-
land security super-merger could have a devastating impact on the core US physi-
cal security interest and thereby on a continued American grand strategy based on
global engagement. To beat the private-sector odds, the government must impart
to Congress and the American people a sense of urgency, grand strategic design,
and, above all, flexibility. In 1947, Eberstadt and Forrestal realized that organizing
for national security was a dynamic process. They expected the national security
state to undergo continued adjustment and in fact were responsible for the major
1949 reorganization. Similar changes will occur as the Administration responds to
critics and to the lessons of 9/11. Institutional arrangements, as Alexander Pope
long ago pointed out, can adjust in a pragmatic manner:
For forms of government let fools contest
Whate’er is best administered is best

Conclusion
“Do not confuse sécurité, the feeling of having nothing to fear,” the au-
thor of the Larousse Modern Dictionary warns in a different context, “and sûreté,
the state of having nothing to fear.”41 In the wake of 9/11, this presents no prob-
lem. For the American public, both elements have virtually disappeared. Be-
cause of the terrorist attacks, the institutional form of the US government is
changing as America sorts out its grand strategic functions in a rapidly changing
world. This should come as no surprise. The same process occurred at the begin-
ning of the Cold War when the United States enlarged its definition of national se-
curity. But at that time it required a ten-year period encompassing an iterative
public and political process for the American grand strategy of containment to be
elaborated and broadly accepted. The United States has no such luxury today.
“The danger of weapons of mass destruction being used against America and its
allies,” a group of high-level analysts concluded even before 9/11, “is greater
now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”42

Winter 2002-03 17
 Like the period 1945-50, the US response to this threat is ushering in a
new era of national security that over the coming five years will affect the next two
generations of Americans in political, economic, and socio-psychological ways
that are not yet fully apparent. In those early years of the Cold War, American lead-
ers fashioned a grand strategic vision of the US role in the world, which while inno-
vative in terms of a changing concept of national security, did not outrun the
experiences of the American people as the Soviet threat unfolded. US leaders face
a similar challenge today as they seek to educate the public that the domestic ter-
rorist threat to physical security should not be allowed to skew the overall Ameri-
can grand strategy of global engagement designed to further that core interest as
well as those of economic prosperity and value promotion. The key is to structure
government for this effort so that the foreign and domestic efficacy and effective-
ness of form and function are clear to the American people. The new threat assures
the continued existence if not growth of the national security state and will cer-
tainly cause increased centralization and intrusiveness of the US government.
Nevertheless, the Cold War demonstrates that all this need not cause the rise of a
garrison state or the diminishment of civil liberties. Above all, that long twilight
struggle is a reminder of the importance of patience, perseverance, and endurance
in the face of protracted conflict without the prospect of clear victory.
NOTES
1. Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 334.
2. The US Army War College uses the four broad categories outlined in Donald Neuchterlein, America
Overcommitted: U.S. National Interests in the 1980s (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1985), which in-
cludes “world order.” Terry Deibel, “Strategies Before Containment: Patterns for the Future,” International Se-
curity, 16 (Spring 1992), 82, points out, however, that national interests at the highest strategic level determine
ends not means and that favorable world order is a means not an end.
3. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 194. Madison also cautioned, in words with great applicability in an era of the new
threat of terrorism, that the “means of security can only be regulated by the means and danger of attack. They
will, in fact, ever be determined by these rules and no others.” James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John
Jay, The Federalist Papers (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 67.
4. It was not until World War II that the term “national security” came into full usage in US political dis-
course. In 1943, Walter Lippmann argued that peace as an ideal combined with a long history of “unearned se-
curity . . . caused us. . . . to argue like the idle rich who regarded work as something for menials, that a concern
with the foundations of national security . . . was beneath our dignity” (emphasis added). Walter Lippmann,
U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 49.
5. Yergin, p. 195.
6. Ibid., p. 199. See also Edward Mead Earle, “Introduction,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military
Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943), p.
viii; as early as 1943 he pointed out that national security strategy “has of necessity required increasing consid-
eration of nonmilitary factors, economic, psychological, moral, political, and technological. Strategy, there-
fore, is not merely a concept of wartime, but is an inherent element of statecraft at all times.”
7. Ernest R. May, “National Security in American History,” in Rethinking America’s Security: Beyond Cold
War to a New World Order, ed. Graham Allison and Gregory F. Treverton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 99.
See also Yergin, pp. 196, 199.
8. Much of the FY 1950 (July 1949-June 1950) budget was due to obligations remaining from World War II.
Ernest R. May, “The U.S. Government, a Legacy of the Cold War,” in The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Im-
plications,” ed. Michael Hogan (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 222, see also p. 219. On the issue of
State and Defense conceptions of national security, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National
Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1948,” American Historical Review, 89 (April 1984), 346-81,
and in the same issue the “Comments” by John Lewis Gaddis, 382-85, and by Bruce Kuniholm, 385-90.

18 Parameters
 9. Emphasis in original. Colin S. Gray, “Strategy in the Nuclear Age: The United States, 1945-1991,” in The
Making of Strategy, Rulers, States, and War, ed. Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), p. 599. For Kennan’s prediction of this trend toward militarization of
the national security concept, see George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1951), pp. 171-75.
10. Yergin, p. 220; see also pp. 200-01, 219.
11. My thanks for discussion and insight on this definition to Ambassador Marshall McCallie, Deputy
Commandant for International Affairs, US Army War College, who co-taught an elective on grand strategy, and
to those members of the US Army War College Class of 2002 who participated in the elective.
12. For the cost-risk patterns throughout the Cold War, see John Lewis Gaddis, “Containment and the
Logic of Strategy,” The National Interest, No. 10 (Winter 1987/1988), pp. 27-38.
13. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National
Security Policy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press 1982), pp. 352-53.
14. Ibid., pp. 91-92.
15. “NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” 14 April 1950, in Contain-
ment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950, ed. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), p. 401.
16. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” Washington, D.C., 16 April 1953.
17. Aaron L. Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States Become a Garrison State?” International Security,
16 (Spring 1992), 117.
18. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Naval Affairs, Report to HON James Forrestal, Secretary of the
Navy on Unification of the War and Navy Departments and Postwar Organization for National Security, 22 Oc-
tober 1945 (hereinafter Eberstadt Report), 79th Cong., 1st sess., 1945, pp. 1-2, 6-14, 16-18, 21, 36-37, 150-52,
163, 181. The two men met in 1909 while they were attending Princeton and later worked together in Dillon,
Read, and Company. Jeffery M. Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership (College
Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 12, 22. See also Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The
American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp.
203-13. “National Security Council” was substituted for “Council of Common Defense” in the Senate (S.758)
and House (HR. 2319) bills that incorporated President Truman’s February 1947 formal proposal of legislation
to Congress. On the influence of corporatist thought, see Dorwart, pp. 29, 104-05. Instead of a consolidated,
military system of national security with an emphasis on government control, the Eberstadt Report emphasized
that with coordinating agencies there would be “tremendous benefits that arise from the parallel, competitive,
and sometime conflicting efforts which our system permits.” Eberstadt Report, p. 20.
19. US Congress, National Security Act of 1947 (Public Law 253, 80th Congress, 26 July 1947) (61 Stat.
495). See also Marcus G. Raskin, Essays of a Citizen: From National Security State to Democracy (Armonk, N.Y.:
M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 10; MacGregor Knox, “Conclusion: Continuity and Revolution in the Making of Strat-
egy,” in The Making of Strategy, p. 620; Gregory F. Treverton and Barbara A. Bicksler, “Conclusion: Getting from
Here to Where?” in Rethinking America’s Security, p. 49; Yergin, p. 219; and Ernest R. May, “Cold War and De-
fense,” in The Cold War and Defense, ed. Keith Neilson and Ronald G. Hay (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 28-35.
Dorwart (p.145) wrote, “In reality the National Security Act was the Eberstadt plan with modifications.” On Tru-
man’s major philosophical and organizational differences with the concepts in the Eberstadt Report and the poli-
tics of the report’s acceptance, see Dorwart, ch. 7.
20. In 1949, only 7 percent of the more than 10,000 pages of Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)
was located in sections with titles concerning the words “security” or “military.” In 1951, for the 13,000 pages of the
FRUS, the figure was 28 percent. May, “U.S. Government,” pp. 226-27. See also Treverton and Bicksler, p. 408.
21. May, “U.S. Government,” p. 227. From the early 1960s, a growing portion of American national strate-
gic planning efforts was devoted to military strategy. Aaron L. Friedberg, “The Making of American National
Strategy, 1948-1988,” The National Interest, No. 11 (Spring 1988), p. 73; Samuel P. Huntington, American Mili-
tary Strategy, Policy Papers in International Affairs, No. 28 (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1986), p. 28; and “The
Evolution of U.S. National Strategy,” in U.S. National Security Strategy for the 1990s, ed. Daniel J. Kaufman, Da-
vid S. Clark, and Kevin P. Sheehan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), p. 12.
22. May, “U.S. Government,” p. 227; Yergin, p. 408; Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States Become a
Garrison State?” pp. 110-11.
23. Chris Seiple, “Homeland Security Concepts and Strategy,” Orbis, 46 (Spring 2002), 264-65; Ashton B.
Carter, “The Architecture of Government in the Face of Terrorism,” International Security, 26 (Winter 2001/2002),
8; and Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 79 (January/February 2000), 45-62.
24. National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century (hereinafter NDP,
Transforming Defense) (Washington: GPO, December 1997), pp. 25-28.
25. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, Road Map for National Security: Im-
perative for Change (hereinafter USCNS/21, Road Map for National Security) (Washington: GPO, 15 March

Winter 2002-03 19
2001), Phase III Report, p. xiii. See also the Commission’s New World Coming: American Security in the 21st
Century (hereinafter USCNS/21, New World Coming) (Washington: GPO, 15 September 1999), Phase I Re-
port, and Seeking a National Strategy: A Concert for Preserving Security and Promoting Freedom (hereinafter
USCNS/21, Seeking a National Strategy) (Washington: GPO, 15 April 2000), Phase II Report. In response to
such warnings, the 1999 Clinton Administration’s National Security Strategy addressed combating terrorism
and devoted an entire section to “Defending the Homeland,” which discussed such topics as domestic prepared-
ness against WMD and critical infrastructure protection. William Clinton, A National Security Strategy for a
New Century (Washington: GPO, December 1999), pp. 13, 16-18.
26. Richard K. Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, 77 (January/February
1998), 41. See also Adam Garfinkel, “NSC-68 Redux?” SAIS Review, 19 (Winter-Spring 1999), 41-54.
27. Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Se-
curity, 21 (Winter 1996/97), 5, 52.
28. For example, see Francois Heisbourg, “American Hegemony? Perceptions of the U.S. Abroad,” Sur-
vival, 41 (Winter 1999-2000), 5-19; Peter W. Rodman, “The World’s Resentment: Anti-Americanism as a
Global Phenomenon,” National Interest, No. 60 (Summer 2000), pp. 33-41; and Chalmer A. Johnson,
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan, 2000).
29. Betts, pp. 27-28, 40; Barry R. Posen, “The Struggle Against Terrorism: Grand Strategy, Strategy, and
Tactics,” International Security, 26 (Winter 2001/2002), 53; Joseph Nye, “The New Rome Meets the New Bar-
barians,” The Economist, 21 May 2002, pp. 23-25; and Stephen M. Walt, “Beyond bin Laden: Reshaping U.S.
Foreign Policy,” International Security,” 26 (Winter 2001/2002), 74.
30. Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, p. 390. See also Frederick W. Kagan, “Back to the Future: NSC-68
and the Right Course for America Today,” SAIS Review, 19 (Winter-Spring 1999), 390.
31. Walt, p. 62, and John G. Ikenberry, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Terror,” Survival, 43 (Win-
ter 2001), 31.
32. Ikenberry, pp. 20, 25, 28; Walt, p. 63; and Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, “A War Nasty, Brutish
and Long,” Current History, 100 (December 2001), 404-05.
33. Daalder and Lindsay, p. 408, and Michael Howard, “What’s in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism,” For-
eign Affairs, 81 (January/February 2002), 10. But see Eliot A. Cohen, “A Strange War,” The National Interest,
No. 65-S (Thanksgiving 2001), pp. 11-22. “When we were attacked on [Sept. 11],” National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice remarked, “it reinforced one of the rediscovered truths about today’s world: robust military
power matters in international politics and security.” At the same time, Rice pointed out the need for a concerted
response using all elements of power by a coalition of like-minded nations in response to the basic fact that
“global terror demands a global solution.” Keith J. Costa, “National Security Adviser Outlines Lessons
Learned from Sept. 11,” Inside the Pentagon, 2 May 2002, p. 11.
34. Ashton B. Carter, “Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future,” in Keeping the Edge: Man-
aging Defense for the Future, ed. Ashton B. Carter and John P. White (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 2.
35. John Deutch and Jeffrey H. Smith, “Smarter Intelligence,” Foreign Policy, No. 128 (January/February
2002), p. 64; Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry with David Aidekman, “Countering Asymmetric Threats,”
in Keeping the Edge, p. 125; John Deutch, Arnold Kanter, and Brent Scowcroft with Christopher Hornbarger,
“Strengthening the National Security Interagency Process,” in Keeping the Edge, p. 266; Seiple, p. 263; and
Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign
Affairs, 77 (November/December 1998), 82.
36. “Bush Speech on New Department,” The Washington Post, 7 June 2002, p. A-19. See also, in the same
issue, Dan Balz, “A Bid to Regain the Initiative,” p. A-1, and Mike Allen and Bill Miller, “Bush Seeks Security
Department,” pp. A-1, A-18; also see Carter, “Architecture of Government,” p. 12. For the entire Administra-
tion approach, see George W. Bush, The National Strategy for Homeland Security (Washington: Office of
Homeland Security, July 2002).
37. Conrad C. Crane, Facing the Hydra: Maintaining Strategic Balance While Pursuing a Global War
Against Terrorism (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, May 2002), pp. 7-17; and
Hunter Keeter, “New DoD Plan Links NORAD, New Northern Command,” Defense Daily International, 19
April 2002, p. 1.
38. Examples of eligibility to retire by 2007: FEMA, 48 percent; Coast Guard, 42 percent; and Customs
Service, 36 percent. Max Stier, “Homeland Security: Mega Merger,” The Washington Post, 25 June 2002, p.
A-19. See also Carter, “Architecture of Government,” p. 10, and Daalder and Lindsay, pp. 405-06.
39. Thomas E. Ricks, “A Question of Implementation,” The Washington Post, 7 June 2002, pp. A-1, A-18.
On institutional culture, see Seiple, p. 271, and USCNS/21, Road Map for National Security, p. 102, which rec-
ommends a National Security Service Corps for senior civil servants.
40. Stier, p. A-19.
41. Marguerite-Marie Dubois, Larousse Modern Dictionary (Paris: Libarie Larousse, 1960), p. 657.
42. Carter, Deutch, and Zelikow, p. 81.

20 Parameters