Overview

U.S. Army War College How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents In some manner, shape, or form, every nation state in the international system has a national security strategy or strategies. These strategies are intended to guide the state as it makes its way through the labyrinth of challenges that every nation state faces in the 21st century. The strategy could represent the nation's overall grand strategy or it could be a national security-related strategy for one particular issue, like force structure development for the armed forces. Strategy making is an art; not a science. Sometimes these strategies work and sometimes they do not. Some are effective and efficient as desired and others are less so. The focus for this assessment is how a nation state can craft the most effective and efficient national security-type strategy possible. To address these key questions, the national security strategy development processes in this monograph were examined and contrasted in five different nation-states to determine the methodologies they employed. For each case study, members of the government who actually worked on the development of the national strategy document in question were interviewed. These individuals-civil servants, career military officers, and senior political appointees-all had a story to tell about the separate approaches to strategy formulation. In the analysis of the strategy development processes utilized by Australia, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States, it became apparent that there were both similarities and differences in the manner that each nation conducted its strategy formulation. But most important, each one of national strategy development processes was found to contain elements that could have real value for those countries not employing those particular approaches. Australia and the UK were superb in ensuring true whole of government coordination, as well as concurrent application of the government's budget process and the formal administration of a risk assessment for the given strategy. Australia and South Africa did a superb job in bringing civil society into their document formulation processes. Brazil was exceptional in the creation of detailed ways and means critical for strategy implementation. Finally, the U.S. approach included addressing all elements of national power, as well as the identification of potential strategy modifiers if the national strategy was found not to be working in certain areas. Given the complexities of the 21st century in the national security arena, the Strategic Studies Institute believes that assessments like the one you are about to read will be crucial to both practitioners and academics alike to gain greater understanding for the most effective and efficient approaches to national strategy making in the 21st century.

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