Here’s an excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Walter Russell Mead on American Foreign Policy. Tyler asks whether the State Department or the CIA understand the Middle East better. Here’s part of Walter’s response:
I think both institutions are troubled by a problem that goes far beyond them, the problem of the bureaucratization of knowledge. If you compare the world of American foreign policy today with what it was like, say, before World War II, in those days you had really quite small institutions where an individual genius or someone like George Kennan could really have an influence.
With the ballooning of the national security bureaucracies in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these ossified institutions. There’s always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is one — if you can find the right one. Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking that’s being done inside them.
I’m not sure you need just one China analyst, as that is the route to monopolization and perhaps a different type of group think. Certainly there is still “bounded rationality” and a single individual cannot know everything.
But it’s hard to say the right direction is not towards a flatter organization, fewer political appointees, more people “doing” and less “checking.”
Defense programs should be associated with an individual who has the strategic insight as well as the administrative capacity to get it done. Where are the George Kennan’s of defense acquisition?
Here’s another good slice:
COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?
MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.
Again, a symptom of a sprawling bureaucracy that relies on credentials, or the appearance of knowledge. It rewards people for having titles, not for taking responsibility and delivering. PhDs spend 30-35 years living in a bubble, catering to the demands of the academy, rather than experiencing the real world, business, and administration.
Walter gives an example of how a PhD-heavy State Department leads to incoherent policies. Just before Russia attacked Ukraine, the State Department did two things.
First, it shows the world that it knew Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. “We know more about you, Russia, than you think!”
Second, the US said it thinks Russia would steamroll Ukraine and immediately started evacuating its people and issuing warnings.
Walter says those two policies were a disaster. If the US knew so much about Russia, and certainly knew more about Ukraine than Russia did, then the US may have given Russia the signal to go ahead and invade. The US may have removed doubt on the state of Ukrainian resistance. Maybe that wasn’t the case, but interesting nonetheless.
I think this piecemeal, haphazard decision making is the same with respect to United States military force structure and weapons programs. It goes back the bureaucratization, consensus-based decisions, and lack of individual responsibility.
It’s a horse race between bureaucraticization and Congress on what has made the government less effective – and the Congress wins. Indeed, above and beyond the long list of well-meaning laws Congress has passed that have served mainly to complicate DoD management and slow down decision-making, Congress is also largely responsible for the”ballooning” of national security bureaucracies (cf. the Department of Homeland Security; the Director of National Intelligence; six Undersecretary positions at DoD — all ABOVE the Assistant Secretary of Defense level…).
As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”