Second Breakfast: Trump’s National Security Strategy

Tony Stark and Justin Mc return for Second Breakfast. In Part I, we break down the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS).

Today, our conversation covers…

• What a National Security Strategy is, and why they matter,

• Controversial new inclusions in Trump’s NSS, including on Taiwan policy and the “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,”

• How to reconcile the document’s ambitious vision for deterrence with the reality of Trump’s China policy,

• The mixed signals this NSS sends to U.S. allies,

• What Buffalo Wild Wings can teach us about competition with China.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Ends, Means, and One China

Jordan Schneider: Tony, give us the 101 on what a National Security Strategy is, and then we’re all going to go around and say one nice thing about it.

Tony Stark: There are three major U.S. government national security strategy documents. The first is the National Military Strategy, which applies to the uniformed services but is rarely noticed outside the Joint Staff.

Next is the National Defense Strategy (NDS), which is the Pentagon’s primary strategic document. It’s the one most people in the field care about because it’s a Cabinet-level document, even if it isn’t overtly political. Legally, a new NDS is required every four years, and developing a new NDS takes 6 to 18 months. New administrations are given a little extra time — about a year and a half — to publish their first one.

The NDS is written at the “action officer” level, which includes General Schedule (GS) employees, field-grade officers, contractors, and think tank experts. Then it is passed up to the Deputy Assistant Secretary level in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) — their equivalents are three-star generals — and then to the commands, the undersecretaries, and so on.

Finally, there’s the National Security Strategy (NSS), which is historically the most political of the documents because it comes out of the White House, not the Pentagon. The NSS is a guiding vision of the administration’s goals and incorporates all elements of national power. Historically, this is also the blandest document — its wide scope reads more as a political statement than a defense plan. The new Trump administration just released its first NSS. While the NDS has been ready for a while, they were likely waiting to publish the NSS first.

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