How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a spectrum of comprehensive national security strategy-related documents that have been created, in part, to institutionalize the existence of national-level direction for a variety of national security issues, and to do this at the unclassified level for the public audience of those democratic nations. The intent of this monograph is to explore the actual processes that specific nation states employ to craft their national security strategy-related documents. For each of the case studies presented, the monograph will address oversight, strategic context, national interests, domestic political considerations, facts and assumptions used to frame strategy development, objectives and measures of effectiveness, ways and means, risk assessment, the identification of a formal feedback mechanism, and who within the government had the final approval authority for the document. Five countries and their national strategy documents were selected for assessment: Australia, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At least one national strategy document was evaluated for each country, and more than one department or ministry from the government's executive branch participated in each nation's document drafting process. The United States' National Security Strategy (NSS) is the only complete whole-of-government national security document that the U.S. Government publishes. This analysis reviews the development of three different U.S. NSSs: 2002, 2006, and 2010. These three were selected because they required the consideration of the many complex issues of the post-September 11, 2001 (9/11) world, and because they were developed at the direction of two different Presidents representing two different political parties, and with the detailed support of three different national security advisors and associated National Security Council (NSC) staffs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA566193
Entities
People
- Alan G. Stolberg
Organizations
- United States Army War College