Heart attacks, prostate cancer, Jake Sullivan awake for a home invasion attempt at 4 AM because he was just up working on a random Tuesday night?

Is the national security bureaucracy in America unwell?

To discuss, I have on today John Gans, a former Pentagon speechwriter, who’s had many, many other jobs in Washington. He is also the author of the fantastic “White House Warriors,” a history of the National Security Council.

We get into:

Why the organizational design of the NSC leads to such crushing burdens for midlevel and senior staffers
The kinds of high-flyers that are drawn to the national security complex and what keeps them there
How POTUS’s time constraints impact decision-making
Why NSC’s historically are excellent at spotting problems but often overeager when crafting solutions
The NSC’s role in America’s “forever wars.”
Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, and Trump’s “maverick model” of running the NSC compared to the Eisenhower vision of “regular order”
How seemingly prosaic technological innovations like track changes and video conferencing have dramatically changed national security policymaking
How reading Shakespeare can improve the quality of our policy-making
What a better model could look like

Illustration from the New Yorker's recent feature on Sullivan. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/trial-by-combat

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Episode 177: The Presence of the Infinite with Steve McIntosh