Is the NSC Unwell?

Heart attacks, prostate cancer, Jake Sullivan awake for a home invasion attempt at 4 AM because he was just up working on a random Tuesday night?

Is the national security bureaucracy in America unwell?

To discuss, I have on today John Gans, a former Pentagon speechwriter, who’s had many, many other jobs in Washington. He is also the author of the fantastic “White House Warriors,” a history of the National Security Council.  

We get into:

Why the organizational design of the NSC leads to such crushing burdens for midlevel and senior staffers

The kinds of high-flyers that are drawn to the national security complex and what keeps them there

How POTUS’s time constraints impact decision-making

Why NSC’s historically are excellent at spotting problems but often overeager when crafting solutions

The NSC’s role in America’s “forever wars.”

Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, and Trump’s “maverick model” of running the NSC compared to the Eisenhower vision of “regular order”

How seemingly prosaic technological innovations like track changes and video conferencing have dramatically changed national security policymaking

How reading Shakespeare can improve the quality of our policy-making

What a better model could look like

Illustration from the New Yorker's recent feature on Sullivan. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/trial-by-combat

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