Mending the Broken Dialogue
Report
Report

Mending the Broken Dialogue

Military Advice and Presidential Decision-Making

November 2016 , 73 Pages

Report

Overview

As commander in chief of the armed forces, the president of the United States bears great responsibility in determining when and how to use military force. To make such decisions, the president requires clear understanding of the risks, costs, and likely outcome of a military intervention. Because many presidents and senior civilian appointees lack military experience, they rely on senior military advisors to provide viable, realistic, and timely advice to inform critical decisions. Unfortunately, what the military leadership provides is often not what presidents are looking for.

Janine A. Davidson
Janine Davidson

Former Senior Fellow for Defense Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

Emerson T. Brooking

Research Fellow

Benjamin J. Fernandes

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

Whereas civilians expect a collaborative dialogue in which multiple options are presented to them over a short period of time, military officers are taught to deliver their “best military advice” only after developing a detailed plan. Developing such a plan takes longer than civilians anticipate, and this process can be stymied when presidents and their advisors are unable to provide the sort of detailed guidance that the military expects. Meanwhile, the president cannot determine the best guidance without first understanding the costs, risks, and benefits of each potential option. This chicken-and-egg dilemma is a perennial feature of civil-military decision-making.

Although friction often frustrates civil-military relations, it is an inevitable and important part of the policymaking process. The system breaks down when there is too much friction or too little: when civilian and military leaders descend into open conflict or when one side acquiesces to the other and embraces groupthink. The system works best when both sides in the civil-military dialogue are able to speak candidly in an environment that fosters empathy and empowerment.

Recommendations

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United States

In considering use-of-force decisions, presidents can no longer rely on the slow-moving gears of the traditional planning process. Neither can civilians remain ignorant of questions of manpower or logistics that lie at the heart of so many modern national security debates. Through improved education, strong executive leadership, and changes to procedure and doctrine, the civil-military dialogue can be mended in order to confront new challenges to national security.

  • Close the knowledge gap. Even high-level civilian officials may have had little prior exposure to military terminology, concepts, and basic planning assumptions. Civilian appointees should be offered regular opportunities to familiarize themselves with military parlance.
  • Build an effective national security team. Senior civilian and military leaders should attend a group retreat during presidential transition. These officials should continue attending regular trainings after assuming their formal duties, participating in mock exercises that test their ability to work together.
  • Set the tone of civil-military dialogue. A clearer distinction should be drawn between taskings (which are formal orders) and simple requests for information that need not always travel the official chain of command. Senior leaders should foster a permissive environment in which subordinate staff are encouraged to meet informally with their interagency counterparts, as well as collaborate on unorthodox ideas, even if such proposals stray from the party line.
  • Redesign the military options process. Military planning doctrine should be revised to allow the rough, order-of-magnitude options. Interagency options development cells should be established across the national security system, as should dedicated options development cells within the Department of Defense.
  • Facilitate interagency communications. Administrative barriers to collaboration, from lack of common email directories to redundant badge procedures, should be eliminated. Interagency partners should be ensured access to necessary classified communications systems.
  • Plant the seeds of future change. Professional military education should no longer teach an idealized version of the civil-military dialogue, but the reality. Foreign Service officers should receive training in military affairs much earlier in their careers. Most ambitiously, courses regarding the nature of warfare and U.S. national security should be encouraged in civilian colleges and universities.

Selected Figures From This Report

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. In May, the Trump administration killed the diffusion rule, days before it would have been set into motion, in part to facilitate the export of these cutting-edge chips abroad to the Gulf powers. This represents a fundamental pivot for AI policy, but potentially also in the logic of U.S. grand strategy vis-à-vis China. The most recent era of great power competition, the Cold War, was fundamentally bipolar and the United States leaned heavily on the principle of non-proliferation, particularly in the nuclear domain, to limit the possibility of new entrants. We are now playing by a new set of rules where the diffusion of U.S. technology—and an effort to box out Chinese technology—is of paramount importance. Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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