FLAWED BY DESIGN: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC.

FLAWED BY DESIGN: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC 

by Amy Zegart Stanford University Press, $45.00

ON MARCH 24 OF THIS YEAR, one day into the NATO bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, Bill Clinton announced to the nation that he had ruled out one possibility: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo," he said.

That vow was at least in part the consequence of assurances from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who believed Milosevic would cave in quickly once air strikes began. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary William Cohen and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also opposed an invasion. But as the campaign wore on with no end in sight, pressure began to build on the president to authorize the use of ground forces. Soon the consensus among the president's advisers broke down. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger seized control of the inner war council from Albright, convening a meeting with foreign-policy experts critical of the administration, signaling to them that the President was prepared to shift his position. On June 2, Berger and members of the National Security Council met to discuss ground-invasion options. The next day, Clinton was to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presumably to exact their consent to send in troops, but by then Milosevic had signed an agreement to leave Kosovo. "The president ... was prepared to send ground forces into Kosovo to assure a NATO victory," one former NSC official told The New York Times. "But why did he and his advisers arrive at this conclusion so late in the war?"

The answer can be found, in part, in Amy Zegart's incisive and revealing new book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC. Though a case can be made that Clintons vacillation on ground troops had a lot to do with his own uncertainty about how to execute a war, Clinton also had to contend with institutional defects which have frustrated every U.S. president since Harry Truman. Though most citizens (and theorists) assume that decisions of foreign policy are made with only the national interest in mind, Zegart argues that is often not the case: While the modern president is the supreme steward of foreign policy, he still receives advice from a multitude of bureaucracies, each behaving according to its self-interest. Indeed, such self-interest is woven into the very design of the NSC, JCS, and CIA. "In an absolute sense, American national security agencies are not created to serve American interests. They do not do their jobs as well as they should, or at least as well as they could."

Zegart, an assistant professor of public policy at UCLA who has worked on the NSC staff, is particularly thorough in describing the bureaucratic horse-wading that preceded the drafting of 1947's National Security Act, which created the NSC, JCS and CIA. Truman's primary priority was to unify the armed forces and create a new secretary of defense who could attend to the hard-business issues of military strategy, supply, and operations. The War Department drafted a proposal advocating a single, powerful military commander with jurisdiction over all armed forces and "decisive influence within the JCS," and a robust, centralized intelligence-gathering body. But the final products of the National Security Act included neither idea.

Zegart identifies the chief culprit as the United States Navy, which following World War II was the military's preeminent service and had "much to lose and little to gain by changing the existing ... system" Vigorous lobbying by Navy Secretary James Forrestal resulted in the erection of a system that featured, at the time, a largely powerless Joint Chiefs of Staff and a similarly weak Central Intelligence Agency. To cement its power, the Navy also proposed the creation of a National Security Council that would bring together the country's highest-ranking national security officials, forming an independent foreign policy-making body through which the Navy could retain leverage upon presidential decisions.

But the NSC that emerged, after months of wrangling between the White House and the Navy, would serve different ends. The NSC, Zegart writes, was given no formal statutory control over foreign policy and its function was left vague enough that Truman quickly made sure everyone knew the NSC was his council, there to serve only his policy objectives. Future presidents followed the same line: Eisenhower elevated the influence of the NSC staff, whose loyalties were almost exclusively with the president, over that of the actual council. Kennedy, too, expanded the role of the national security adviser, appointed McGeorge Bundy to the position and turned the NSC staff into "a truly presidential foreign policy staff," Both Nixon and Carter followed Kennedy's lead, appointing esteemed foreign-policy intellectuals (Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski) as national security adviser.

The evolution of the modern NSC into the principal tool of presidential foreign policy-making has also attenuated of the clout of Cabinet departments. Reciting the list of largely enfeebled Secretaries of State since 1961 -- Dean Rusk, William Rogers, Warren Christopher -- Zegart concludes, "It is the president and his national security advisor, not the secretary of state, who serve as the principal architects of U.S. foreign policy?" Zegart, that is a salutary development -- the president is the only actor likely to pursue the national interest over his own. (Few members of Congress take much interest in foreign policy, knowing re-election rarely depends on the positions they strike on world affairs.)

All post-war presidents have invested considerable power in the NSC reflecting the fact that the other instruments of foreign policy-making are institutionally designed to work at cross-purposes to the national interest. Zegart reserves her harshest judgments for the design of the JCS and the CIA. The JCS that came out of the National Security Act was "incapable of offering a comprehensive military point of view" to the president; as a result, presidents often turned to civilian defense officials for basic battlefield advice. The CIA, meanwhile, was created without the authority to coordinate "intelligence from the rest of the community," which included the armed forces and the Justice Department.

The costs have been considerable. The JCS' lack of coordination and muddled chain of command, Zegart writes, was a direct cause of the disastrous effort to rescue American hostages in Iran and cost the lives of 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983. It was only after, as Zegart writes, "the political stars aligned," and the Goldwater-Nicholson Act of 1986 was passed that the JCS evolved into anything other than an ineffective and ultimately dangerous forum for interservice rivalry. Meanwhile, the CIAs the institutional weakness produced major intelligence lapses which contributed to the outbreak of the Korean War and the Bay of Pigs disaster. Even apparent successes, such as Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983, suffered from the lack of systematic coordination that was inherent in the design of national security agencies. "Ill-suited agencies may still end up producing positive outcomes," Zegart writes, "but they exact a high price in the process."

Zegart intends Flawed by Design to be an academic riposte to the prevailing realist theory of international relations, which assumes that in global politics, states act purely according to their interests; to the realist, the bureaucratic organization of a government has no discernable effect on the foreign policy it pursues. By convincingly arguing that U.S. interests have been compromised -- at least in some instances -- by the institutional design of national security agencies, Zegart's book, in my estimation, succeeds in puncturing some of realism's theoretical supremacy. But perhaps that judgment should be left for the theorists. What the casual reader takes away from Zegart's book is a deeper sense of appreciation -- and even awe -- for the enormous responsibilities placed on the presidency to shape the course of U.S. foreign policy.

Buffeted by advice and suggestions from all sides and hampered by the inefficiency and self-interest of bureaucracies, a president ultimately stands alone in making decisions of paramount importance. That the results have largely turned out so well should not be cause for complacency. As a new presidential campaign kicks off, the importance of presidential decision making should be a useful reminder of the gravity of the nation's highest office, and an argument against those candidates who might think that foreign policy is not worth serious attention, that the tough decisions can simply be left to well-informed advisers.

ROMESH RATNESAR is a staff writer at Time.