[House Hearing, 114 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
REFORMING THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: EFFICIENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 8, 2016
__________
Serial No. 114-224
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida BRAD SHERMAN, California
DANA ROHRABACHER, California GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey
JOE WILSON, South Carolina GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia
MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida
TED POE, Texas BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
MATT SALMON, Arizona KAREN BASS, California
DARRELL E. ISSA, California WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts
TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island
JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
MO BROOKS, Alabama AMI BERA, California
PAUL COOK, California ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, California
RANDY K. WEBER SR., Texas GRACE MENG, New York
SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania LOIS FRANKEL, Florida
RON DeSANTIS, Florida TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii
MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas
TED S. YOHO, Florida ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois
CURT CLAWSON, Florida BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania
SCOTT DesJARLAIS, Tennessee
REID J. RIBBLE, Wisconsin
DAVID A. TROTT, Michigan
LEE M. ZELDIN, New York
DANIEL DONOVAN, New York
Amy Porter, Chief of Staff Thomas Sheehy, Staff Director
Jason Steinbaum, Democratic Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
WITNESSES
The Honorable David C. Miller, Jr., Non-Resident Senior Fellow,
The Atlantic Council (former Special Assistant to the
President, National Security Council).......................... 4
The Honorable Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr., Chairman of the Board,
The Stimson Center (former Assistant Secretary for Political
Military Affairs, U.S. Department of State).................... 12
The Honorable Derek Chollet, Counselor and Senior Advisor for
Security and Defense Policy, The German Marshall Fund of the
United States (former Assistant Secretary for International
Security Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense).................. 18
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
The Honorable David C. Miller, Jr.: Prepared statement........... 7
The Honorable Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr.: Prepared statement..... 14
The Honorable Derek Chollet: Prepared statement.................. 20
APPENDIX
Hearing notice................................................... 50
Hearing minutes.................................................. 51
The Honorable Gerald E. Connolly, a Representative in Congress
from the Commonwealth of Virginia: Prepared statement.......... 53
The Honorable David C. Miller, Jr.: Material submitted for the
record......................................................... 55
The Honorable Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr.: Material submitted for
the record..................................................... 63
REFORMING THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: EFFICIENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2016
House of Representatives,
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:00 a.m., in
room 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edward Royce
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Chairman Royce. If we could ask all the members to take
their seat and the audience as well, this hearing Reforming the
National Security Council: Efficiency and Accountability, will
come to order.
In recent years, there has been increasing bipartisan
concern over the size and the role of the President's National
Security Council. In too many cases, its traditional role of
``honest broker'' has evolved to a policy-making role. It has
even undertaken secret diplomatic negotiations and that has
been done outside of Congress' view.
Indeed, one observer recently wrote, ``The national
security advisor and his or her staff remain among the most
influential entities in the Federal bureaucracy that are not
subject to direct congressional oversight.'' This has proven to
be a problem for this committee.
While concerns about the NSC aren't new, they have reached
new heights, leading to current proposals before Congress to
statutorily restrict the size of the NSC staff. This is a staff
that has increased from 100 persons at the start of President
George Bush's presidency to reportedly over 400 people today on
the NSC staff. Such a large staff sends the message that the
President intends to run foreign policy and military operations
out of the White House to the exclusion of the cabinet.
It also makes for more meddlers. Indeed, former Defense
Secretary Gates has complained that the ``micromanagement'' of
the Obama White House ``drove me crazy.'' A smaller staff would
more likely empower cabinet secretaries to do what they have
been selected and confirmed by the Senate to do and that is to
run their departments.
More staff means more meetings and often paralysis.
According to a report in the Washington Post last year, on some
issues, NSC meetings of the cabinet deputies ``grew so
repetitive'' that ``deputies stopped coming, sending assistant
secretaries and below in their stead.'' How many hearings has
the committee held on Ukraine at which State Department
officials have told us that the White House is still debating
Kiev's request for heavy defensive weapons?
Also of concern, the profile of an NSC staffer has changed
from a seasoned professional doing a stint at the White House
as the capstone of their career, to that of junior
professionals just off the campaign trail. As one interviewed
for the Atlantic Council's Study we will hear about today said,
``This is no place for on-the-job training of bright, young,
but inexperienced people.'' Especially at the expense of the
State Department.
Take the President's move to normalize relations with Cuba,
secretly run out of the White House by two NSC staffers.
Secretary of State Kerry was not informed of these negotiations
until the discussions were well underway, and State Department
officials in charge of the region found out only as the
negotiations were all but done.
Why do we care? When the committee requested that these NSC
staffers testify, we were told no and given a separation of
powers excuse. But our role and the responsibility is to
conduct oversight of U.S. relations with foreign nations. And
if the committee can't hear directly from those most involved
in these negotiations, our role and influence--and that of the
American people we represent--is significantly minimalized.
This morning, we will hear from several witnesses who have
direct experience with the growing size and role of the
President's NSC. While today's focus is about process, process
is important to good policy. And we hope that our discussion
will lead to recommendations for the next administration to
improve the efficiency of this important body.
And I now turn to the ranking member for any opening
remarks from Mr. Eliot Engel of New York.
Mr. Engel. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for calling
this hearing. Ambassador Miller, Ambassador Bloomfield, Mr.
Chollet, welcome to the Foreign Affairs Committee. We are
grateful for your time and your expertise.
It has been nearly 70 years since the National Security Act
created the National Security Council. Over that time, the
council has proved to be a flexible and dynamic body. Every
President has shaped the NSC staff in a way that has worked
best for his purposes.
Congress intended for the NSC staff to serve as the
President's advisory and interagency coordinated body. As the
National Security Act put it, to ``advise, coordinate, access
and praise'' policymakers relating to national security.
Obviously, over that time, national security politics and
concerns has changed, as the world has changed and the NSC has
had to keep pace. As we think about how the NSC might look
under future administrations, we should keep in mind lessons
learned in the NSC's first 70 years.
First, a selection of a National Security Advisor is one of
the most critical appointments the President will make. This
person sets the tone for the rest of the NSC and the National
Security Agencies. The President should have full faith with
the National Security Advisor as a trusted confident, a role
that Congress has supported.
Secondly, the President's policy staff should be national
security experts with experience managing interagency
processes. Even though many of them are detailed from other
parts of the government, their loyalty should be to our
national security and not to any one agency or service.
And thirdly, while the NSC staff should certainly be in the
business of advising the President on policy and ensuring the
agencies are carrying out that policy, the NSC staff itself
should not be carrying out the policy. That responsibility
rests with the cabinet agencies with Congress' oversight.
It is essential to our discussion today how do we ensure
that the execution of foreign policy stays where it belongs.
One common explanation is that the NSC mission creep results
from the NSC staff growing too large and the easy solution is
to limit the size of the staff. I am sympathetic to that
feeling because we don't want it to be too large and we don't
want it to be usurping things that the State Department or the
Agency should do. But it is not just that. That, in itself, in
my opinion, is too simplistic. It fails to take into account
why the staff is growing and ignores the bureaucratic demands
placed in the NSC.
The real questions we should be asking are about the
appropriate role of the NSC and how it is managed, issues that
are important, regardless of the size of the staff. I do want
to say that I am concerned about the size of the staff but I
think these other things are at least equal of concern as well.
In a certain way, the NSC was set up as a clearing house.
Seventy years ago, the cabinet agencies had relatively clear-
cut missions with a minimal amount of overlap. When matters
emerged that required cross-agency collaboration or tradeoffs,
the question went up the food chain to the NSC and the NSC
coordinated among agencies.
Today, we face so many more issues that are crosscutting
and overlapping and they often involve a whole host of cabinet
agencies. Just consider the Zika virus. State Department, HHS,
and the Agriculture Department all have roles to play in
addressing that problem but our civilian agencies are still
essentially a stovepipe bureaucracy. So, when questions emerge
about one of the many complex national security issues we face,
those questions still get passed up to the NSC, often leaving
policy-making decisions in the White House's hands. Over time,
this pattern has forced the staff to grow as well. Past
attempts to create so-called tsars to oversee overlapping
issues have proved to be a Band-Aid at best, and at worst,
totally ineffective. So, how do we empower our agencies to deal
with a modern set of challenges without having their first
phone call be to the White House? How do we modernize our
agencies and, we think, decades-old bureaucratic structures
ill-suited to the new challenges we face?
We know this sort of reform is possible. We saw it succeed
decades ago when the Goldwater-Nichols Act forced our military
services to work together in joint commands. That law promoted
collaboration and a more unified approach to military concerns.
Following the same approach, we need to make it easier for the
talented men and women in our cabinet agencies to collaborate
and arrive at policy consensus. That way, NSC staff could get
back to their original mission, advising the President on
policy, seeing that policy carried out, and facilitating
coordination among agencies only in those instances when it is
absolutely necessary.
Yet, we simply cannot expect our agencies to shake off
decades-old procedures and habits if Congress isn't providing
them with the tools and resources they need to become
effective, modern organizations. It has been 15 years since
Congress sent a State Department authorization to the
President. I want to repeat that, 15 years since Congress sent
a State Department authorization to the President. I don't
think anyone on this committee, on both sides of the aisle, is
happy about that. This committee recently marked up such
legislation. It is sitting on the launch pad, waiting for House
leadership to say go. I think the problem that we are
discussing today is one more reason that the House needs to
finish its work on the bill and I would encourage all the other
National Security Committees to look at what needs to be done
to bring their agencies into the 21st century.
To our witnesses: I am curious to hear your views on the
structure of the NSC and how we can make our agencies more
effective and collaborative when it comes to policymaking.
Again, we are grateful for your time.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Chairman Royce. Thank you, Mr. Engel. So, this morning we
are pleased to be joined by a distinguished panel. We have
Ambassador David Miller. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at
the Atlantic Council. Previously, Ambassador Miller served as
the Special Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs at the National Security Council staff. Additionally,
he served as the United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe and to
Tanzania.
The Honorable Lincoln Bloomfield. Ambassador Bloomfield is
chairman of the board of the Stimson Center and previously he
held a series of positions in the Departments of State and
Defense, including serving as the Assistant Secretary of State
for Political Military Affairs.
And we have the Honorable Derek Chollet. He is Counselor
and Senior Advisor for Security and Defense Policy at the
German Marshall Fund of the United States and previously he
served as the Assistant Secretary for International Security
Affairs at the Department of Defense.
Without objection, the witnesses' full prepared statements
will be made part of the record and members will have 5
calendar days to submit any statements or questions or any
extraneous material for the record.
So, Ambassador Miller, if you could please summarize your
remarks, we will begin with you.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE DAVID C. MILLER, JR., NON-RESIDENT
SENIOR FELLOW, THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL (FORMER SPECIAL ASSISTANT
TO THE PRESIDENT, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL)
Ambassador Miller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is nice to
see you again.
Chairman Royce. Good to see you back.
Ambassador Miller. We spent many interesting hearings on
Africa, so it is great to be back.
Ranking Member Engel, thank you and all the members of the
committee. I must say I am exceptionally pleased to see this
many members of your body interested in the management of the
NSC. It is an immensely serious topic. It doesn't get a lot of
public discussion.
Chairman Royce. I am going to ask you, though, Ambassador,
to move your microphone right there.
Ambassador Miller. Does that work? Good. It is just a lack
of practice. I will get it.
I am here today to present the Atlantic Council report,
which I think you all have seen a copy of. It is named ``A
Foundational Proposal for the Next Administration.'' It was
drafted over a couple of years by Ambassadors Tom Pickering and
Chet Crocker, myself, and Dan Levin. I suspect you know most of
them and have talked with them before.
The report is meant to address two issues, that is, what
did we learn over the 60 or some interviews we conducted over 2
years. The interviews were conducted by all of us in-person. We
felt that the subjects that were being discussed were sensitive
enough that when you interviewed former cabinet officers or
national security advisors that those doing the interviewing
had to have had similar jobs, sat in the same meetings, and
been subject to the same pressures.
I must say that the opening comments were excellent and, in
many ways, speak to our observations but let me offer a few
comments on the spirit of our report.
We spent so much time on the NSC because if it doesn't
work, it is like congestive heart failure. If the NSC is not
working well, the entire executive branch foreign policy and
military structure slows down and is not effectively used.
And there is another point that I would like to make at the
outset and I hope will make throughout the presentation and
that is, this is a non-partisan report. We looked at
administrations going back for some period of time. General
Scowcroft's thesis at West Point was on the Eisenhower NSC. So,
we go back a good ways.
I am fond of describing the document as an owner's manual
for the NSC. It tells you what has worked in the past, what has
not worked, and it is policy neutral, if you will. It is meant
to say if you want to run an NSC in a manner that has been
effective in the past, take a look at this document. Learning
how to run the NSC is something that we may have lost track of.
The recommendations are quite simple and they are
coincident with what you two have mentioned in your opening
comments. The NSC needs to get back to its original mission of
coordinating policies for the President and then ensuring that
those policies are faithfully executed. The role of the
National Security Advisor is absolutely critical. It is
clearly, I believe, the most important Presidential appointment
not subject to Senate confirmation.
The size of the NSC staff has, as we have all observed,
grown quite large. There are a variety of reasons for that but
it is much larger than it has been historically.
The NSC has struggled, over time, with creating a strategic
planning staff that has never worked too well and there are
some issues about how to coordinate executive branch legal
advice better.
In the few moments I have left, the chairman had a question
about why this happened. I think to a certain degree, the most
important factor is inertia. It has just grown. It has not been
successfully checked by the Congress or by cabinet members or
agency heads. There is another observation that the NSC has
become in-box driven, that there are so many issues in the
world that surely, the President must have a position on all of
them. The 24-hour news cycle I think is another contributing
factor. We have talked to senior NSC officials who said the
ability to delegate key Presidential positions to departments
and agencies to make public statements has not worked
exceptionally well.
The State Department, where I enjoyed working and am proud
to have worked with the foreign service, is still seen as being
too slow, too bureaucratic and we all need to address that. The
multi-disciplined threat that you have mentioned is another
issue where the NSC has stepped in and added personnel to deal
with that. And finally, there is an issue that I will touch on
at the end and that is there seems to have developed a serious
split in this town between politically loyal foreign policy
professionals and professionals that work for the departments
and agencies. I think we need to address that.
Finally, and I thought your comments about the lack of an
authorization bill for the State Department were bang on. There
is little reward in this town for building institutional
capability in the executive branch. That is in some distinction
from the private sector, where the building of institutional
capability is seen as a key responsibility for a CEO.
I am over my time but I have one less thing I would like to
say. I have been out of town for a little bit and when I came
back and got involved in writing this, my friends said to me,
David, you have been gone too long. I am in San Antonio. And
the trust that was in this town when I was younger, which was
some time ago, seems to have gone. And I hope this hearing is
part of a step to begin to develop a more civil dialogue among
those of us who may see issues differently but we all love the
country.
That is it.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Miller follows:]
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Chairman Royce. Ambassador Miller, that is exactly the tone
we want to set and we appreciate you being the lead witness
here.
Ambassador Bloomfield.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE LINCOLN P. BLOOMFIELD, JR., CHAIRMAN
OF THE BOARD, THE STIMSON CENTER (FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY
FOR POLITICAL MILITARY AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE)
Ambassador Bloomfield. Thank you, Chairman Royce, Ranking
Member Engel. Thank you, members of the committee, for the
honor of testifying before you today. I would like to second
the remarks that both of you made. And it is clear that the
issues that are covered in my prepared testimony are the same
ones that you have already articulated.
I really want to make four brief points from the standpoint
of someone who does not have the most recent experience and has
not served on the NSC but, in the last 35 years, I have been in
the interagency in five different administrations. So, I am
going to take a broader view.
I will play the resident optimist. I think everyone who is
here in this room today is here because they believe that it
can be fixed and so do I.
The first point starts with the legal mandate for the NSC
and the privileges that the NSC enjoys. So long as the NSC
staff and the national security advisor are coordinating the
work of the other national security agencies of government and
following the legal mandate to make the tools of government
more integrated and more effective, military and non-military,
then they should continue to enjoy the prerogative of being the
President's staff and, therefore, not being Senate-confirmed,
not being subject to testimony, not having their paperwork
subject to the same oversight and public oversight that the
line agencies of government have.
That said, there are lines that they can cross, and have in
the past, where these privileges come into question. One of the
two sources that I consulted, and I applaud the effort of the
Atlantic Council and its co-chairs, both of whom I greatly
respect, but I have in my hand the so-called Tower Commission
Report. And people of a certain age will remember this big blue
book that I am holding. This was one of the eight
investigations on the Iran-Contra Affair. This was done by
three very respected statesmen, Senator John Tower, Senator
Edmund Muskie, and Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, who had
previously served as President Ford's National Security
Advisor. They found that the NSC Advisor and staff had
conducted a covert operation in transferring funds to the
Nicaraguan contras. And without re-litigating the merits of the
case, they issued a warning to future Presidents, which I will
read to you. They are warned, and members of the National
Security Council and National Security Advisors, ``of the
potential pitfalls they face, even when they are operating with
what they consider the best of motives.''
So, I think that there is a cautionary note. There may be
issues where the NSC is becoming operational and setting
policy, rather than coordinating it. And that is, historically
speaking, a problem.
The second source and the third point I want to make has to
do with the evolution of the NSC and, with the privilege of the
committee, I would like to hold up a book by my late father,
MIT Professor of Political Science Lincoln Bloomfield, who
served on the NSC under his colleague, Zbigniew Brezezinski,
for 1 year under the Carter administration and wrote in 1982
``The Foreign Policy Process: A Modern Primer,'' in which he
reviewed 40 years of National Security Councils.
Among the insights gained here were that technology moves
only in one direction. Under the Kennedy administration, the
White House Communications Agency installed equipment so that
the White House could see the same diplomatic dispatches, the
same military dispatches, the same intelligence reports as the
other agencies, which made them more powerful and brought them
into the conversation.
Under the Nixon administration, they had secure facsimiles.
So, now, the White House could send agendas and papers for
discussion in the situation room. And Dr. Kissinger famously
used this to great effect, and was actually dual-hatted as
Secretary of State and NSC Advisor for 2 years.
And so, in some ways, you can't turn the clock back to the
1970s or '80s, or the 1950s, and we have to recognize this.
But before we conclude, and this is my final point, that
the NSC needs to be--that there is a right size for the NSC and
that the President's prerogative should be, in some way,
changed or interfered with by the Congress. I think it is
really important to recognize that the NSC is trying to chase a
bureaucracy in Washington that is much bigger than it was 20 or
30 years ago. There are so many more undersecretaries and
assistant secretaries and issue-specific offices that they are
asked to coordinate that you could understand why the size has
gotten larger. And I think this leads to, perhaps, a broader
conversation on how to right-size the entire national security
process.
I published last Friday, in Foreign Policy, an article that
takes a slightly larger view of the national security
management challenge and I commend it to the members, I think
copies have been made available, and with the chairman's
permission and the ranking member, I would hope perhaps it
could be brought into the official record or the hearing.
Chairman Royce. Without objection.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Thank you, sir.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Bloomfield follows:]
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Chairman Royce. Mr. Chollet.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE DEREK CHOLLET, COUNSELOR AND SENIOR
ADVISOR FOR SECURITY AND DEFENSE POLICY, THE GERMAN MARSHALL
FUND OF THE UNITED STATES (FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)
Mr. Chollet. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Engel, members of
the committee, it is an honor to appear before you again and I
will briefly summarize my longer statement for the record.
I approach this important topic from a unique perspective.
I served on President-elect Obama's NSC Transition Team 8 years
ago and then I went on to serve for 6 years in the Obama
administration at the State Department, at the Pentagon, and at
the National Security Council staff at the White House. So,
therefore, I follow the assessment of this administration's NSC
system with great interest, since I both experienced and am
partly responsible for many of the concerns that have been
raised.
Consider the three most common concerns expressed about the
current NSC. First, that it is too big; second, that it is too
operational; and third, that it has a proclivity for too much
micromanagement and too little strategic thinking. And let me
take each in turn.
First, most experts and former officials believe that the
NSC is too big. We certainly thought so during the 2008
transition from President Bush to President Obama, as does the
current NSC leadership today. And yet the trend, I think, is
headed in the right direction. Today's NSC policy and
leadership staff consists of fewer than 200 people. And my
understanding is that with the current downsizing underway, and
there has been about a 15-percent cut in NSC staff since
January 2015, the NSC staff size that Obama will leave next
year will be roughly the same as what he inherited from
President Bush in 2009.
And it is important to consider these numbers in context.
Some of the widely cited higher numbers of the Obama NSC staff
size reflect the back office functions like those staffing the
White House situation room, the records management personnel,
as well as the integration of the Homeland Security Council in
2009. And moreover, even despite its growth, the current NSC
remains comparatively small. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is over
seven times larger. The State Department's Office of the
Secretary is nearly twice the size of the NSC staff, as is the
staff of the Congressional Research Service. So in many ways,
the NSC's evolution reflects global complexity and how much the
world and our Government has changed.
For example, the traditional regional policy offices, Latin
America, Asia, Europe, et cetera, have looked similar in both
size and function during the past several decades, yet there
are now new policy dimensions the NSC must cover such as
cybersecurity, climate change, WMD proliferation, biosecurity
and global health, global economics, counterterrorism. Few of
these issues were prominent a quarter century ago and none of
them reside in a single agency, which is why close coordination
is so important.
Because of this complexity and the importance for the
President to maintain flexibility in how she or he can respond
to events, I believe it is a mistake to impose arbitrary caps
on the NSC staff size, nor do I believe it wise to make the
position of National Security Advisor require Senate
confirmation. And here, I can do no better than echo the 1987
Tower Commission Report, which studied this issue carefully and
in its warning that doing so, making the NSC Advisor Senate-
confirmed would undermine the Presidential advisory role the
National Security Advisor must play and only create more
bureaucratic confusion and tension than it would resolve.
Now, concerns about the NSC size relate directly to a
second enduring critique that the NSC is too operational. Now,
agencies must be given the responsibility and be held
accountable for doing their jobs. And in my experience, that is
what Presidents and members of the NSC staff wanted. But at the
same time, agencies must operate within the policy parameters
set by the President. Now, sometimes, when the White House
tried to enforce regular order and place the agencies in charge
of a policy, then it was accused of taking its eye off the
ball. And where you stand often depends on whether you agree
with the policy direction. For example, Obama's NSC has held
tight control over U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan
but it is important to remember that the Bush White House
conducted the same intense oversight when managing the surge in
Iraq from the West Wing in 2007 and 2008. Moreover, some policy
issues lend themselves to a strong White House lead and many of
those delicate tasks require such agility that they are best
managed from a tight circle within the White House.
Yet, these must be the exception, rather than the rule,
which brings us to the third common critique, that by
micromanaging, the NSC is not doing enough strategy.
I used to run the strategy office at the NSC. So, I can
fully appreciate how difficult this task can be. And in today's
tumultuous policy environment where our President is expected
to respond to almost everything instantly, it is very difficult
to keep the urgent from overwhelming the important. Crisis
management tends to dominate the NSC's operations. And although
during my time and since, the NSC staff worked very hard to
allow senior officials the opportunity to think about long-term
strategy and examine crosscutting issues, it has not nearly
been enough.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Engel, members of this
committee, the recent focus on the NSC's design and operation
has generated an important debate. I welcome congressional
attention to this issue. My hope is that by opening up this
conversation, we can make some necessary changes, empower
agencies to do their jobs, while ensuring that the President
gets the advice and support she or he requires to conduct a
strong, coordinated, and strategic national security policy
that serves the interest of the American people.
Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Chollet follows:]
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Chairman Royce. Thank you, Mr. Chollet. I think the
difficulty here, if we look at the drift, is if we look
Ambassador Miller's report, the report that we are discussing,
in that report there is a story of a four-star general
receiving a phone call with orders from a low-level NSC
staffer. So, the directive did not originate from the
President. It didn't originate from the Secretary of Defense.
It didn't originate from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It
originates from a rather low-level staffer.
Clearly, the goal here is to get back to a system on
foreign policy that works when different agencies and branches
play their proper role. What we have to figure out here is how
to get a situation where diplomats do the negotiating, where
commanders call in the air strikes, where Congress conducts
oversight and that is not happening under the current and past.
The way in which this has morphed over the years has led to
these problems that we are talking about today.
And so, I would just ask this question to the panel: What
State Department reforms are most necessary to facilitate the
evolution of power from the NSC back to the Department where
the expertise lies and where you don't end up with low-level
staff members making these kind of calls to four-star generals?
How do we get back to the system the way is intended to work
and in which it will function most effectively?
And Ambassador Bloomfield, maybe you will add to that
because you make the point that this has become a problem not
just at the NSC but also it is something that affects us,
Congress, and the administration. We have a situation where our
instinct is to appoint a special position on everything and so
you have all of the special envoys and all of the coordinators
adding to the complexity of a situation where the agency that
is supposed to be in charge of making the decision isn't doing
its role.
So, I will open that question to the panel.
Ambassador Bloomfield. If I may, Chairman Royce, I don't
believe that the people who strategized American policy during
the height of the Cold War, when we were 25 minutes from
extinction from Soviet nuclear weapons, were any less
intelligent than the people that we have in senior positions
today. In fact, I would argue that we have too many very
talented people trying to chase authority, funding, control
over policy, authorship of policy. And I have many friends on
the inside who have great difficulty getting a well-considered,
innovative idea all the way out of the building in the State
Department.
And so I think that consolidating offices, and this is
under both administrations, Republican and Democrat. I have
spent half my career outside the government. When I had been
appointed to come in, I asked the question how much sense does
this activity make? Is this something that we need to be doing,
that my people should be spending time on, or are we just
playing ping pong inside the bureaucracy and sending papers
back and forth?
So, I think there is a great deal of process that can be
consolidated. And what happens when you try to show how
important an issue is by putting a special office in charge is
that everything else becomes diluted. You dilute the currency
of high-ranking people so that, in the Congress, you have 40
plus assistant secretaries. I was very honored to be an
Assistant Secretary of State. If I were Secretary of State
today, I don't think I could name them all or recognize their
faces. These are Senate-confirmed----
Chairman Royce. Right. Well, there is another element of
this. And that is part of this goes to the experience or the
expertise of the staff. One of the questions in this study, the
explanation from another lower level staff member is you have a
hard time running the interagency process if you have never
held a senior position in one of the agencies. So, this is
another aspect of the problem, in terms of the expertise and
not consolidating this decisionmaking where it belongs.
Ambassador Bloomfield. If I may, at the high levels, the
under secretary level. There was one Under Secretary of State
under President Kennedy, that was the second-ranking person in
the department. The President would call the Under Secretary on
the telephone. There are six or seven today. The same in the
Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And I
think, by the way, the Office of the Joint Chiefs, the
Combatant Command Staffs, I was there when they started to put
joint JIACs together and was part of the approval process. They
are thick with all sorts of flavors of experts on their own
staffs. I think we need to downsize. And what happens is, you
have high officials who only have one-seventh of the picture.
How strategic of a view will an administration have if everyone
has just a sliver or a soda straw view of policy that they care
about? We need to start elevating people and giving them a
broad swath of policy authority so that they can think very
strategically and when the Zika virus becomes a problem, we can
put a task force together and have it expire once the problem
is under control.
Chairman Royce. Well, my time has expired, so I will go to
Mr. Engel. But it seems to me the NSC should return to its
original mission of managing the development of policy options
for the President of the United States. If that can be the end
game here, I think we can get back to its original function and
an effective function. Mr. Engel.
Mr. Engel. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to echo my
concern along with you, the two questions you asked about the
role of Congress. We are very anxious. Many of us feel that
more and more things are slipping away from what Congress is
supposed to do and we don't like it and don't think it is good
for the country. So, I am very concerned about it.
I believe the chairman also spoke about tsars. And I wanted
any of you who care to say what observation would any of you
make about the usefulness of these tsars, the proliferation of
special coordinators and special representatives that the State
Department, these were created to shepherd initiatives into
provide help with the coordination. And sometimes it has
actually been an impediment to coordination. So, from the
perspective of the NSC, do these types of structures help or
inhibit effective interagency coordination? Anyone who cares to
answer that?
And let me say, before you do, I want to thank all three of
you for excellent testimony. And Dr. Miller, I am glad that you
couldn't have put it better when you said that there is
difference of opinion way all over the country and I think that
is important.
The chairman and I have tried to conduct this committee as
the most bipartisan committee in the Congress because we
believe that foreign policy is bipartisan and differences need
to stop at the water's edge.
So, I just want to let you know that in the 4 years we have
been doing this, we have tried very hard. It doesn't mean we
agree all the time, but we have tried very hard to work
together. And my commendation to members, my colleagues on both
side of the aisle, who have worked very hard, even when we have
a disagreement, we have a good discourse and we try to find
common ground.
So, if anybody wants to answer that tsars question, I would
appreciate it. Ambassador Miller.
Ambassador Miller. I ended up----
Mr. Engel. If you could, pull the microphone toward you.
Ambassador Miller. I will get this. I ended up supporting
one of our first tsars, when Bill Bennett was given the drug
war. And so I have spent a good deal of time figuring out what
support from the White House is appropriate and where it is
damaging.
We, I think, have gotten to rely too much on Band-Aids and
we appoint tsars, or special envoys, or administrators, when
they are duplicative of functions that already exist but don't
seem to be moving as fast as the White House would like or
performing exactly what the White House wants.
So, my sense is that you need task forces. You need special
envoys on occasion but your first examination ought to be is
there an assistant secretary that already has this
responsibility? Is there a competent Ambassador on-site?
Because when you appoint a person with duplicative authority,
it can really set things back. It is just confusing.
That said, there is going to be a need for these, as we go
forward, but they ought to be led by the departments and
agencies that have the lead stake in the issue and supported by
the NSC.
Mr. Engel. Thank you. Mr. Chollet, you had your hand up. I
don't know----
Mr. Chollet. Yes, well I very much want to echo what the
Ambassador has said. Tsars have been, in the past, a good thing
but there is also too much of a good thing. And the tsars that
I, both at the State Department or at the White House that I
worked closely with during my time in government, whether going
back to the Clinton administration, the tsar on the Balkans, or
during the Obama administration the SRAP structure on
Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department, were
successful, had some challenges, but were successful in trying
to bring about greater coordination both within the Department.
It is also within the broader interagency. But clearly, every
administration, I think, in the modern era has seen a
proliferation of these tsars. And when a new team comes in--we
certainly did this in 2008, I expect the next transition team
will do the same--is take a close look at these various
idiosyncratic bureaucratic structures that administrations
create, sometimes for personnel reasons, sometimes because an
issue becomes so important that they don't want it to overwhelm
the other senior officials who have the whole world to worry
about. But I think we have to be very mindful moving forward
that there can be too many of these and this will just create
Band-Aids that don't actually get at the core coordination
strategic problem that we are all interested in trying to
solve.
Mr. Engel. Ambassador Bloomfield.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Yes, if I may. My last position in
government was as a special envoy in 2008. I came back part-
time on an issue that the chairman knows about. I was to try to
travel the world and quietly remove shoulder-fired missiles
from circulation. And you had to be able to speak to heads of
government, chiefs of defense, because no second in a ranking
would ever give up a weapon, you have to go to the top. And so
I took my orders directly from Steve Hadley and Condoleezza
Rice and had very strong support from the NSC Counterterrorism
Team. My observation, though, and this is a little bit of dirty
laundry, is that there are lots of senior people walking the
halls of the State Department looking for a job that is at
their rank and that this is a way. They want these positions.
It is not clear to me they are all necessary.
What I would do, and this is probably a little bit out of
the ordinary but I have seen it in the past, is to identify
prominent Americans in the private sector and in Congress who
could be a well-received envoy to deliver a message to a head
of state, somebody of prominence. And I include members of the
House and Senate in that list on both sides of the aisle, which
would add credibility to the President or the Secretary of
State's message.
So, I hope we think about that and move in that direction.
Mr. Engel. Thank you. If the chairman will indulge me, I
have a quick question that I would like to ask you, all of you.
The current House language in the fiscal year 2017 NDAA
calls for Senate confirmation of a National Security Advisor if
the NSC staff exceeds 100 employees, including detailees. I
want to quote Stephen Hadley, who is former NSA to President
George W. Bush. He said, and I quote him, ``If a President
thought that what he or she shared with the National Security
Advisor could be compelled in public testimony, the President
would look elsewhere for a national security and foreign policy
confidant.'' That is a quote.
So, do you think that Senate confirmation, any of you, of
the National Security Advisor would inhibit this person from
serving the President and does it also raise questions about
the constitutional separation of powers?
Anyone care to try it?
Ambassador Miller. I suspect I speak for all of us but I
will start off. And that is I don't think advice and consent
for the President's personal staff makes sense.
That said, we are in a situation where the Congress needs
to play a larger role and have a larger discussion with the
President about how the NSC works and who is selected. Now,
that doesn't mean a vote but I surely wish that you all and the
Executive Office of the President have a more candid or active
discussion about who is there and who is serving.
Mr. Engel. Thank you.
Chairman Royce. If the gentleman would yield.
Mr. Engel. Yes, certainly.
Chairman Royce. From my standpoint, if you look carefully
at the language, the intent there seems to me, and it is not
our language, it is from the Armed Services Committee, but the
intent seems to be to control the size of the staffing and get
it back to the original numbers because confirmation isn't
required, as long as the executive branch concurs with evolving
back to the original size of the indices NSC staff.
So, I don't think the intent is to drive confirmation. I
think the intent is to try to exercise some kind of
congressional oversight or control over what has actually
happened in the agency. So, I would just throw that in for the
mix. I don't know how else to do that but this hearing is an
attempt.
Ambassador Miller?
Ambassador Miller. I think if you look at what we have
written, indeed, there is very strong support for limiting the
headcount at the NSC, as it is seen as the root cause of a
number of subsets of problems. But there is equally strong
opposition to the advice and consent. So, I think your
observation is right on.
Chairman Royce. Yes, I think it is a clumsy attempt to get
at your objective. So, our hope is to reach a bipartisan
consensus of a more effective way to get to that objective.
We go now to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.
Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you for this hearing. From the ransom payments in Iran, to the
alleged secret Iran deals, and humanitarian catastrophe that is
unfolding every day in Syria, the manipulations of intelligence
on ISIS, there are too many examples of how the White House has
manipulated information while keeping the Congress and, most
importantly, the American people in the dark.
And Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for bringing up Cuba in
your opening statement because that is a good example of what
was happening with the secretive nature. The White House
decided to keep not only Congress in the dark but also cut out
the State Department and others, even though the White House
was negotiating with the Cuban regime for more than a year.
Then Assistant Secretary Jacobson testified before our
committee in February 2015 that she found out about the
negotiations just weeks before the announcement. And when
former Deputy National Security Advisor and now Deputy
Secretary of State Tony Blinken testified at his confirmation
hearing in November 2014, he assured the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that any change in U.S. policy toward Cuba
would be done in full consultation with Congress. Well, that
turned out to be an utter falsehood, as less than a month later
with zero consultation with the Congress, the administration
announced what has proven to be a complete failure of a deal
with the Castro regime. And as we heard from Ambassador
Bloomfield, NSC staffers shouldn't conduct official actions,
which are supposed to be the responsibility of agencies that
are answerable to Congress, and then expect to be immune from
accountability.
So, Mr. Chollet, I have a series of questions. We won't
have time to answer them but maybe we can have a discussion
afterward.
Is it worrisome that NSC is not accountable to Congress or
that when Congress attempts to exercise our oversight authority
in the foreign policy realm, it cannot perform that function
because NSC officials do not testify before Congress? Also,
what steps can Congress make in order to make the NSC more
transparent?
There was a time when NSC staffers were trained on the
proper rules to delineate between the duties and roles of the
NSC and the duties and roles of the State Department or Defense
Department, making sure that they didn't overlap and, instead,
stayed focused on their responsibility in those lanes and left
the policymaking to the proper person. And I was wondering if
you received that kind of training when you were at the NSC and
do you have any idea if training programs of this type still
exist.
Also, in November of last year, when I traveled to
Afghanistan and our generals on the ground indicated that their
hands were tied when it came to operations, no doubt it was
because, I believe, NSC was overriding our leaders on the
field, and former Defense Secretaries Gates and Panetta both
have complained about NSC staff imposing themselves on their
jurisdiction. Based on your experience in both the NSC and
various government agencies, maybe you can help shed some light
on that.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Chollet. Thank you very much and I would be happy to
follow up with you as well, if I don't get fully to answer your
good questions. First, I will take it in reverse order.
On the tension between White House oversight, political
oversight, and what is going on in military operations, I
experienced that on both sides of the ball, right, at the NSC
staff but then also when I served at the Pentagon as an
Assistant Secretary.
And whereas there are examples, and I don't know exactly
when the example that the Ambassador's report cited about when
a junior staffer apparently called the Pentagon to ask for
something that was completely out of order, that is not the
regular order. That doesn't happen that often, at least in my
experience. And when it does happen, it should be stopped,
absolutely. The National Security Advisors I have worked for,
the Secretary of Defenses I have worked for would not tolerate
that.
That said, there is such a thing as Presidential control
over the use of military force. So, if the NSC staff, on behalf
of the President, is essentially ensuring that the agencies
follow the President's prerogative on how that force should be
used, what kind of targets we hit, what sort of operations we
conduct, it seems to me that that is something we would want.
I was struck in 2008 coming into the Obama administration
how intensively the Bush White House and the Iraq/Afghanistan
tsar and the directorate that was created to run the surge in
Iraq, in particular, how deeply involved in military
operational issues that that team was, much to the distress of
uniformed military and the Secretary of Defense at the time to
have a sitting three-star general working in the basement of
the West Wing, essentially running the surge in Iraq.
So, I think that should be the exception. It should not be
the rule, which then gets back to the opening question, which
was NSC staff, senior NSC officials engaging in direct foreign
engagements. I think there should be as little of that as
possible.
Throughout our history, we have seen National Security
Advisors take on important missions on behalf of the President
that are extremely sensitive and secretive. Henry Kissinger's
opening to China----
Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. Thank you. That is right.
Mr. Chollet [continuing]. Brzezinski's normalization of
China several years later. But then we have also as the Tower
Commission pointed out, very negative examples of that.
Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. Well, thank you.
Mr. Chollet. So, it should be the exception, not the rule.
Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman. I know I am out of time but thank you for this
hearing. Thank you, gentlemen.
Chairman Royce. Thank you. We will go to Mr. Brad Sherman
of California.
Mr. Sherman. Last century the high-water mark for the NSC
was Kissinger. Everything we complain about now was probably
more true then, in terms of the NSC.
As to this century, I have seen this committee and the
House of Representatives in general go from foreign policy
makers to foreign policy kibitzers that are at least allowed to
provide some oversight and some input to really an irrelevancy
because the most important people making and carrying out
foreign policy don't even come here and pretend to listen to
us.
Mr. Chairman, the Armed Services Committee passes an
authorization bill every year and nothing illustrates the
importance of that more than that the provision to limit the
size of the National Security Council is in their bill and will
be considered in their bill, whereas our bill for 15 years is
an exercise in--well, often isn't even written. It usually
isn't even considered by the House and hasn't reached the
President's desk in 15 years.
So, what we need to do is say not how can we possibly get
the most important Presidential advisor on foreign policy to
come into this room but how can we write an authorizing bill in
this room that becomes law? And I would like to see us demand
that we don't appropriate money for foreign policy that isn't
authorized. And we could do that by insisting that the
authorizing bill that we pass be joined to the appropriations
bill and that neither the Senate nor the President should be
able to get the money without dealing with the authorizing
provisions. And if we, as a committee, would demand that the
rule for considering the foreign operations appropriations bill
include both the authorizing and the appropriation. And I would
like them to be separate bills but separate bills where one of
them is thrown away, that is not the best approach. So, if they
were married, then, when they go over to the Senate, we make it
plain--you have to have an authorizing and an appropriations
bill. You go to the President and you say you want the money,
you have to look at the appropriations; you have to look at the
authorizations as well.
Mr. Chollet, I am going to go into a much less significant
point. You compared the NSC staff to CRS. Is that just the CRS
foreign policy national security folks? That is not their folks
on medicine or transportation or whatever.
Mr. Chollet. Fair enough. I used the most expansive numbers
both for the NSC staff----
Mr. Sherman. Right.
Mr. Chollet. So, I took the most number of them as well as
CRS to try to make an apples to apples----
Mr. Sherman. But you looked only at what portions of CRS?
Mr. Chollet. No, no, no, no. This was the entire thing.
Mr. Sherman. Okay, so you are saying that----
Mr. Chollet. So, this is----
Mr. Sherman. But I mean it is like you are comparing apples
with a fruit plate.
Mr. Chollet. So, I included in the NSC staff the back
office people.
Mr. Sherman. Yes, but everyone at the NSC staff deals with
national security. There are people over at CRS who are dealing
with health policy. So, the fairer comparison would be the
entire White House and the old Executive Office Building, and
all the offices of the President, and all the tsars. Because
otherwise, you are comparing a department at CRS that deals
with health policy and you don't have anybody at--I hope you
don't have anybody at the NSC who is focusing on a cure for
cancer or----
Mr. Chollet. But there are people on health policy.
Mr. Sherman. On health?
Mr. Chollet. I mean not domestic health policy but global
health is a huge issue.
Mr. Sherman. Right, global, yes. Okay.
Ambassador Miller, were you indicating a desire to say
something?
Ambassador Miller. My hope is that you all can take a very
serious look at improving the performance of the State
Department. I spent most of my life investing capital and
looking at the performance of companies. Sometimes they are
good, sometimes they aren't. But whatever, you can learn a lot.
State needs to step back. You need to help them step back
and say what do we need to do to make the department work. The
Foreign Service is a fine, fine institution. I was immensely
well-served as a political appointee in two Embassies, very
well served at the NSC. There is more human capability at State
going to waste than in almost any institution I have ever seen.
Somehow or other, we need to put our minds together to say
how can we fix this because----
Mr. Sherman. So you think maybe Congress should oversee the
State Department, write an authorization bill, pass it into
law, and have an agency of the Federal Government act according
to congressional authorization. That is a brilliant and
innovative idea, one that we ought to apply to the State
Department.
And I yield back.
Ambassador Miller. I have waited all these years for that
opportunity. Thank you.
Mr. Sherman. I yield back.
Mr. Rohrabacher [presiding]. Well, here we are and it is in
my hands. There you go. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
All right, let me just note that I had the privilege of
serving in the White House for 7 years and I had a lot of
experience with the NSC and a lot of experience since then and
during that time, with the other agencies of government. So, I
have more than just having been here on this side of the
questioning.
Let me suggest this. I think that our Government isn't
working as effectively as it could and should. I think that
targeting the NSC is the wrong target. Having, as I say,
experience with all of these players, it is not the NSC that is
the problem. The problem is we have a bloated State Department
and a bloated intelligence community. I mean after 9/11, what
did we do? We made the intelligence community even more
complicated, put even another layer of bureaucracy between the
President and his intelligence sources. That is what we did in
Congress.
Now, the fact is the National Security Council was
established so that the President of the United States would
have people on his staff who could keep up on the issues of the
day. And now there is a debate whether or not the NSC is
overstepping its bounds when the President actually engages in
foreign policy activities that I guess the Congress or other
people or the State Department feels they should be conducting.
Let us note that Kissinger made a dramatic difference in the
history of this country when, at the height of the Cold War,
when it was going against us, it looked like the United States
was going down, that he changed the whole dynamics by reaching
out to China. That happened secretly. I believe if they tried
to do it through the State Department, that initiative never
would have succeeded. That would have been undercut and every
step of the way, not to mention what would happen if the CIA
and everybody else was involved in it.
Let me note also that the bad use of the NSC, what
Ambassador Bloomfield mentioned was the Iran-Contra Affair. We
had given the contras $100 million the year before to the CIA
and then all of a sudden we are going to cut them off. There is
a lot of politics being played on that that culminated, instead
of letting those guys go, Ollie North took it upon himself to
make sure they got money for ammunition, et cetera. So, I don't
think that is an example of how things go haywire.
And thinking back, the Iran-Contra Affair demonstrated that
the President of the United States has to be a player in these
things and has to have a staff that is able to be a player.
Ollie North, also, I might add, when he was there, took it
upon himself to reposition a carrier battle group so that when
the Achille Lauro was taken over that we would have airplanes
that could actually intercept the terrorists when they were
captured, if you remember that.
Now, I don't know if we would have gone through the normal
channels whether that carrier battleship would force but they
at least paid attention when Ollie North called up the admiral
and said, that would be a good place to have put them there in
case of emergency.
One personal example I remember and I have been deeply
involved in the Afghan thing since I was a speechwriter. What
is a speechwriter doing being involved in helping the
Mujahideen in Afghanistan? But that is the way it was and there
was a situation where a general called me and said look, we
have to take off within a matter of days or there is a field
hospital that will not go to the Mujahideen on the border of
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And these are men who put their lives on the line for us
and the Pakistanis are demanding money for our planes to land
and our planes aren't going to land. And thus, hundreds of
Mujahideen are going to die because we don't have this field
hospital that is in the back of the C-130 waiting to go there.
Can you do something?
Now, at that time, I am a member of the President's staff.
I am a Special Assistant to the President of the United States.
Well, if I had to go call up somebody over at the State
Department, the CIA, or the Defense Department, it would not
have gotten done. I know that. Hundreds of people fighting for
us against the Soviet army would have been dead. And I called
up a guy at NSC and he said well, we can't do this on our own;
I can't do this. And I said look, all I want you to do is take
a call, give a call to our Embassy in Pakistan, and they will
then tell the Pakistani Government that the White House has
called and the job will get done. Oh, I can't do that on my
own. You know what? He called back and he said okay, I will do
it. Because I told him, I said okay, hundreds of people will
die who are our best allies in the fight against the Soviet
Union and they will die because you are not willing to make one
call.
He calls back and says okay, I will do it. And do you know
what? One call and that hospital equipment got there and
hundreds of lives were saved. We need to have a National
Security Council that can function, that can do that, that can
save the lives of those of hundreds of thousands Mujahideen
fighters or whoever it is that is in jeopardy around the world.
And isn't NSC involved in crisis management? Okay, the
President needs a staff to be there during a crisis. Does the
President need someone for policy analysis so that he is not
getting hundreds of reports from different points of view? Let
somebody be there who can digest it over a matter of days,
rather than an hour when the President has to make a decision.
No, we need that.
And I think that the NSC should not be decreased and,
instead we should try to make the rest of the government more
efficient and that is where things are breaking down.
Please feel free to comment on anything I just said right
down the line, Ambassador Miller.
Ambassador Miller. On the intel situation, I could not
agree more. For my 2 years at the White House, I ran the
Counter Terrorism Coordination weekly meeting, the CSG, Lincoln
and I got to meet each other then.
Counter terrorism requires a very tight turning radius and
that means speed of movement and trust of communicators. You
can't do that among large bureaucratic structures I don't
think. Eventually, it gets down to does the J3 trust you? Does
the head of counter terrorism at the CIA trust you? Do your
principals trust you as the first line actors? And if they
don't, you can lose that advantage of information which may be
stale in 2 or 3 days and you have to move.
On your ability to call, let us suppose you need to call
the J3. The problem with a very, very large White House staff
is that senior officers at the Pentagon don't get to know the
White House staff and they don't really know who is phoning.
And you get more stories about the White House called--456-1414
is not a self-dialing machine. You know----
Mr. Rohrabacher. Ollie did make telephone calls.
Ambassador Miller. Listen, I followed Ollie on and Ollie
and I traded notes on a lot of stuff. I got to know the J3 well
enough, General Scowcroft and Secretary Gates way back then. We
all trusted each other. And you could pick up the phone and you
could call then Admiral Owens, who was Secretary Gates'
military aid, and say Bill, we have a problem and we have to do
something in a hurry. Now, Bill knew who I was.
If you don't have that trust, things don't work right and
that is one of the problems with having a larger staff. If the
larger staff stays inside and does analytic work, that is fine.
But if you are a special assistant, somebody at the Pentagon
better know who you are when you pick up the phone and say let
us move a carrier task group. That is a serious decision.
Mr. Rohrabacher. All right, thank you. And real quickly, I
am sorry I blabbed on with too much time here, but very
quickly, if you have some disagreement, please feel free.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Congressman Rohrabacher, I just want
to reiterate the importance of the structure of government that
has worked so well. The NSC staff should be up to the
President. The President should have whatever staff the
President is comfortable with, he or she, so long as the staff
does not do things which would more properly be under the
purview of both the American people's right to have oversight
and the Congressional oversight and the authorized activities.
As long as they are coordinating and operating under the 1947
mandate, they can have as many people as they want--whatever
makes the President comfortable--but that line should not be
crossed.
The second thing I need to say--Derek has been an Assistant
Secretary of Defense, and I was in ISA for 8 years at the
Pentagon--the National Command Authority is sacrosanct. There
is a famous story in the Nixon administration when Dr.
Kissinger called Secretary of Defense Laird and said the
President wants such and such to be done. And he said well, let
the President call--click. And that is the National Command
Authority.
If there are lives on the line and exigencies, if you
haven't pre-delegated the authority to the people who are
capable of doing the right thing, whether it is the State
Department in a Benghazi situation or the Pentagon in a
military situation in the field, then that is a failure of
policy, but it is fixable. We just simply need to recognize
these are the things that have made America work so well in the
past. We just simply need to recognize the lines and execute
properly.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Mr. Chollet.
Mr. Chollet. I know you are out of time, so I will be very
brief. I fully agree with what both of my colleagues here have
said.
I just want to echo, sir, your point, which is mainly the
growth of the NSC does reflect the growing complexity and size
of our national security apparatus and that there are entire
dimensions of policy that didn't exist 25 years ago that now
the President needs to fully understand. He needs to have folks
around him who fully understand. So, that explains a lot of the
growth.
I think the NSC is too big. I think it can be smaller and I
think the trend, as I said, is headed in the right direction
but I don't think we should have an arbitrary cap on it.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Yes, I don't ever remember getting a
briefing on the threat of cyber-attack back during the Reagan
years.
Mr. Sires, you are now recognized.
Mr. Sires. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is all right that
you went over a little bit.
First of all, this is a very informative hearing. I want to
thank you for being here. On one side we have experience, on
one side we have youth that has worked, and Ambassador
Bloomfield, you are in the middle somewhere, as far as--but it
has been informative.
And from what I gathered, I would tend to think that the
NSC is just too large. I have problems thinking that a staffer
can call a four-star general and say, ``Do this.'' To me, that
is--I guess I have been involved in politics a long time and it
is not your enemies that get you in trouble but your friends or
people that work for you. And I think that that is a very
possible scenario and it has happened. But as it gets larger, I
think it is even more something that can happen and I have a
problem with that.
I have a problem with the NSC negotiating. They negotiated
secretly. We had here people from the State Department and we
asked them about certain negotiations, especially with Cuba.
And I don't know if they wanted to lie or not but we were told
that they weren't negotiating when, in reality, there was
negotiations going on. And I would think that if they are
negotiating secretly and you have a State Department person
come before this committee and you ask them the question, and
she will say no, they weren't, I would take it at her word that
she didn't know that secretly somebody was negotiating. And to
me, that is a problem.
We are a State Department. We are very careful with people
who are capable of doing the kind of work that some people at
the NSC is doing. I also think that sometimes this committee,
the NSC, is used as a buffer. This is to keep people away from
reaching maybe the presidency or the President using the
committee to keep other people away. There has got to be
somebody in-between to absolve any responsibility.
So, I really don't think that keep growing this committee
is going to be helpful to this country or is going to be
helpful to the President. I think, as Ambassador Miller
expressed, there are many capable people working in different
places in the State Department where they are tripping over
each other to do something. And they could do some of the work,
instead of growing this committee.
And can you just tell me what you think it started to go
wrong with this committee, this NSC committee? Where did you
see that it started going wrong, with your experience? When did
it take the wrong direction? Let me put it this way.
Ambassador Miller. A very inelegant answer is that
apparently over time, within the 18 acres at the White House, a
sense that speed of movement was critical. And that goes way
back, if you look at the graphs here, it goes way back to the
Clinton administration, which we saw our first very big spike
in NSC staff.
The illusion from my standpoint is that speed of movement
is more important than wise decisionmaking. Wise decisionmaking
is frequently slow and difficult and there are many times in
which speed of movement is the most important issue that you
are looking at. But it has become an excuse, I think, for not
involving institutions that seem to move too slowly, that have
a lot of wisdom and experience. This study began more than 2
years ago when I called some of my agency friends who had been
involved in the Afghan situation and I said, really, nobody
talked to you about what we were doing in the Middle East. And
the answer was no, nobody talked to us. And I said you have got
to be kidding me.
So, I don't have an elegant answer to that but I think one
thing is that the White House has pushed on an open door. The
Congress has allowed this to occur and it is not healthy for
the Congress and it is not healthy for the White House either.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Congressman, could I just say that I
think this suggests a larger solution? I know people have
specific complaints about the NSC staff, probably in both
administrations, Republican and Democratic. Part of it is not
their fault because with the tools and information they have,
with the real-time media contacts, with Ambassadors coming and
calling at the White House as well as the State Department and
possibly visiting military dignitaries, the question arises of
what can the State Department do that the NSC staff can't do.
There is a little bit of ``we can do it all here.'' And part of
it is because of technology and just the press of business.
So, I think without blaming people, we can look at that and
say what can we do. Because if it goes much further, it does
cross the line where there is no oversight and Congress can't
call them before--they can't confirm the appointees. And the
President should not want that to happen.
So, there needs to be a conversation. I, personally, think
that Congress has immense power over the next President that
could be a subject of discussion during the transition, and
before knowing the result of the election, that has to do
partly in the Senate with the confirmation process and partly
with the amount of hearings and questions for the record. These
are things which are enormous burdens on an incoming
administration. If their appointees are going to be slow to be
confirmed, if they are going to get thousands of questions that
the bureaucracy will be tied up answering, you have something
to bargain with. And this might be, Congressman Engel had
brought up the question of, an authorization bill. I would like
to see a grand bargain, where there are fewer high officials in
the Executive Branch and frankly, maybe a few fewer gavels in
the Congress so that we can get back to a leaner, high-level,
principal-to-principal process.
My congressman is yelling at me. I will stop.
Mr. Sires. Thank you very much.
Mr. Connolly. Would my friend just yield for one quick
observation?
Mr. Sires. Sure.
Mr. Connolly. Because I want to return to this when it is
my turn. Ambassador Bloomfield, excellent point but I want to
make one point. The change up here with respect to the NSC came
out of the military, not the State Department. And that causes
me grave concern about the dismissal of Young Turks calling a
four-star and daring to ask or tell something. That is not a
good enough reason to revamp the entire national security
apparatus of the President of the United States, which I think
my friend, Mr. Rohrabacher, was making as well.
So, I want to engage in that when it is my turn but I think
it is important to remember the genesis of the proposed change
in the legislation. It didn't come out of the Foreign Policy
Committee on the Hill. It came out of the Armed Services
Committee.
And I yield back.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Well, if I may, Congressman
Connolly, I never thought of myself as an old codger but I know
a lot of four-stars, retired and some active duty, and it has
been my privilege to know them. And I have seen them during
situations where they may even not take guidance from the
Secretary of Defense on certain things, like ROE in a situation
where they need to keep the peace the first day of an
intervention. I know these folks and I have been there. Derek
will have his own experience.
It is unfathomable to me that a four-star commander in the
field would take guidance from a staffer in the bureaucracy. It
is unfathomable to me. I don't understand it.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Mr. Chollet.
Mr. Chollet. Just very briefly, I agree with that. And
again, my experience is that that is a rare occurrence, where
there is a junior staff who tries to call a four-star or a
lieutenant colonel working in the NSC who calls an admiral to
move a carrier battle group. It is an exception and not the
rule.
Just one very quick observation on this question of
oversight. When I served at the White House, I always found
myself toggling back and forth between two perspectives. One
is, why aren't the agencies doing what the President has
decided? So, he decided to do something. Why isn't this
happening or why is it happening too slowly? Or it is, what are
they doing? The President hasn't decided yet. They are creating
facts on the ground before the President has been able to
actually make a decision on what he wants to do.
And I never found a way out of that dilemma, personally.
And so I do think that there is a sort of secular trend toward
greater oversight because, of course, that is the common answer
for both. You hold more meetings. You do more taskings. You try
to hold agencies accountable. And I think in some ways it goes
back to this issue of we ultimately do hold the President
accountable. When things go wrong, the President is blamed.
When things go right, the President gets credit. And so the NSC
staff as an extension of the President tends to be more
involved in the policies and tasks.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Well thank you very much. And that means
that the President has to be accountable for what his
appointees do or her. There you go.
Mr. Perry.
Mr. Perry. Thanks, gentlemen. Thanks for all of you for
being here. It is a fascinating conversation. Minute by minute,
it leads to new questions, at least on my behalf.
And I think about the most recent one on accountability of
the President. You know I hate to bring up the sore subject of
Ben Rhodes but I don't see any accountability. I mean I see Ben
Rhodes on the TV from Laos this week and I, myself, wrote the
President a letter asking him to relieve Ben Rhodes for his
forays that were made public.
That having been said, I know the 1947 Act doesn't
specifically talk about qualifications but you fine gentlemen
who have worked in the industry maybe could lead us in the
right direction. And I would also say right here that I am not
an advocate of Congress meddling too much in the President's
business. And I think that regardless of the President's party
or who that person is, everybody wants the President to have
the tools that he or she needs to complete the mission. But it
is apparent, I think, to most people, that this things is
pretty broken for whatever reason. And without any
congressional oversight, we are completely relying on the
executive to make the correct decisions. And once it gets a
level or two below him or her, it seems like the rules are
being made up as they go for the expedience of whatever at the
moment is garnering the attention.
So, with that in mind what should--I looked at Ben Rhodes'
qualifications, knowing what he was involved in, the level.
This is national security. This is national policy that affects
millions of lives and the world and I think that the
qualifications for that individual have to be profound and
robust in my opinion. I mean I don't have the qualifications to
do what some of these folks are doing and I wouldn't deign to
think that I do. What should they be and how does that come
about?
Anybody.
Ambassador Bloomfield. If I could give a perspective,
Congressman Perry. I can't answer about individuals in the
current administration but it has been my observation, and I
made this in my testimony, that because the agencies in the
national security space are so bloated with so many empowered
people doing you name it, there are 80 direct reports to the
Secretary of State by my count. That is just an unbelievable
fact. And I would say OSD and OJCS and, as Congressman
Rohrabacher pointed out, the intel community with 800 new
billets layered on top of the 16 agencies.
So, that is out there. Now you have the NSC staff which has
grown into several hundred. And if you could just imagine, and
we all can try to imagine, the President inside the Oval Office
saying, ``Who are all these people?'' You are getting huge
amounts of paperwork from all of these agencies. Then, you have
hundreds of people that you met once, when they came in to say
hello and take your picture. I sort of can understand why he
would take five people that he trusts and say close the door,
we will figure it out. Sort of a treehouse mentality. I don't
mean to be----
Mr. Perry. And I would agree with you. It is just a process
problem. My perception in years past is that it was four or
five, 10 people that the President trusted and that is who the
NSC was now. It is apparent now that that is who the current
President trusts and I don't blame him. But who are all these
other people and why do we need them? What have they got to do
with anything?
What are their responsibilities regarding the national
security strategy? Anybody?
Mr. Chollet. Sure. And Congressman, I served for a year and
a half as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the
White House. In terms of the creation of the national security
strategy of the United States, which happens once every 3 years
or so----
Mr. Perry. But you know what the statute is, don't you?
Mr. Chollet. Yes, yes, yes.
Mr. Perry. So, in 8 years now, we will have it done twice
when it is required every single year.
Mr. Chollet. Sure. I mean unfortunately, as someone who
owned the strategic planning operation or ran it, I would have
wanted to see it done more often but it has traditionally been
done, going back to when the statute was created, I think twice
in an administration. Bush did it twice. I think Clinton did it
twice or did it more than twice.
Mr. Perry. So, do we need a change in the standard since,
apparently, we can't abide by the standard? What are the
consequences of not abiding by the standard? Poor policy,
right? Poor execution.
Mr. Chollet. I believe there should be more strategic
thinking in the White House. I very much applaud that
recommendation in Atlantic Council's Report. As I said, we
tried mightily to give our senior policymakers more time to
think strategically and get out of the inbox but the press of
events has been unrelenting.
And just very quickly, if I could, sir----
Mr. Perry. So, hold that thought for a minute and then
continue it afterward. But do you have a recommendation
regarding--to me one of the bigger issues is we have all these
new people, all these great minds. We can't even get a national
security strategy out. How does the national military strategy
follow no national security strategy? How does anybody know
what the plan is?
Mr. Chollet. I think one of the most important things that
a new administration can do is try to get the sequencing right
in how they do these strategies because no administration has
gotten it right, where you start with the national security
strategy, then you do the QDR, then you do the QDDR, and then
you do all the other sort of agency-level strategies. And
unfortunately, because of different oversight committees,
different processes in the different departments, those are not
well-aligned and it doesn't make much sense. I concede that.
Can I just say very briefly, not to get into individuals
but I should, Ben Rhodes is a friend and colleague. I worked
with him very closely during my time in the administration. He
is one of the most talented people I have worked with in
Washington. I have worked here for 20 years with a lot of
talented people.
That said, both at DoD, State, and at the NSC, there a lot
of folks that I worked with who were the best in the business
and there are a lot of folks I worked with or some, I should
say, that I worked with and I wondered how they got there.
This goes back to a question that I was given earlier that
I didn't get a chance to answer which was there isn't really
any quality training done really in any of the positions in the
national security field. Basically, once you get out of school
or if you are in the career foreign service or in the military
you get a chance to do a stint at NDU, I think that is
something we should take very seriously. I believe in past
authorization bills from the State Department, that issue has
been looked at, sort of career professional training but to
ensure that we do have a higher standard in all of our agencies
for senior officials.
Mr. Perry. Let me just conclude with this, Mr. Chairman.
Regardless of Ben Rhodes' talents, and I acknowledge he seems
like a very talented individual by what I have read and what I
have seen, nothing, nothing at all regarding his talent
explains or justifies deceiving the American people outwardly,
regardless of the policy outcome.
The ends do not justify the means and I find it
reprehensible, unacceptable, and I think it is a black mark on
the administration and on American policy and that is my
opinion.
But with that, I yield back.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Thank you. He ended it on a different kind
of note. That is fine.
But Ms. Bass, you may begin it on any kind of note that you
would like.
Ms. Bass. Well, thanks for letting us know how you really
feel.
Thank you very much for your testimony. I think this has
been a very, very, very interesting discussion. And I just
wanted to ask a few questions.
One, as I listen to the three of you, and I want you to
tell me whether I am right or wrong, there are things that need
to be improved in the NSC but I don't think I heard any of you
say that we are in some kind of crisis and that there is
something terribly wrong.
I guess listening whether we should increase or decrease
the staff, what worries me about that is that it seems rather
mechanical and I can absolutely appreciate what you were saying
Mr. Chollet, if I am pronouncing your name correctly, about how
things have changed so much, especially from Bloomfield, you
know what you were saying.
Mr. Chollet, you mentioned climate change and I was
wondering how--cybersecurity I certainly understand but I was
wondering if you could give me an example of how climate change
fits in there.
But if each of you could respond to: We are not in a
crisis, there are things that could be improved, but there is
no great disaster happening. Am I correct in what I hear?
Mr. Chollet. I will take the first shot, if I could.
Ms. Bass. Okay.
Mr. Chollet. I agree with you. I don't think it is a crisis
but I think it is legitimate and good that this committee, the
Congress, the strategic community, those of us on the outside
now are looking into this issue because we have an opportunity
here coming up with a new President taking office to reform the
NSC, to try to right-size it, to try to ensure that we are
getting the most we can out of it, and to help the incoming
administration think about these important issues that they are
going to be inheriting because the NSC is very malleable.
The only thing in statute is the members of the actual NSC,
the senior level members, and establishing the Executive
Secretary. Everything else, the President can do things totally
differently. And so climate change is a perfect example where
that is an issue that didn't exist much 25 years ago and now,
of course, it has been a major issue internationally and a
major priority for this administration. So, although it is an
issue set that doesn't solely reside in the NSC because there
are other agencies within the Executive Office of the President
that deal with the various issue of climate change, clearly,
the effort of the United States Government to try to get at
this issue, both in terms of how we behave here at home but
also how we negotiate abroad is something the NSC has had to
follow as the President has been engaging in international
diplomacy on this issue.
Ms. Bass. Oh, so it is because he has been engaging in
international diplomacy that he has----
Mr. Chollet. Both. I mean it is a priority. This is one of
the greatest international----
Ms. Bass. Right. I just didn't see. I mean believe me, I
understand the significance of climate change. I just didn't
see its relation here.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Can I just take a moment?
Congresswoman Bass, I will be the one that says crisis is
too strong a word but the bus only shows up every 4 years
before an election when you can think a little bit out of the
in-basket and say what should we be fixing.
I think we have something verging on a crisis in our
national security community----
Ms. Bass. Okay.
Ambassador Bloomfield [continuing]. And it is not personal
to President Obama or any of the members of his team who have
been named today. It is broader than that and it is more
historic.
There is a foreign diplomat in Asia who made a comment a
few years ago that is true. He said when he deals with other
governments, they take 20 percent of the time figuring out
their policy and 80 percent implementing it.
Ms. Bass. Oh.
Ambassador Bloomfield. But in Washington it is reversed.
Ms. Bass. Yes.
Ambassador Bloomfield. I have spent much of my life
watching the internecine battles between people trying to hang
onto their authority, their issue. I will give you one example.
My old bureau, the Political Military Bureau, went into Libya,
after Ghadafi was taken down, to look for loose weapons and
shoulder-fired missiles and arms with U.N. folks.
Then came Syria. And I remember Congressman Royce held a
hearing on Syrian chemical weapons. But because chemical
weapons are WMDs, that is a different bureau. We had teams on
the ground, operational, with communications, ready to go, but
a different bureau said no, that is my turf. And that is just
one of a thousand, I used the term ``thousand bowls of rice''
in my testimony and I see that. And I think we need to address
it.
Ms. Bass. Okay.
Ambassador Miller. Very quickly, Ms. Bass, I think crisis
is the wrong term but it is close. Crises today seem to be
defined by what is on the right-hand column of The Washington
Post front page, whatever. We are in a significant crisis in
terms of the stature of the United States in the world, full
stop. If you are traveling out there, you are going to get an
earful. If you are an old Ambassador, you are used to being
criticized. But it is getting worse and we need to step back
and take a serious look about how our country is developing
international strategy and as Linc was saying, then, how we
implement.
Much of our report focuses on the fact that there may have
been reasonable strategic decisions made but the implementation
was poor enough to jeopardize the outcome and I think that is a
very serious issue.
And one last observation and that is, one of the things
that you are observing is the White House is trying to solve
many, many, many problems. There is not a staff at the White
House of the size to solve all the problems that really fall
under the jurisdiction of cabinet secretaries and agency heads.
And so I think one of the things that we need to look at is
the proper use of the cabinet officials and the agency heads to
say the President cares a great deal about X and he wants you,
Madam Secretary, to go do that, not to add another layer of
people at the White House.
Thank you.
Ms. Bass. Thank you.
Mr. Rohrabacher. Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. DeSantis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
So, I think that there are probably too many people in the
NSC. I think there are too many people in a lot of parts of
government but to me, it is the authority that they are
exercising that is more important than the sheer numbers. In
other words, if I had to choose between a bloated staff that
was basically serving the core advisory function versus a
leaner staff that was actually usurping the authorities of the
secretaries, I would choose the former. Are most of you in
agreement with that? I know Ambassador Bloomfield.
And part of the reason is I think when you have the model
gravitating toward where is more policy being implemented by
the NSC, it really detracts from the accountability that the
American people have.
I mean, for example, Ambassador Bloomfield, I saw you
served in different positions. You had to get confirmed by the
Senate for those positions.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Yes.
Mr. DeSantis. And those were Deputy Assistant posts in the
State Department?
Ambassador Bloomfield. Assistant Secretary and above.
Mr. DeSantis. Right. At the NSC, for example, we mentioned
Ben Rhodes as the Deputy. He did not have to get confirmed by
the Senate, correct? And he has been described as the most
influential voice shaping U.S. foreign policy, other than
President Obama, himself.
And so I think that somebody who is really wielding that
much influence in our affairs of State should at least have to
sit and get Senate confirmation. And if Rhodes is an advisor to
the President and that is what he is doing, fine. But if he is
implementing policy, if he is crafting things with the Iran
deal, with Cuba, that becomes much different. And Ben Rhodes,
and I appreciate your comments about him, obviously, we have
had disagreements with him because of how the Iran deal has
been handled. We wanted to invite him to testify but he is a
member of the staff and so he doesn't come. He would not have
been able to be confirmed to be Secretary of State or Secretary
of Defense. I mean that is just the reality of the situation.
So, you are putting people who are implementing policy
without having the check of Senate confirmation. And again, if
there are White House advisors, I don't want us dragging in an
actual counselor to the President. I think that there are
absolutely legitimate separation of powers concerns there.
But then you also have this idea of putting the power in
the hands of the NSC staff; then, you don't have congressional
oversight, which is what we need to do.
Secretary Kerry has to come here because Congress controls
the budget. Secretary of Defense has to come here and they have
to answer questions about how the policy is being conducted.
That is good for Congress but it is also good for the American
people to be able to see what is going on.
As I mentioned, we wanted to figure out how this Iran deal
happened. We invited Ben Rhodes and he declined to come. And I
think his position, as it should be, I think that would be
legitimate but I think he was exercising authority that went
beyond that.
And then I guess the final thing that I think about when
you have people on the NSC staff getting involved with military
commanders in the field, totally going outside the normal chain
of command. If we had military commanders that bucked the chain
of command, they would never be able to get away with that. I
mean that would be a cardinal sin to do it. And so we have a
very clear chain of command. When you have a combatant
commander they are reporting up to the Secretary of Defense and
then to the President. It should be that we can't have the NSC
staff just basically going around the chain of command.
Ambassador Miller, you wanted to----
Ambassador Miller. Yes, just very quickly on that. At least
one of our intelligence agencies has handled the communications
issue by basically saying no calls to staff in the field from
the White House will be answered, full stop. Those calls will
be referred to a headquarters across the river and we will
worry about responding to staff.
We got, in our interviews, we got really, really tough
commentary from the military. You all know General Mattis and a
wonderful group, virtually all from the Naval Service, who felt
very strongly about that.
One other, just one comment on confirmation. I, obviously,
went through the confirmation process in the ambassadorial
assignments and I found it very valuable. I learned a lot. An
Ambassador represents not just the President but the country.
So, I think a dialogue with the Congress is actually very
helpful.
And when I was at the NSC, I was immensely comfortable
coming up here to discuss issues where I knew members had
concerns and nobody had to ask me to testify. I was happy to
come up and talk. And I think that the end of my testimony
speaks to that and that is, you can't legislate trust. You
can't change organizations to create trust. You have to just
begin to work with each other to the point that you say yes,
these are all pretty bright guys and they all care about the
country. And I hope that is where we might begin to move here.
I am sorry I took so long with that.
Mr. DeSantis. That is okay. My time has expired but I
appreciate all of you guys coming and testifying. And I think
that there is probably a consensus that this is not operating
the precise way it was envisioned and we would like to see some
changes with the next administration.
I yield back.
Chairman Royce [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will inform my friend from Florida I don't know that we
all agree. I certainly don't agree with his analysis in terms
of the prescription.
Frankly, how Congress is approaching this through the Armed
Services Committee, not through the Foreign Affairs or Foreign
Relations Committees, reminds me of H. L. Mencken. You know for
every human problem, there is a solution. There is a solution;
simple, neat, and wrong.
I mean I heard my friend Mr. Perry talk about maybe that
old system of 10 advisors is what we ought to go back to. Well,
I mean, if you are worried about unwieldy bureaucracies in the
White House, let us go back to Lincoln's model. He had two
secretaries. Would that work? That would certainly not be
unwieldy. I don't know that it would. And he had to deal with a
Civil War. So, what is wrong with that? It is a big, difficult,
complex world.
Ambassador Miller, you mentioned one of the prescriptions
was, make the State Department work. I thought that was a
profound statement.
Ambassador Miller. Yes.
Mr. Connolly. One of the reasons a President turns to a
group of advisors is because the bureaucracy doesn't work for
them.
Ambassador Miller. I know.
Mr. Connolly. Thank God there were low-level people telling
the President a different thing than Curtis LeMay during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. If we had followed the chain of command
strictly, rigidly, after all, he has the stars, he has been
confirmed, we would have gone to World War III. Curtis LeMay
wanted to bomb Cuba, even though he didn't even know that in
fact some of the missiles in fact had already been nuclear
tipped and were acclimated. Thank God there were other voices
than the chain of command.
There are times the bureaucracy, and I don't mean that in
any pejorative way, produces great statesmen and stateswomen.
And thank God it does. The very best rises to the top. There
are other times that is not so true. And the President has to
rely on a group of younger people to give him some advice and,
soon, maybe her.
And so it seems to me, a little thing up here, Congress
doesn't do nuance. And so if you look at the legislation, what
does it do? What is our fix for this vague problem, that it is
too big? Well, I don't know. What would make you happy? What
would be the ideal Goldilocks solution for the NSC size?
And by the way, why have we chosen the NSC? Mr. Chollet,
you mentioned, would you remind us how big the staff of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon is?
Mr. Chollet. It is roughly seven times larger than the
current NSC.
Mr. Connolly. Seven times and no one is talking about that.
Is that a problem? When you were in the White House, was that
ever a problem?
Mr. Chollet. They had more charts than we did.
Mr. Connolly. Was there ever confusion as to who was
speaking for whom?
Mr. Chollet. No.
Mr. Connolly. Well, I just I think we need to tread
lightly. I don't think that the legislation only ought to have
the imprint of the Armed Services Committee. I think it needs
some foreign policy overlay and I think we need to understand
what problem it is that we are fixing.
It may be that it is too big and too unwieldy and not
coordinated and some people overstep their lines. Of course
that is going to happen but does that merit draconian
legislation that says you can only have 100?
How many are on the NSC staff now, Mr. Chollet?
Mr. Chollet. It is about 190 policy staff.
Mr. Connolly. Okay, so we are roughly cutting it in half.
And if you want to go above that, as the chairman indicated,
NSC gets confirmed.
Now, this is why I cited Mencken. Let us assume for a
minute, stipulate there is a problem and that is the problem.
The solution guarantees all the things you don't like,
guarantees institutional friction until the cows come home
because now I am your equal. I am confirmed, too. And I got
actually official status to get you in a lot of trouble over
there at the State Department or the Pentagon because I am
confirmed like you are. And I am not sure that is the solution.
You know if there was someone who understood that, it was
the guy who probably started all this problem, Henry Kissinger.
Because when he finally got the confirmable job, he kept the
NSC job, too, because he didn't want that tension. And that is
an interesting model for us to contemplate.
At any rate, I am sorry, but the chairman has graciously
said I could have an extra minute or two to compensate for Mr.
Rohrabacher. So, this is your comment.
Ambassador Bloomfield. Could I just put another idea before
you? And this is in the spirit of nonpartisanship. Every time
there is an election, the winning team has a plum book and
gives away political appointments. I have been in an political
appointed position for five administrations. We have watched,
over the decades, as lower and lower levels of the bureaucracy
are awarded to political appointees, people who are loyal, who
were helpful on a campaign, that sort of thing, who may have
been contributors. And I think that we could look at that issue
and ask, because as Mr. Perry brought up the question of
qualifications, it may be there are just too many jobs in the
foreign policy bureaucracy being awarded to people who had
talents in the political arena but really didn't have
background or any seasoning in the foreign policy and national
security arena. And that is something that would be a
bipartisan endeavor. So, I thought I would put that out there
as part of the record of the hearing.
Ambassador Miller. Mr. Connolly, I think it is time for a
nuanced look at the State Department.
Mr. Connolly. And I reiterate, that is not us.
Ambassador Miller. Yes, but somebody up here has to have a
nuanced approach to the State Department. It is an institution.
And I will say this again, every foreign service officer that
came out of the White House who worked for me, they were
superb. You put them back in the State Department and they are
put back into a structure that doesn't function well.
The cure, if you will, is complex. It is a problem that has
grown over many years. And I would hope that a group of staff
people up here could begin under your direction to say what all
might we consider as a new administration arrives to make the
Department work better. If it doesn't, you are not going to
solve whatever NSC problem you think you are facing.
Mr. Chollet. Just one brief comment. And I think this is
why this hearing is so important because it creates the space
for a new administration to perhaps make some change.
I can speak personally from the transition from Bush to
Obama, where we also came in with some big ideas about how the
NSC should work better; the NSC was way too big under President
Bush and we would make it slimmer and hold the agencies
accountable. But then once in office, there was also an
imperative don't screw up. Don't change things for the sake of
changing things before you actually know what you are doing,
particularly when we are a nation at war.
And this gets back to holding the President accountable. We
want and the President should be held accountable. The
President is the one who got elected. But at the same time, in
order help the President make the system work as best as she or
he can, there also needs to be a sense that there is space that
should be allowed to make those important decisions and,
perhaps, absorb some risk because that is part of the issue--
the President's national security advisors don't want to take
the risk. If I cut the staff too much and take away that
oversight and that accountability that I am trying achieve here
to serve the President, then we are going to get burned on the
other end if something goes wrong.
Mr. Connolly. Mr. Chairman, I just want to thank you for
the indulgence and I think our witnesses were great. And I
really think this is a great contribution to a very important
subject and I would hope that our committee will weigh in and
not cede this entirely to the Armed Services Committee because
I think it is just too important.
And again, I thank you so much for holding this hearing.
Chairman Royce. Well, I thank you, Mr. Connolly. And I do
think we may have stretched a point with Mr. Bloomfield's
opinions on the bureaucracy at the size of the Pentagon. Based
on his writings, I suspect he is every bit as much concerned
with the size of the bureaucracy there as he is with the size
of the NSC.
I would just make a point that there seems to be no
disagreement among those that have worked at the NSC that the
current size increases dysfunction. There does seem to be that
conclusion. Reducing its size can only help and it is good that
the administration is moving in that direction.
I want to also express my appreciation for the time of our
witnesses today. This has been, I think, as I share Mr.
Connolly's view, that this should be the purview of this
committee. This has been a very informative hearing. We have
had good participation today from the members.
As Ambassador Miller said, the NSC is the heart of the
foreign policy machine. And I took that analogy to heart but
your other point is that there can be heart failure and then we
have a massive problem. And you know I think the next
administration's goal should be getting back to the core
function of the NSC and that is coordinating policy,
coordinating policy where the diplomats are doing the diplomacy
and the military has oversight over the military and the NSC
can give the President the policy options that it is intended
to. And if not, then Congress has to step in and that is
especially true when it comes to accountability. That is our
role.
And I thank our witnesses again. And, Mr. Connolly, thank
you.
We stand adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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Material Submitted for the Record
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Material submitted for the record by the Honorable David C. Miller,
Jr., Non-Resident Senior Fellow, The Atlantic Council (former Special
Assistant to the President, National Security Council)
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[Note: The entire report is not reprinted here but may be found on the
Internet at: http://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/
ByEvent.aspx?EventID=105276]
Material submitted for the record by the Honorable Lincoln P.
Bloomfield, Jr., Chairman of the Board, The Stimson Center (former
Assistant Secretary for Political Military Affairs, U.S. Department of
State)
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[all]