Kate Bannen on FP reports on the National Security Council’s transformation:
Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.
“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized. …
The lack of a paper trail documenting the decision-making process is also troubling, the intelligence official said. For example, under previous administrations, after a principals or deputies meeting of the National Security Council, the discussion, the final agreement, and the recommendations would be written up in what’s called a “summary of conclusions” — or SOC in government-speak.
“Under [President George W. Bush], the National Security Council was quite strict about recording SOCs,” said Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who served on Bush’s National Security Council. “There was often a high level of generality, and there may have been some exceptions, but they were carefully crafted.”
These summaries also provided a record to refer back to, especially important if a debate over an issue came up again, including among agencies that needed to implement the conclusions reached.
Certainly the ascent of extremist Islamophobe Steve Bannon to a permanent seat on the NSC is a matter of concern – President Bush forbade the presence of political strategist Karl Rove at NSC meetings, and while Obama permitted his political strategists to accept invites, they didn’t have permanent seats – according to this article’s author, Kate Bannen. National security should not be warped by political considerations.
This lack of paper trail, though, is something of a sign of a modern Keystone Cops, the comedy troupe that lampooned the real cops back in the 1910s. Why? Because it’s a truism of modern management that in order to evaluate your methods, you have to know what was decided and why, develop baselines, and evaluate your results. These things must be recorded, or they don’t exist.
Avoiding writing things down and evaluating decisions? This is the mark of an amateur, someone who’s too tied up in his self-importance to realize that governance is a team game. Hey, he’ll remember this decision – after all, it had been made before the meeting started. He’s Just Too Good To Be Wrong. Everyone else should Just Remember It. Another sign of amateur hour? Kate notes that her source says, “There is zero room for dissenting opinion.” Think about it. No reasoned debate, enlivened with facts and interpretations. Either you’re singing in the choir or your job, your entire career is teetering on the edge.
This is, as anyone’s worked on hard problems knows, a recipe for disaster.
So what’s my point? He can certainly cause chaos and uncertainty – indeed, as a critical part of our defense infrastructure, the failure to come into governance with a plan for the NSC, as Bannen also reports, is an echo of just how much of a disaster the Trump Administration has been so far. Bannon is a critical part of this failure. His perception of Islam being a fatal enemy may cloud the fact that the Russians, as an homogenuous ethnic group and equipped with heavy weapons, are far more capable of causing us upset than a relatively lightly armed religious group riven with both theological and ethnic divisions. Obama’s strategy, no doubt built during meetings fraught with dissenting opinions, of picking off leaders and letting the groups run around more or less headless, keeps us out of painful wars that could prove disastrous. ISIS is being driven out of the cities is had conquered, out of territory it claimed. Does Bannon have a clue as to how this is working? Has he bothered to read the reports? Or does he regard himself as the expert? He’s dangerous – but he’s acting like an unconscious buffoon.
Honestly, if Trump was a smart guy (and he keeps telling us he is – makes you wonder how often Einstein reassured us he was smart), he’d thank Bannon for his help during the campaign – and show him the door. He’d get a troublemaking amateur out of the gears of government while giving more than half the populace some assurance that he’s taking the job seriously.
But Trump thinks he’s smart, so it won’t happen. Better to impeach Trump sooner rather than later, then see if Pence is smart enough to eject him – or if we’re going to have to up the count of Presidents yet again.
