One of seminal works coming out of the Vietnam war was David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest about the highly intelligent, highly educated “whiz kids” that were brought into our national security structure in the 1950s and 1960s and ended up tangled up in the unsolvable Vietnam War. This tendency for the foreign policy team to include highly educated specialists was reinforced by Nixon hiring the scholar Henry Kissinger as his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State. This has become somewhat of a tradition, where the National Security Advisor is often a reputable academic like Rostow (PhD, Yale), Kissinger (PhD Harvard) or Brzezinski (PhD, Harvard). Even Trump’s second national security advisor, the legendary three-star general H. R. McMaster, had a PhD and had published one book.
So the tradition, for better or worse, is that the U.S. national security team consists a smattering of “whiz kids”, academics and some of the “Best and the Brightest.” This tradition does not appear to be closely adhered to now. The Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is a lawyer (although from Harvard) and career politician. The newly nominated National Security Advisor is Robert O’Brien, also a lawyer. The previous holder of that office, the infamous John Bolton, was also a lawyer. The head of the Defense Department is Mark Esper, who has a PhD in Public Policy.
I will leave it to the reader as to whether having a bunch of Harvard academics with a background in International Relations results in better foreign policy. I just note that this is now no longer the tradition. It is mostly lawyers now.
P.S. A few related posts:
“I will leave it to the reader as to whether having a bunch of Harvard academics with a background in International Relations results in better foreign policy.”
From the perspective of this reader, it depends upon who is hired by the bunch of Harvard academics to conduct the actual work and whether the workflow gets structured in an effective way (including incorporating the academics’ models such that form follows function) and how effective they are at communicating with each other and with foreign and domestic stake holders (including the President and the Congress, not that my dated experience with the Foreign Service recruitment examiners suggests that it is desired that foreign Service Officers appreciate the importance of the foreign policy role of Congress : – )
HI – well Pompeo and Esper are both professional soldiers to start and only lawyers later.But i agree with your general opinion – what we lack are professional students of strategy who also have combat experience and high level – theater and above – experience in management