Principals and Principles: Trump’s National Security

January 31, 2017–Second fiddle to the immense current controversy over President Donald J. Trump’s immigration action has been his initiative on national security. Here the firestorm concerned a Trump directive that added political operative Stephen K. Bannon to the Principals Committee of the National Security Council (NSC). At the same time the president demoted the incoming Director of National Intelligence and the general who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to merely occasional attendance on that same committee. Susan Rice, the national security adviser who served former president Barack Obama, labeled this action “stone cold crazy.”

Attracting the most attention is Stephen Bannon’s apparent promotion. As “chief strategist” he was supposed to be providing Mr. Trump with suitable advice. Now the Trump directive, called a “National Security Presidential Memorandum” (NSPM) not only “invites” Bannon to attend all NSC meetings, it makes him a member of the NSC Principals Committee, and Bannon’s deputy an invitee to sessions of the NSC Deputies Committee. In all this gnashing of teeth no one seems to have noticed that President Trump has also elevated his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, in the same way.

Common wisdom is that Mr. Bannon is becoming the unelected president, exercising all the power, without the title or, indeed, the people’s opportunity to vote on him. I actually think it is too soon to draw that conclusion. What can fairly be said is that President Trump seems to be about increasing the political content of NSC discussions. This is not new–and the media discussions so far have been extremely shallow. Yes, David Axelrod sat in on some NSC discussions, yes Karl Rove was kept out of some similar deliberations during George W. Bush’s time. But it is absurd to think that presidents have historically kept politics out of national security. Under Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski made a point of including political considerations in NSC staff work. Henry Kissinger, his predecessor, can be heard on the Nixon White House tapes talking politics quite often. President Carter also listened to chief of staff Hamilton Jordan on national security matters, making him a major player in Washington’s decisions on whether to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment, which became a catalyst for the Iran Hostage Crisis. Ronald Reagan used his top politicos on security missions repeatedly. One of them, James Baker III, actually became secretary of state when Reagan’s vice-president, George H. W. Bush, ascended to the presidency. And Bush’s son, “W,” used political aides as well. Andy Card delivered White House messages to the CIA, played a role in the “Niger uranium” affair that convinced CIA boss George Tenet to retire, and he served as utility infielder for the president. It’s the job.

On the other hand the pundits have captured the deeper importance of NSPM-2, the formal identity of Trump’s reorganization directive. It does bring politics more to the fore at the NSC. The presence of both Bannon and Priebus on the Principals committee is a first-order indicator that Trump’s Council will become one battleground where the White House pecking order will be fought over. But the elephant in the closet is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who is really the topmost adviser of all. An alternative explanation for the NSC imbroglio is it puts the big shot advisers in a ring to duke it out while Kushner consolidates his own power.

Stone cold crazy? Yes, at the level of mere national security. This will cost the nation in the quality of our foreign policy and the coherence of Pentagon efforts. But the judgment also depends on the president’s real aims. If they are political, this harebrained scheme may not be stupid at all. It puts big aspirants to power in a place where they can be tied to the ridiculous judgments that flow from this NSC–and then they can be pushed out of the Trump administration. That brings us to the question of principle: there is none here. It is an outrage to the American people to use national security and foreign policy as mousetraps to catch power players.

 

 

What Future in Trump’s “Respect” for CIA?

January 22, 2017–Inauguration Day has come and gone. Donald J. Trump is now–for real– the President of the United States. His administration started off with a bang. Mr. Trump used the CIA for a political stump speech, as he sent spin doctor Sean Spicer out to deal False News in support of a Trumpian assertion that inauguration crowds were larger than they were. That, in turn, was a gambit to divert attention from the Women’s March on Washington–and in more than 630 other places all over the world (eight people rallied in Irbil, Iraq; twenty-seven in Hanoi, Vietnam)–in all totaling ten times or more the number of people attending the Trump inaugural. These events, plus Trump’s accession to the presidency, cry out for fresh commentary.

Trump’s rise has been interpreted here as heralding a purge within the intelligence community. At the CIA yesterday, as protesters took over Washington, the president took pains to declare the opposite: “I am so behind you. You’re gonna get so much backing. Maybe you’re gonna say, please, don’t give us so much backing. . . .” Trump blamed his favorite enemies of the moment–the media–for the notion there is anything wrong between the president and the community of American spies.

Everything this man says requires interpretation. Never forget that. Just since the New Year Mr. Trump has accused the CIA of being Nazis, enclosed references to U.S. intelligence and intelligence agencies within quotation marks (as in”intelligence”), and said outgoing agency director John Brennan is a leaker. Last year–as covered in this space more than once–Trump leveled more charges at the spies, including lambasting them for decade-old mistakes and insinuating they are the same old re-treads. These are things Mr. Trump wrote, explicitly, in his tweets, or said in public, in speeches or elsewhere. Yesterday all of that did not exist–in Trump’s eye the media had made it up.

Artiste Andy Warhol once famously observed that everyone seeks fifteen minutes of fame. To Trump’s mind that equates to fifteen minutes of friendship. You’re only a friend while you say the right thing–or until Trump himself changes tack, recasting you as enemy. Just look at what happened to New Jersey Chris Christie–once chairman of Trump’s transition team and expecting to be appointed Attorney General, on Friday Christie was not even on the inaugural platform (at least in the picture published in the New York Times). As for the CIA–wait for it!!!–Donald Trump’s visit lasted exactly fifteen minutes. He did not even take off his overcoat for the festivity. Either Trump wore an armored vest under the greatcoat, visiting the CIA’s den of vipers; or he intended the whistlestop from the outset, which brings us back to the political nature of this event, in my opinion futilely designed to distract from the Women’s March.

Declaiming in front of the agency’s hallowed wall of stars–known and still-clandestine officers who have given their lives in United States service–Trump spoke only briefly  before he veered off on tangents–even more extravagant falsities about his crowds at the inauguration, and self-congratulatory puffery on his “intelligence.” But while he was actually still on point, the president hinted at several of his intentions for CIA. Returning to waterboarding and torture was one, stronger action against the islamists of ISIS was another–this time taking their oil. (Why seizing Syrian oil on behalf of an oil-rich U.S. would be necessary, and how that might be feasible without pipelines and in the face of Syrian national sovereignty, plus how those intentions would complicate the problem for CIA officers trying to recruit Syrian militants, are all questions that speak to the new president’s intelligence.)

Bottom line: President Trump intends actions that will require greater CIA efforts. He needs the CIA. But at the same time he distrusts the agency and its intelligence–witness Trump’s steadfast rejection of the Russian hack. The role of the hack, and of FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour reinvestigation of Hillary Clinton, in Trump’s election requires getting rid of those who can tell the tale. That need, in addition to Mr. Trump’s ephemeral but constant course changes, will ensure the purge goes on. The deputy to the Director of National Intelligence, and the chief of staff to the CIA director have already sent in their resignations. No doubt a stream of other mid-ranking and senior officials will follow. A little bit down the line, the result will be that a corps of junior officers faces the president’s demands for extreme, even extra-legal action. Not only will there be more stars on the CIA wall, there will be more agency officers in the soup. And where will President Trump be then? My guess is not “backing” the CIA any more than he is backing Paul Manafort or Roger Stone in the Russian influence peddling scandal. Those gentlemen are now non-persons in the Trumpian universe.

Gamer’s Corner: Pacific-Go

January 14, 2017–I learned from a friend this week that an interview with my colleague Lenny Glynn has appeared in the GMT Games magazine known as C3i. In his interview he comments on our design Pacific-Go. This game has yet to be covered on the drop-down “Games” menu on my website because it has yet to be published. But since Lenny has brought the game into the light, I’m sure interested fans would like to hear something about it.

This is one of several designs from the Prados-Glynn team. For the old Victory Games, later absorbed into Avalon Hill, we did the power politics game CIA. For SPI we teamed up to produce Spies. In each case Lenny ruminated and proposed, and I then turned the idea into a real game. For Pacific-Go, it was a time when Lenny was enamored with the classic game Go, which he played incessantly (only a few times with me). The rumination was, why couldn’t there be a game that retuned Go to an historical subject. That reasonable idea triggered the thought that the classic game, being of Oriental origin, ought to be coupled to a theme from that history. The game originated in China, but there are no subjects in Chinese history that resonate to an American audience–and we needed the latter to make a commercial success. Go arrived in Japan before 1,000 C.E., however, and the Pacific War from 1941 to 1945 immediately leapt out as a potential theme. That is the game I designed.

Three essential elements characterize the Go game. One is its square spaces where the play occurs on the intersections of the lines rather than within the enclosed area. A second is the “liberties,” the idea that game pieces (“stones”) can exist so long as open interstices exist around them (the core concept being that they can thus draw supply). The opponent captures stones when they become surrounded and have no liberties. The third element is the measurement of victory by the number of stones captured. I felt those elements could easily be incorporated in a board game.

I’m not going to give away all the fine mechanics of Pacific-Go. But a few things are suitable. This is designed as a strategic game of the Pacific Theater. Players have both a level of resources set by the scenario plus an increase based on control of objectives. The full number of stones that can be in play is the Force Pool, which players procure given their resources. Stones compose chains which must have liberties to survive. Captured stones leave the game. We have replaced the sequential turns of the classic game with simultaneous movement. There is a scenario that actually creates an historical situation for 1941. The vanilla nature of stones in the original has been modified. The game ends after a number of quarterly turns equivalent to the length of the war or the accomplishment of certain goals, whichever comes first. Victory is measured in the value of stones captured and objectives controlled.

This is a fast-playing, dynamic game, that can be played twice, or even three times, in an afternoon. That’s very cool for a strategic game. I hope someday you’ll be able to play it.

 

Fearful Leader and Bombastic Duck

January 14, 2017–The past week has been stuffed with events, each one controversial, each more outrageous than before. You can imagine where this is headed. General James Clapper, the Fearful Leader, pulled his punches all through the summer and into the fall on the Russian hacking caper, and ended up making desperate phone appeals to the president-elect. Donald Trump, who quacks like that other duck, and is much more a bombast, played his standard game of bait-and-switch, saying one thing to your face but twisting meanings, words, and whole ideas, in public or on twitter.

The prediction here a week ago was that Director of National Intelligence Clapper would get 24 hours to bask in the sun for the intelligence community’s briefing to Trump on the Russians, before president-elect Trump backed away from his initial acknowledgement of the assessment and resumed playing the intelligence as politics rather than a national security determination. That prediction erred–Trump made one statement shortly after the briefing appearing to accept its substance, while insisting that lots of countries do cyberspying and that the Russians had had no impact on the U.S. election outcome. He held off somewhat longer on returning to suit, with surrogate Kellyanne Conway taking the role of attack dog dismissing the intelligence.

But the prediction here was on the money in terms of the direction The Donald took. First, dilute the intelligence by widening the circle of suspects beyond Russia, while insisting on a lack of specific evidence implicating Putin. Next, falsify the DNI/CIA reporting by putting words in the mouths of Fearful Leader and the others–claiming that U.S. intelligence had concluded the Russian hack had not influenced the election, where, in fact, the spooks explicitly said they had made no attempt to evaluate the political impact of the hack. Trump personally had belittled the intelligence in advance of his briefing on January 6, with the phony assertion the spies had postponed the brief, plus the jab they must need extra time to put together credible charges.

President-elect Trump had his own event scheduled, a news conference on Wednesday, January 11. On the eve of that the web news site BuzzFeed released a long paper detailing alleged Donald Trump misdeeds and embarrassments the Russians had supposedly documented and held over his head. The paper, written by a former British spy, had begun as an effort by Trump opponents to gather ammunition to use against him, but the spook eventually found the allegations so disturbing he took the document to the FBI. By all accounts vague rumors drawn from this paper had been all over Washington for months, and both the FBI and media outlets had attempted, without success, to authenticate the charges.

Back on January 7, after the intelligence community meeting with Mr. Trump, General Clapper’s office released a 25-page unclassified version of the secret information it had given the president-elect. The public document did not contain a two-page annex that several sources now mention as a summary to Mr. Trump of  what the oppo research paper might reveal. Multiple sources also affirm that FBI Director James Comey took Mr. Trump aside at the conclusion of the briefing to warn him that damaging information was out there and could surface at any time. The Donald was soon tweeting of a “total political witch hunt,” terming the oppo paper “fake news,” and asserting he had heard nothing about it until the document leaked.

The president-elect’s news conference became a shambles. Mr. Trump seemed to accept that there had been a Russian hack, but then repeatedly went back to his formula that anyone could have done it. He harped on the notion the hacking had not altered the election outcome. He accused media outright of purveying “fake news” for reporting the existence of the oppo paper. He asserted he’d known nothing about it. By the following day Kellyanne Conway was speaking of intelligence officials leaking for political purposes. Trump personally took up that theme yesterday–Friday the 13th–tweeting “Totally made up facts . . . probably leaked by ‘Intelligence.'”

Director Clapper phoned Mr. Trump to remind him the FBI had told him of the oppo paper material. The president-elect represented that as the opposite. Ms Conway piled on to add to claims the intelligence community is leaking information they are sworn to keep secret. This extra irony is especially painful because–as you will have read here several times now–my view is that Mr. Trump’s political wriggling has been facilitated by Director Clapper’s excessive concern for secrecy, which left such vagueness and ambiguity in intelligence community declarations about Russian hacking as to leave room for some plausibility in The Duck’s defense of Moscow.

The bottom line is this: Donald Trump and his surrogates seem completely unable to distinguish between what is political–whether or not Russian hacking turned the election of 2016–and what is national security–the threat to American institutions demonstrated by a foreign ability to enter and manipulate the top ranks of U.S. political parties. Mr. Trump’s entire concern is political. This reinforces the point made in this space in a previous posting–the new chief executive will be imposing a political litmus test on the intelligence brought to him.

For being right, Clapper’s spooks are in deeper doo-doo than ever.

Trump and the Hack: Whose Witch Hunt?

January 6, 2017–Yesterday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee and, referring to president-elect Donald Trump’s jibes at U.S. intelligence, said “I think there is a difference between skepticism and disparagement.” As Clapper said that you could see Robert S. Litt, the DNI’s general counsel, sitting behind him. Litt has been referred to here as a consigliere, and also sat at Clapper’s side when the Fearful Leader perjured himself, swearing to a different Senate committee a few years ago that U.S. intelligence had no collection programs aimed at masses of American citizens. This time around you could see Litt let his head fall, hold it in his hand, and shake it “no.” His gestures suggested the consigliere had a bad feeling about what was happening around him.

Today that is confirmed. General Clapper and the mavens of the intelligence community made their pilgrimage to Trump Tower in New York and presented their detailed findings on the Russian hack to the incoming president. I had thought Trump would give them the courtesy of at least pretending to think over their brief for a day or so but, no, hardly were they out the door when Mr. Trump disparaged the spooks’ findings on Russian hacking as a witch hunt.

Trump looks set to win the public relations contest. Not only have his spin doctors–and the president-elect himself–hammered constantly to repackage a question of a covert influence operation from an historical adversary as a mere case of political sour grapes, but U.S. spooks have left themselves vulnerable to that tactic. The DNI has now had three runs at this affair: a joint statement he issued with the Director of Homeland Security on October 7, 2016; a joint report with DHS last week, and yesterday’s Senate hearing. In all three instances Clapper chose to go with anodyne pronouncements that gave hardly any detail regarding the Russian hack that affected an American presidential election, buried those details released among a mass of generic B-S regarding protective measures against hacking, or submerged it among descriptions of hacking by other states and entities. On top of that DNI Clapper failed to restrain FBI director James Comey from the related action of calling in the computers of the ex of a senior Hillary Clinton aide which, apart from anything else, served to muddy the waters about charges of a Russian hack. All of these actions exhibited exaggerated fears for secrecy–and show why here we call the DNI a Fearful Leader. The effect of Fearful Leader’s actions and omissions has been to leave daylight for Mr. Trump to manipulate this matter as an artifact of politics rather than national security.

Donald Trump’s stance of stiffing those he regards as witch hunters now requires him to point out the real enemies. Top of the list has to be U.S. intelligence. You can see the purge coming.

 

Part 2

January 7, 2017–In his Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times, former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell write, “Mr. Trump’s attacks on the agency surprised me, but they shouldn’t have.” Precisely. This space has been commenting on the attacks for many weeks now. The president-elect chose to make intelligence a political football as an alternative to accepting a serious objection to his simplistic attitude toward Vladimir Putin and Russia. The head-in-the-sand obtuseness of U.S. intelligence under Fearful Leader Clapper helped make Trump’s maneuver feasible.

Yesterday we commented on the shortcomings of previous releases and reports from Director Clapper that were so bland and uninformative they permitted Mr. Trump to dance away from their implications. Yesterday DNI Clapper and his agency directors had their detailed briefing with the president-elect. Afterwards the DNI released an unclassified background paper that purported to detail the charges against Russia for hacking the U.S. election. The news commentaries today, Mr. Morrell’s article, and many other speculations, are based on that summary paper.

Unfortunately the DNI presentation again illustrates the same deficiencies already noted here. Barely more than one quarter of the 25-page “intelligence community assessment” is actually substantive. There is almost as much blank paper (cover and back covers, contents, title pages) as that. Five more pages are given over to explanations of what is an intelligence report, a scope note, and tabulations of the probability levels the spooks attach to judgments that range from “remote” to “almost certain.” By far the meatiest element in this report is an only tangentially-related paper–years old we are told, and as lengthy as the entire substantive hacking report–of the way the broadcast outlet RT Television essentially functions in the same fashion as the Voice of America.

The substantive report contains three “key judgments.” These were by nature assessments, not facts. The only real factual statements were that Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking campaign, and that the Russians did not target or compromise systems involved in vote tallying. The analysis underlying these conclusions lies in a five-page paper jointly produced by the CIA, NSA, and FBI, labeled “a declassified version of a highly classified assessment . . . [that] does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the [Russian] influence campaign.” Aside from such public record details as when various Russian outlets, including RT Television, began their coverage of the U.S. election, and characterizations of the content of Russian media coverage and the statements of notables, there is very little in this report. In terms of the massive hacking, the most substantive elements say that Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee networks in July 2015 and maintained that access at least through June 2016. Russian military intelligence (GRU) joined in by March 2016, compromised personal email accounts of officials and party figures, and within two months “had exfiltrated large volumes of data.” That’s it.

“Scope Notes” are of little value when their purpose is to disguise lack of content. U.S. intelligence understandably wanted to safeguard its sources, and wished to preserve a step-level distinction between the depth of the information it provides top officials versus the public, but General Clapper again failed to make his case to the public, and to Donald Trump the issue is politics, not intelligence. Trump’s response was to declare he will order an investigation of how NBC News found out about some things in Clapper’s report. He referenced hacking by outsiders (including, but beyond) Russia, and said he will seek a report by late April 2017 regarding general countermeasures against hacks. The only Trump statement recognizable from the U.S. intelligence report is his insistence no voting machines were tampered with.

 

Nuclear Dilemmas: Between the Tragic and the Absurd

January 1, 2017–We are moving to a new presidency. Our new president promises a widescale construction program in new nuclear weapons, reversing the trend of reducing dependence on these dangerous instrumentalities that has been underway since Ronald Reagan’s time. In part Donald J. Trump seems to regard this as an answer to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s similar promises to build new nukes to counter the system of U.S. missile detection radars and defense mechanisms going into place in Eastern Europe. In part a nuclear buildup will form part of a larger, poorly conceived, Trump administration Pentagon budget that will simply increase spending in every category rather than imposing fiscal discipline on programs that have long run without it.

Our outpourings of grief for people lost in the past year have been heavily tilted toward musicians, actors and cultural personalities. Two of the names missing on those lists could have been vastly helpful in the period we are about to enter. They passed away within a week of each other in December 2016–not quite as close as Carrie Fisher and her mom, Debbie Reynolds, but awfully evocative. One was Harvard economist Thomas C. Schelling, the other Sidney D. Drell, the theoretical physicist who trained at the University of Illinois. Schelling made seminal contributions to game theory, including the escalation dominance and hedging mechanisms that lie at the heart of nuclear strategy. With Bernard Brodie and Herman Kahn, Schelling can indeed be viewed as a father of this school–and in fact he was a plankholder in the creation of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Drell became a founder also–of the JASON Group of scientific experts who counseled the Pentagon on all manner of issues. Drell’s contributions to particle physics were considerable and he remained associated until his death with the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But for our purposes today it is Drell’s forthright advocacy–over decades–of nuclear arms reductions that is important. He sought earnestly for a world without nuclear weapons. Both provide insights to us today.

First, what is Trump talking about as a nuclear buildup? Only certain things are possible. The most obvious is expansion of the ballistic missile defenses currently being installed in Alaska and Eastern Europe. These are represented as oriented toward stopping potential North Korean or Iranian missile attacks. But these deployments are precisely the ones that have aggravated Putin–and accounted for a good measure of the decline in Russian-American relations that began during George W. Bush’s presidency and until now has not been reversed. As president, especially one who esteems Putin as he claims to do, Mr. Trump would be unlikely to focus his buildup here.

What other possibilities are there? As a matter of fact there are no new-generation U.S. ballistic missiles, bombers, or other weapons carriers under design or in production. Efforts for over a decade have actually centered on creating more powerful conventional explosives to de-nuclearize ICBMs and SLBMs. New nuclear weapons designs have been projected, and may have been modeled using the more sophisticated simulations that have become our substitute for actual weapons tests. These are the only nuclear force elements with anything like near-term prospects, though building next-generation warheads is often spoken of as a multi-decade initiative. If so, a buildup based on these elements is likely to incur Russian anger today, while not offering any practical result for a long interval past Donald Trump’s presidency. The engineering development of new nuclear weapons would increase demands for real, physical nuclear tests, and that, too, would spark Russian hostility. Sidney Drell would surely label that course absurd.

The last time the U.S. was embarked on nuclear deployments we were on the verge of producing new-generation guidance systems when arms reduction agreements and the end of the Cold War changed the dynamics of international relations. A resurrection of accuracy-enhancing programs (such as the Maneuverable re-entry vehicle, or MARV)would be a likely avenue for the new arms race. The destructive power of nuclear weapons depends on a combination of accuracy and yield–and of the two accuracy is the more probable near-term development. However, Mr. Putin, in threatening to counter U.S. missile defenses, has to be aware that maneuverable re-entry vehicles (though expensive) offer greater benefits than other types of penetration aids. Igniting an arms competition for MARVs is not in U.S. interest. Tom Schelling would mark it down as a stupid, tragic, strategy, in particular because it would trend toward unraveling many of the confidence-building measures of past decades (emptying the pre-stored target parameters of guidance systems; taking missiles off alert status, etc).

A nuclear arms buildup will not improve United States security. To speak of engaging in an arms race “until” other countries “understand” nuclear weapons, as Mr. Trump has done, is the height of folly.