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Since 1986, presidents have been required to submit an annual National Security Strategy (NSS). Recent years have seen a proliferation of national strategies of other kinds, linked in part to the NSS. The National Security Council, led by the national security advisor and employing its committee system and the interagency process, develops the NSS. The integration of all the necessary elements within the NSS involves an opaque and irregular set of rolling negotiations among national security principals. The 2006 NSS is best viewed in comparison to the 2002 version, which was issued in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It stipulates that the United States is at war with transnational terrorism fueled by a perversion of Islam and proposes stable democracy as the primary solution, supported by aggressive efforts to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the option of taking preemptive military action. Criteria for assessing national security strategies can be process oriented or results based.
A national security strategy (NSS) purports to represent a "nation's plan for the coordinated use of all the instruments of state power-nonmilitary as well as military-to pursue objectives that defend and advance its national interest."1 All countries have them, either implicitly or explicitly. Implicit strategy is what we find by observing a country over time as it interacts with its security environment (i.e., with other countries and forces that might threaten it or interfere with its objectives). The game of describing a country's implicit strategy is open to all players. For example, scholars generally agree that U.S. security strategy centered on deterrence during the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, however, there has been less consensus.
Explicit strategy, our concern here, is something else. It refers to a country's public, authoritative declarations about the manner in which it intends to achieve its security objectives within the international security environment. These are the "official" strategies published by governments. Explicit strategy can be found in a variety of public documents. Many countries refer to their NSS as a "white paper" for defense. After experimenting with such titles as "A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement" (1994-96) and "A National Security Strategy for a New Century" (1997-99), the United States has settled (since 2002) on...