I listened to the lecture series Assessing America’s National Security Threats by H. R. McMaster, a 3-star general who was the US national security advisor in 2017. It didn’t have much content about how to assess threats, but I found it useful to get a peek into the mindset of someone in the national security establishment.
Some highlights:
Even in the US, it sometimes happens that the strategic analysis is motivated by the views of the leader. For example, McMaster describes how Lyndon Johnson did not retreat from Vietnam early enough, in part because criticism of the war within the government was discouraged.
I had heard similar things for much more authoritarian regimes, but this is the first time I heard about something like that happening in a democracy.
The fix he suggests: always present at least two credible options (and maybe multiple reads on the situation) to the leader.
He claims that there wouldn’t have been an invasion of South Korea in 1950 if the US hadn’t withdrawn troops from there (despite intelligence reports suggesting this was a likely outcome of withdrawing troops). If it’s actually the case that intelligence was somewhat confident in its analysis of the situation, it’s crazy that it was dismissed like that—that should be points in favor of it being possible that the US government could be asleep at the wheel during the start of an intelligence explosion.
He uses this as a parallel to justify the relevance of the US keeping troops in Iraq/Afghanistan. He also describes how letting terrorist groups grow and have a solid rear base might make the defense against terrorism even more costly than keeping troops in this region. The analysis lacks the quantitative analysis required to make this a compelling case, but this is still the best defense of the US prolonged presence in Iraq and Afghanistan that I’ve encountered so far.
McMaster stresses the importance of understanding the motivations and interests of your adversaries (which he calls strategic empathy), and thinks that people have a tendency to think too much about the interests of others with respect to them (e.g. modeling other countries as being motivated only by the hatred of you, or modeling them as being in a bad situation only because you made things worse).
He is surprisingly enthusiastic about the fight against climate change—especially for someone who was at some point a member of the Trump administration. He expresses great interest in finding common ground between different factions. This makes me somewhat more hopeful about the possibility that the national security establishment could take misalignment risks (and not only the threat from competition with other countries) seriously.
(Not surprisingly) he is a big proponent of “US = freedom, good” and “China = ruthless dictatorship, bad”. He points to a few facts to support his statement, but defending this position is not his main focus, and he seems to think that there isn’t any uncertainty that the US being more powerful is clearly good. Trading off US power against global common goods (e.g. increased safety against global catastrophic risks) doesn’t seem like the kind of trade he would make.
Thanks! In general, I like these bite-sized summaries of various things you’re reading. Seems like a win for the commons, and I hope more folks engaging with governance/policy stuff do things like this.
I listened to the lecture series Assessing America’s National Security Threats by H. R. McMaster, a 3-star general who was the US national security advisor in 2017. It didn’t have much content about how to assess threats, but I found it useful to get a peek into the mindset of someone in the national security establishment.
Some highlights:
Even in the US, it sometimes happens that the strategic analysis is motivated by the views of the leader. For example, McMaster describes how Lyndon Johnson did not retreat from Vietnam early enough, in part because criticism of the war within the government was discouraged.
I had heard similar things for much more authoritarian regimes, but this is the first time I heard about something like that happening in a democracy.
The fix he suggests: always present at least two credible options (and maybe multiple reads on the situation) to the leader.
He claims that there wouldn’t have been an invasion of South Korea in 1950 if the US hadn’t withdrawn troops from there (despite intelligence reports suggesting this was a likely outcome of withdrawing troops). If it’s actually the case that intelligence was somewhat confident in its analysis of the situation, it’s crazy that it was dismissed like that—that should be points in favor of it being possible that the US government could be asleep at the wheel during the start of an intelligence explosion.
He uses this as a parallel to justify the relevance of the US keeping troops in Iraq/Afghanistan. He also describes how letting terrorist groups grow and have a solid rear base might make the defense against terrorism even more costly than keeping troops in this region. The analysis lacks the quantitative analysis required to make this a compelling case, but this is still the best defense of the US prolonged presence in Iraq and Afghanistan that I’ve encountered so far.
McMaster stresses the importance of understanding the motivations and interests of your adversaries (which he calls strategic empathy), and thinks that people have a tendency to think too much about the interests of others with respect to them (e.g. modeling other countries as being motivated only by the hatred of you, or modeling them as being in a bad situation only because you made things worse).
He is surprisingly enthusiastic about the fight against climate change—especially for someone who was at some point a member of the Trump administration. He expresses great interest in finding common ground between different factions. This makes me somewhat more hopeful about the possibility that the national security establishment could take misalignment risks (and not only the threat from competition with other countries) seriously.
(Not surprisingly) he is a big proponent of “US = freedom, good” and “China = ruthless dictatorship, bad”. He points to a few facts to support his statement, but defending this position is not his main focus, and he seems to think that there isn’t any uncertainty that the US being more powerful is clearly good. Trading off US power against global common goods (e.g. increased safety against global catastrophic risks) doesn’t seem like the kind of trade he would make.
Thanks! In general, I like these bite-sized summaries of various things you’re reading. Seems like a win for the commons, and I hope more folks engaging with governance/policy stuff do things like this.