The problems with American foreign policy are as much structural and organizational as they are conceptual. It is easy to focus on the conceptual issues because they are the most overt, the easiest to understand, and the product of the political and policy debates that dominate the news. In contrast, structural and organizational issues are obscure, slow moving, and the usually the product of stagnation rather than dynamism. We often do not realize that there is an issue with the structure until we find out that it is broken, even if it was deteriorating before. It would be like driving a car with the passengers fighting over the map and the directions but only waiting until the car broke down until they realized that there was a problem with the engine.
Unfortunately, like the car that breaks down, structural reform occurs either in response to an unequivocal failure (the War Powers Resolution or Goldwater-Nichols) or in response to an undeniable threat (the National Security Act of 1947 or the Department of Homeland Security). The shortcoming with waiting until either event is that it ignores the problems that are always there but wait for a crisis to reveal themselves. Robert Komer, who was a critical figure in the White House during the Vietnam War, articulated these issues better than almost anyone in his study, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam, prepared for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), outlined his understanding of the structural problems that complicated the American war effort. His primary argument is that though the American government perceived the difficulties in Vietnam more than it got credit for, it failed to adapt its conventional approach to meet an unconventional adversary because the bureaucratic institutions responsible for carrying out American policy “tended to play out their existing institutional repertoires,” becoming ossified in their established roles and unwilling or cripplingly slow to adapt when circumstances required it even if there was broad consensus that adaptation was required.
His thesis that policymakers identified the problems but the bureaucracy was incapable of executing changes is an idea that needs more attention than as a reference from an obscure report from the 1960s. The recent experience in Afghanistan is full of examples where the intentions were correct (or less wrong than they were criticized for) but the execution is where realities of budgeting and resources is where things start to go wrong. American attempts at post-war reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hindered by the situation that the Defense Department and military are inexperienced and uncomfortable with civilian reconstruction duties, while the State Department is underequipped to handle such duties on its own. Each department agrees that the situation is untenable — the dissonance is in the implementation.
The problem with fixing the bureaucracy is that structural problems are often the most difficult to solve and require buy-in from the President, relevant agencies, frequently Congress, and sometimes outside constituencies like NGOs or other interest groups. Any process of bureaucratic reform is slow (often by intention), incremental, and requires a strong understanding of organizational minutiae. Patience is even more fundamental, not to mention a firm grip on reality as well as the understanding that just because a process or system appears to be broken does not mean that it can be fixed or that everyone agrees that it is broken. It should be remembered that someone, somewhere benefits from the status quo if for no other reason than that change would be too difficult and unsettling.
The first point is not so much to fix bureaucracies but to recalibrate conceptualizations of foreign policy to acknowledge the fact that intentions are easy but execution is hard. Policy is almost more about operationalization of ideas than the ideas themselves. Nothing can happen without buy-in from the relevant agencies, and no strategy can survive intact the first discussion on execution since the stakeholders begin their input on what is viable, risky, impossible, and preferable. This means that foreign policy analysis and recommendations need to consider the fact that bureaucratic machinery narrows the number of policy responses that are available and that failing policies may not be recognized as such and may not be corrected without a large effort. More succinctly, suggesting policies because they are “the right thing to do” is not enough.
The second point is that structural issues do not make innovations impossible, just more difficult. Bureaucratic politics are not completely negative — the fact that policies require buy-in from the relevant stakeholders makes them more legitimate, their creation more democratic, and hopefully lead them to be more effectively executed. Furthermore, their ability to adapt is rare but underrated: both the National Security Council and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff were both created in response to World War II and the Cold War. The National Security Council — now with a staff over just over one hundred — has become, for better or worse, the primary foreign policy agency in the United States, and its role can swing from one extreme to the other depending on the administration or the national security advisor. The Policy Planning Staff has shifted from tasks of interpreting Cold War strategy to developing the Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review. In other words, adaptation is possible but slow.
Bureaucratic politics is complicated, like the car engine in the original analogy, and its complexity means it gets left out of too many foreign policy analyses. This does not mean that it is the only relevant factor in policymaking — a car engine is useless if the driver has to map to guide the car — but better thinking about bureaucratic politics would produce analyses and critiques that are more realistic, more practical, and more likely to make an impact.
Paul Nadeau is editor-in-chief of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs which is the flagship academic journal of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He will graduate from the Fletcher School in May 2012 with a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) degree focusing in U.S. foreign policy.
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The Bureaucracy Is Still Doing Its Thing
April 26, 2012
The problems with American foreign policy are as much structural and organizational as they are conceptual. It is easy to focus on the conceptual issues because they are the most overt, the easiest to understand, and the product of the political and policy debates that dominate the news. In contrast, structural and organizational issues are obscure, slow moving, and the usually the product of stagnation rather than dynamism. We often do not realize that there is an issue with the structure until we find out that it is broken, even if it was deteriorating before. It would be like driving a car with the passengers fighting over the map and the directions but only waiting until the car broke down until they realized that there was a problem with the engine.
Unfortunately, like the car that breaks down, structural reform occurs either in response to an unequivocal failure (the War Powers Resolution or Goldwater-Nichols) or in response to an undeniable threat (the National Security Act of 1947 or the Department of Homeland Security). The shortcoming with waiting until either event is that it ignores the problems that are always there but wait for a crisis to reveal themselves. Robert Komer, who was a critical figure in the White House during the Vietnam War, articulated these issues better than almost anyone in his study, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam, prepared for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), outlined his understanding of the structural problems that complicated the American war effort. His primary argument is that though the American government perceived the difficulties in Vietnam more than it got credit for, it failed to adapt its conventional approach to meet an unconventional adversary because the bureaucratic institutions responsible for carrying out American policy “tended to play out their existing institutional repertoires,” becoming ossified in their established roles and unwilling or cripplingly slow to adapt when circumstances required it even if there was broad consensus that adaptation was required.
His thesis that policymakers identified the problems but the bureaucracy was incapable of executing changes is an idea that needs more attention than as a reference from an obscure report from the 1960s. The recent experience in Afghanistan is full of examples where the intentions were correct (or less wrong than they were criticized for) but the execution is where realities of budgeting and resources is where things start to go wrong. American attempts at post-war reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hindered by the situation that the Defense Department and military are inexperienced and uncomfortable with civilian reconstruction duties, while the State Department is underequipped to handle such duties on its own. Each department agrees that the situation is untenable — the dissonance is in the implementation.
The problem with fixing the bureaucracy is that structural problems are often the most difficult to solve and require buy-in from the President, relevant agencies, frequently Congress, and sometimes outside constituencies like NGOs or other interest groups. Any process of bureaucratic reform is slow (often by intention), incremental, and requires a strong understanding of organizational minutiae. Patience is even more fundamental, not to mention a firm grip on reality as well as the understanding that just because a process or system appears to be broken does not mean that it can be fixed or that everyone agrees that it is broken. It should be remembered that someone, somewhere benefits from the status quo if for no other reason than that change would be too difficult and unsettling.
The first point is not so much to fix bureaucracies but to recalibrate conceptualizations of foreign policy to acknowledge the fact that intentions are easy but execution is hard. Policy is almost more about operationalization of ideas than the ideas themselves. Nothing can happen without buy-in from the relevant agencies, and no strategy can survive intact the first discussion on execution since the stakeholders begin their input on what is viable, risky, impossible, and preferable. This means that foreign policy analysis and recommendations need to consider the fact that bureaucratic machinery narrows the number of policy responses that are available and that failing policies may not be recognized as such and may not be corrected without a large effort. More succinctly, suggesting policies because they are “the right thing to do” is not enough.
The second point is that structural issues do not make innovations impossible, just more difficult. Bureaucratic politics are not completely negative — the fact that policies require buy-in from the relevant stakeholders makes them more legitimate, their creation more democratic, and hopefully lead them to be more effectively executed. Furthermore, their ability to adapt is rare but underrated: both the National Security Council and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff were both created in response to World War II and the Cold War. The National Security Council — now with a staff over just over one hundred — has become, for better or worse, the primary foreign policy agency in the United States, and its role can swing from one extreme to the other depending on the administration or the national security advisor. The Policy Planning Staff has shifted from tasks of interpreting Cold War strategy to developing the Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review. In other words, adaptation is possible but slow.
Bureaucratic politics is complicated, like the car engine in the original analogy, and its complexity means it gets left out of too many foreign policy analyses. This does not mean that it is the only relevant factor in policymaking — a car engine is useless if the driver has to map to guide the car — but better thinking about bureaucratic politics would produce analyses and critiques that are more realistic, more practical, and more likely to make an impact.
Paul Nadeau is editor-in-chief of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs which is the flagship academic journal of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He will graduate from the Fletcher School in May 2012 with a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) degree focusing in U.S. foreign policy.
