When Organizations Decide for Themselves

How can organizations decide except when they receive guidance passed down by top leaders? Consider a real-world case in which Estonia accused Russia of a border incursion to snatch one of its intelligence officers. We may speak of “Estonia” accusing “Russia” of kidnapping an Estonian intelligence officer on the Estonian side of the border – or of Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of doing so – but, in reality, this alleged action would have been carried out by a governmental organization. Assuming for the sake of argument that the allegation is true (the Russians claim that the Estonian agent was apprehended on their side of the border), then perhaps this was a deliberate provocation ordered by President Putin with some deliberate purpose in mind.²² For more information on this incident and its aftermath, see “Russia Jails Estonian Intelligence Officer Tallinn Says was Abducted over Border,” The Guardian, August 19, 2015, at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/russia-jails-estonian-police-officer-allegedly-abducted-border-eston-kohver. Yet it is also not inconceivable that Russian intelligence services or special operations military forces may have acted on their own initiative, perhaps based on general procedures, or else on the strict (or loose) interpretation of standing rules of engagement, all without the specific authorization or knowledge of President Putin. In this case, the Kremlin and Russian Foreign Ministry would not have been at all prepared to deal with the diplomatic fallout. Note that these two alternative explanations would dramatically alter our understanding of Russian motives.

In actuality, many observers in the United States and Europe not only accepted the Estonian version of events, but assumed that this was a clear instance of deliberate provocation by President Putin, indicative of a broader Russian strategy to chip away at Estonian sovereignty and security, its membership of NATO notwithstanding. But what if, hypothetically, it was not a deliberate action initiated by, or at least with the knowledge of, the Kremlin? Returning to the above case of President Obama’s first trip to Iraq, how might things have gone differently if Prime Minister Maliki had interpreted President Obama’s refusal to come to him, as diplomatic protocol dictated, as a deliberate slight? After all, looking at the situation through the unitary state or cognitive lenses, this would be a perfectly logical supposition.

This sort of organizational influence happens frequently, especially in large and far-flung national security systems such as that of the United States. As in the presidential visit to Baghdad that never made it to Baghdad, while everything may happen in the name of the president, the president, as an individual, is aware of only a fraction of the decisions that are made every day. The same is largely true of his top aides, including the leaders of the key departments and agencies, only slightly less so.

Acknowledging the role of organizations and their influence on human behavior helps us to understand a whole host of incidents – puzzling to those applying the unitary state perspective even in combination with cognitive factors – in which a state takes foreign policy actions that appear to be contradictory or incoherent. Why, on October 27, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis when both the United States and the Soviet Union were on hair-trigger nuclear alerts, was the United States still sending spy aircraft to probe Soviet air defenses in the Pacific? These flights resulted in an accidental penetration of Soviet airspace and an hour and a half overflight of the Soviet Far East by an American U-2 aircraft that, given the situation, could have provoked a nuclear response. Why, in 1999, after having worked so hard to create conditions for the first direct presidential election in Yemen after years of internal conflict and strife, would the United States consider holding a military exercise simulating an invasion of the country two days before balloting was to begin? Why, in June 2008, at a particularly sensitive point in negotiations between the United States and Iraq over the future security relationship between the two countries – including the legal framework for the continued presence of US forces in Iraq – would the United States launch a raid in the hometown of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, killing his cousin and so jeopardizing months of painstaking negotiations?³³ For the Cuban Missile Crisis incident, see Michael Dobbs, Why We Should Still Study the Cuban Missile Crisis, US Institute of Peace Special Report 205, June 2008, 3, 8; for the Iraq incident, see Sky, The Unraveling, 259–260; for Yemen, see Shoon Murray and Anthony Quainton, “Combatant Commanders, Ambassadorial Authority and the Conduct of Diplomacy,” in Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy? eds. Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014), 181. These three incidents, which we will return to later in this chapter, cannot be easily explained by the dictates of the unitary state paradigm. It is only by adding the organizational process perspective that we can illuminate these occurrences in ways that make sense.

Moving Beyond the Unitary or Personified State

The vast majority of foreign policy decisions are made at a far remove from the rarefied atmosphere of the Oval Office and its environs. Numerous less momentous foreign policy decisions are made, day in and day out, at lower levels of government. Whether these involve routine matters – for example, approving or denying an export license application from a US company that wants to sell advanced technology with military applications to a foreign company – or are in reaction to some minor foreign policy crisis – for example, Peace Corps volunteers being arrested in Ghana on charges of murder – the process leading to these decisions will be qualitatively different from those rising to the top levels. In other words, by fixating so much on high-level decisions of all kinds, our understanding of foreign policymaking skews toward an unrepresentative (or at least incomplete) class of decisions in which lower-level organizational influences are not adequately taken into account.

As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the shortcomings of the unitary state perspective (widely known as the rational actor model), led Graham Allison to develop additional models of decision-making that take the analyst inside the “black box” of the Executive Branch to examine the behavior of the organizations and individuals that comprise the American government and are key players in enacting policy. Most crucially, Allison emphasized the idea that “Governmental action does not presuppose governmental intention.”⁴⁴ Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edn (New York: Longman, 1999), 306. Governmental action may not even reflect the intent or preferences of leaders or senior officials. Allison contrasted a view of foreign policy as deliberate decisions with one that allowed foreign policy to consist of actions taken in the name of the state by organizations within the national security apparatus without the conscious choice – or perhaps even knowledge – of senior figures in government.

Allison attempted to address these deficits of the unitary state perspective by proposing his “Model II,” which he called the organizational behavior model. It focuses on the fact that rather than being a monolith, the American “[g]overnment is a vast conglomerate of loosely allied organizations, each with a substantial life of its own.”⁵⁵ Ibid., 143. This perspective is reflected in media coverage of national security and foreign policy when we hear about how the State Department is limiting the number of visas issued, or the Treasury Department is imposing sanctions, or that the US Navy is conducting a freedom of navigation exercise (FONOPS) in the South China Sea.

Allison’s Model II was strongly influenced by the work of the Carnegie School of economics, which examined how limits on human cognitive ability constrain human decision-making, sometimes known as “bounded rationality” and discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to leader cognition. In particular, scholars of the Carnegie School examined how organizations both help humans overcome the limits of bounded rationality, but are also themselves subject to similar limits on rational decision-making. More recently, scholars working in this paradigm have asked questions such as: where do the procedures enacted by organizations come from, and when are they malleable? When and why does organizational structure lead to failure?⁶⁶ Timothy J. McKeown, “Plans and Routines, Bureaucratic Bargaining, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Journal of Politics 63(4): 1163–1190; C. F. Larry Heimann, “Understanding the Challenger Disaster: Organizational Structure and the Design of Reliable Systems,” American Political Science Review 87(2): 421–435. Forming organizations is one way that people attempt to improve their ability to collect and process information, make decisions, and take on complex activities. As we will see in this chapter, organizations do, in fact, allow humans to accomplish tasks that would be impossible without a formal coordination mechanism. But they also face their own version of cognitive limits, which foreign policy analysts and practitioners would do well to be aware of.

If the unitary state perspective starts from the top down, seeing the state as one massive unitary organism whose parts are subordinated to a common understanding of a shared national interest, then this third perspective we are now introducing flips this paradigm by starting from the bottom up. The United States created the world’s largest national security bureaucracy. From a network of globe-spanning combatant commands to a host of very specialized agencies focusing on discrete diplomatic, defense, development, intelligence, or technology tasks, there are literally millions of people handling different aspects of US foreign and national security policy.⁷⁷ See Derek S. Reveron, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, and Mackubin T. Owens, US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), esp. 73, 118, 231. Yet most of these subordinate national security officials are not entrusted with responsibility for the entire national security enterprise, but instead with discrete, specific tasks and missions. They are evaluated not on the national security of the nation as a whole, but rather on how closely they have accomplished these specific tasks. They relate to foreign policy through their organization’s mandate for action and, in turn, are conditioned, trained, and incentivized to see national security through the lens of their specific organization or command, as reflected in each one’s specialized processes and procedures.⁸⁸ I. M. Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy: The Politics of Organizational Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 70.

For the purposes of this text, we have renamed Allison’s organizational behavior model the organizational process perspective to more clearly distinguish this perspective from the closely related bureaucratic politics and subordinate bureaucratic politics perspectives, which we take up in Chapters 6 and 8, respectively. Bureaucratic politics will deal with the question of how individuals in senior positions represent their agency’s bureaucratic interest and bargain over the shape and content of policy decisions. Subordinate bureaucratic politics will explore how such bureaucratic interests and bargaining may differ at lower levels of foreign policymaking. In contrast to both of these perspectives centering on reconciling bureaucratic interests, organizational process examines how organizational structure and culture condition and shape both procedures and the people who are charged with carrying out the tasks and mandates of the specific organization. It is based on I. M. Destler’s cogent observation that people’s “perspectives grow narrower the further down in the hierarchy they sit,” and the focus will not be on the proverbial “big picture” but on adherence to the organization’s rules and preferences.⁹⁹ Ibid., 57. The organizational process perspective views foreign policy actions as organizational outputs – the result of organizations – through the individuals within them – carrying out business as usual. In sum, this perspective conceives of large national security organizations as vast creatures of habit and routine; they are inherently habitual actors.

Mission and Organizational Essence

Government agencies are generally created by the president or by Congress with some goal in mind – for example, to gather and analyze intelligence, or to maintain and safeguard nuclear weapons. This goal or purpose is the organization’s mission – the central task it is meant to accomplish on behalf of its elected overseers. This purpose, however, is frequently stated in vague terms, particularly if a broad base of political support was required to create and fund the agency. Additionally, the mission on which Congress or the president wants an organization to focus can change over time, as the president or the composition of Congress changes, or as international or domestic conditions change. Frequently, the high-level goals with which the organization is tasked “may be so banal that they can be conceived or framed as a mission for the organization in many different ways.”¹⁴¹⁴ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 150.

An agency will often seek to self-define its mission in a narrower frame; as, for instance, the State Department’s traditional definition of foreign affairs as primarily diplomatic contact between governments.¹⁵¹⁵ Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 161–162. Even then, however, what, precisely, does it mean to engage in foreign diplomacy or to safeguard the US homeland? Both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security claim to be engaged in the latter task, for instance, but with the Department of Defense generally focusing on securing the country from external military attack, while Homeland Security takes the domestic counterterrorism mission. And yet the Department of Defense has a domestically focused sub-unit, US Northern Command, and Homeland Security frequently engages overseas. Organizations, like people, need operational goals – those whose accomplishment can be clearly linked to actions taken – to guide their everyday behavior. Over time, the agencies themselves “influence the prioritization of purposes into a definition of their ‘mission’ and are especially influential when the mission is translated, for a specific task, into more concrete, operational objectives.”¹⁶¹⁶ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 151.

Morton Halperin, who is a noted foreign policy scholar and practitioner in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, coined the idea of organizational essence to describe “the view held by the dominant group within the organization of what its mission and capabilities should be.”¹⁷¹⁷ Morton Halperin and Priscilla Clapp, with Arnold Kantor, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 27. In other words, an organization’s essence is the way the organization sees itself – the organization’s fundamental purpose as agreed upon by the majority of the organization’s members. There is a rule of thumb that argues that an organization should be able to summarize its purpose for existence on a bumper sticker. For example, the essence of the Department of Defense might be “defending the nation against military threats,” while the essence of the Treasury Department might be “safeguarding the nation’s money.”

Organizations may go through times of turmoil when they contain multiple factions competing to shape and define the organization’s essence. For example, without a near-peer competitor after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the face of decreasing concern about global nuclear war, the US Air Force lost the part of its essence within “flying combat missions” that was focused on the delivery of nuclear weapons. Factions within the organization debated whether the organization’s essence should center on conventional bombing or tactical air support – in the end, conventional bombing won – but at the expense of preserving expertise in the nuclear mission.¹⁸¹⁸ Halperin et al., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 27. The impact of this shift on the nuclear mission in the Air Force was examined in the Report of the Secretary of Defense Task Force on DOD Nuclear Weapons Management. Phase I: The Air Force’s Nuclear Mission (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2008), esp. 29–48. On the air support question, see, for instance, Benjamin Fernandes, “The Future of Close Air Support is not What the Air Force Thinks,” War on the Rocks, June 18, 2015, at: https://warontherocks.com/2015/06/the-future-of-close-air-support-is-not-what-the-air-force-thinks. Similarly, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has long had three factions competing to define the agency’s overall mission: is it to gather and collect intelligence, or to analyze this intelligence, or to engage in clandestine operations? At various points in its history, the CIA has prioritized one of those missions as its core function to the detriment of the other two.¹⁹¹⁹ See, for instance, the discussion in Glenn Hastedt, “CIA’s Organizational Culture and the Problem of Reform,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 9(3) (1996): 249–269. See also the discussion in Halperin et al., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 34. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the balance of power within the organization has again been shifting toward the covert operators, given the CIA’s role in drone operations, and the encroachment of multiple other intelligence agencies on its intelligence analysis functions.²⁰²⁰ The CIA, for instance, has strongly resisted giving up its paramilitary and drone capabilities it expanded after the September 11 attacks and the start on the “war on terror” to the Department of Defense, even though some of these activities might be seen as more properly the function of a “military” versus an “intelligence” organization, reflecting the sense that the clandestine, covert use of force is a mission that some elements of the CIA see as core to the organization’s identity within the US national security apparatus. On that resistance, see Micah Zenko, “Transferring CIA Drone Strikes to the Pentagon,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 16, 2013, at: www.cfr.org/report/transferring-cia-drone-strikes-pentagon; and Chris Woods, “Moving the Drone Program from the CIA to the Pentagon won’t Improve Transparency,” Foreign Policy, May 8, 2015, at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/08/moving-the-drone-program-from-the-cia-to-the-pentagon-wont-improve-transparency-yemen-pakistan-jsoc. Indeed, a sign of this shift has been the creation of a “targeting” analyst category that would better link collection and analysis with an eye to improving the agency’s ability to identify and eliminate threats (see Box 5.1 Reforming the CIA? for a discussion of recent attempts to reform the CIA through reorganization)²¹²¹ Roger Z. George, “Central Intelligence Agency: The President’s Own,” in The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth, eds. Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2017), 209..

Problems of organizational identity also manifest themselves when a new organization is created from the merger of several organizations, or when previously independent organizations are brought under the control and supervision of another one.²²²² Michael K. Baughn and Peter A. Finzel, “A Clash of Cultures in the Merger of Two Acquisition Project Offices,” Engineering Management Journal 21(2) (2009): 11–17. Since the 1990s, there have been two major reorganizations of key parts of the US national security apparatus which have resulted in the merger of disparate organizations under one larger bureaucratic roof.

The first, undertaken by Congress in the Foreign Affairs Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, ended the tenure of the US Agency for International Development (AID), the US Information Agency (USIA), and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) as independent agencies of government, merging their functions and personnel into the State Department. AID retained some degree of autonomy and thus organizational identity as the effective manager of US foreign aid and development grants, but the other functions of public diplomacy and arms control and non-proliferation, which had previously been focused in discrete organizations, were now spread over different parts of the State Department. These specific missions lost their advocates and now had to be justified against other priorities which the traditional core of the State Department had found to be more important. At the same time, the influx of additional functional-issue oriented personnel helped to exacerbate the split in the State Department between the geographic and functional bureaus (more on that below).²³²³ For some of the first-hand remembrances of those involved in the mergers, see “The ACDA–USIA Merger into State: The End of an Era,” Moments in US Diplomatic History, issued by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, October 2016, at: http://adst.org/2016/10/acda-usia-merger-into-state-end-of-an-era/#.Wd0vvdVSyJA.

The second was the 2002 Homeland Security Act, which took twenty-two different agencies out of seven existing cabinet departments and merged them into a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These agencies had had a variety of law enforcement, border security, intelligence, military, disaster management, and revenue functions that in most cases had dovetailed well with the essences of their former departments, but were now uneasily co-existing in a hastily cobbled-together new structure. It was not clear how a distinctly “homeland security” dominant identity might emerge. Created in reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the DHS was expected to coalesce around a counterterrorism mission, but also to preserve core competencies in disaster preparedness, border and immigration security, cyber protection, and responding to pandemics. Fifteen years after its creation, “how these diverse functions and cultures can be unified remains a major DHS hurdle” even as natural disasters such as superstorm hurricanes and growing concerns over migration issues compete with the counterterrorism focus for priority.²⁴²⁴ See Susan Ginsburg, “The Department of Homeland Security: Civil Protection and Resilience,” National Security Enterprise, 247–280, esp. 253.

When its identity is fractured, the organization can lose effectiveness. Over the past thirty years, for instance, the State Department has seen its essence – maintaining the bilateral diplomatic relationship between the United States and another country and supporting multinational regional initiatives – challenged by a rising tide of functionalism that prioritizes specific issues (for example, human rights, democracy promotion, arms control, or the environment) across national and regional lines. This has led to an effective bifurcation of the State Department’s organizational essence between the “regionalists” (generalists who focus on countries and geographic regions) and the “functionalists” (specialists who focus on an issue across a global remit).²⁵²⁵ Brett D. Schaeffer, “How to Make the State Department More Effective in Implementing US Foreign Policy,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder 3115, April 20, 2016, 10. The end result, as the Hart–Rudman Commission concluded, is that it is very difficult to develop a coherent “State Department” point of view on any issue, leading to a corresponding loss of organizational effectiveness (see Box 5.2 A Clash of Organizations: State versus Treasury for an example of such regional and functional interests clashing across departmental lines).²⁶²⁶ The US Commission on National Security/21st Century, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, Phase III Report, February 15, 2001, Washington, DC, 53. This dynamic of intra-agency division and bargaining is discussed at greater length in Chapter 8 as it pertains to the sub-bureaucratic politics perspective.

Still, the organizational process perspective assumes that most government organizations, most of the time, have a dominant identity focused on a shared sense of mission. In tasking an organization with a mission, elected officials are telling the organization to focus on one particular thing and not another. When organizations further refine their mission for the sake of everyday operations, they refine this focus even more. This brings us to another key feature of organizations – formal structures that allow for specialization and coordination.

Organizational Structure: Specialization and Coordination

Organizations permit specialization both horizontally – across different subject matter of types of task – and vertically – between those completing tasks and those managing the completion of tasks.²⁷²⁷ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 7. “[A] fundamental technique for simplifying the problem is to factor it into a number of nearly independent parts, so that each organizational unit handles one of these parts and can omit the others from its definition of the situation.”²⁸²⁸ James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 173. “If an administrator, each time he is faced with a decision, must perforce evaluate that decision in terms of the whole range of human values, rationality in administration is impossible. If he needs consider the decision only in the light of limited organizational aims, his task is more nearly within the range of human power.”²⁹²⁹ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 11. This dynamic of specialization is especially prevalent when it comes to organizations or organizational sub-units that are responsible for implementing existing policy.

American embassies overseas help to shape policy through the reports and assessments that they provide about local conditions on the ground. However, a primary role of any embassy is to interpret and implement policy decisions made in Washington. Implementation almost always demands and rewards specialization. Rather than focusing on the broad problem of securing US national security in general, the US embassy in Cairo need only concern itself with how US–Egypt relations affect US national security. Saudi Arabia might represent a higher national security priority overall, or especially during a given crisis in which it plays a central role, but none of that need bother or distract Embassy Cairo in staying focused on Egypt. In turn, given the relatively high importance of the US–Egypt relationship, the Cairo embassy hosts personnel from other organizations and sub-organizations who specialize even further. There may be some embassy personnel, for instance, in charge of monitoring human rights in Egypt and liaising with the country’s civil society organizations, while others supervise the flow of US defense equipment to Egypt’s military and the progress of security cooperation between the two countries’ militaries. Still others may coordinate the intelligence-sharing relationship, including the fight against transnational terrorist organizations. Finally, there will be personnel in the embassy who have management and security functions, whose work has no immediate bearing on US–Egypt relations, but who facilitate the work of others, and can impact the embassy’s mission by, for instance, not approving travel by US personnel to different parts of the country based upon their assessment of the security situation.³⁰³⁰ Even a cursory perusal of the press releases issued by US Embassy Cairo (archived at: https://eg.usembassy.gov/category/press-releases) helps to demonstrate the degree of specialization of missions in the overall management of US–Egypt relations.

The benefits of specialization come at a cost – a loss of control:

Delegating tasks to specialized units or expert individuals allows a leader to accomplish much more than he or she would be able to accomplish alone. Delegation, however, is risky when (a) the agent’s interests are not perfectly aligned with those of the principal, and (b) the principal does not have perfect knowledge of the agent’s actions. Under these circumstances, “[g]overnment leaders can substantially disturb, but rarely precisely control, the specific behavior of these organizations.”³²³² Ibid., 143. We will return to the question of whether the interests of bureaucratic “agents” and their elected “principals” are aligned, and what this means for policymaking, first in Chapter 6 on the bureaucratic politics perspective, and later in Chapter 8 where we introduce the idea of sub-bureaucratic politics that occurs within and among agencies at lower levels of the policymaking process.

In addition to specialization, organizations also enable coordination – the ability for factored problems to be put back together in some sense. “Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.”³³³³ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 110. Specialization thus increases the interdependence of organizations and of organizational sub-units, which comes with its own risks. March and Simon predict that a high degree of specialization is more likely to occur in stable environments with a high “tolerance for interdependence,” or in organizations that have ways of “increasing stability and predictability of the environment.”³⁴³⁴ March and Simon, Organizations, 180–181. National security agencies frequently do not operate in a stable or predictable environment. But they, like other organizations, have found other ways to increase stability, as will be discussed in depth in the sub-section on routines and standard operating procedures.³⁵³⁵ George and Rishikof, The National Security Enterprise, 4.

Organizational structure also substantially impacts the flow of information and options within and across organizations. “[H]ow subordinates are grouped in the hierarchy can be expected to affect how high in the organization conflict over implementation can be expected to rise … this means that the policy ultimately implemented will itself be a function of the organizational hierarchy.”³⁶³⁶ Thomas H. Hammond, “Toward a General Theory of Hierarchy: Books, Bureaucrats, Basketball Tournaments, and the Administrative Structure of the Nation-state,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3(1) (1993): 120–145. The consequences of these impacts will be discussed in the sub-section on shaping the decision environment.

Organizational Culture

An organization’s essence, along with the habits and routines developed to promote it, together combine to shape a distinctive organizational culture: “a persistent, patterned way of thinking about the central tasks of and human relationships within an organization. Culture is to an organization what personality is to an individual.”³⁷³⁷ James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 91. Organizational culture is a shared definition of how things are done, of what is valued, and of what conduct is acceptable. Individuals who join the organization are expected to internalize the norms and preferences of the group, and this shared understanding is passed on from one generation of employees to the next.³⁸³⁸ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 153; Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 70. An organization’s culture is affected by its definition of success, the information and technology available to the organization, professional norms and “street-level” experience within the organization, and by the organization’s reward structure.³⁹³⁹ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 167.

Organizational culture is a powerful force that “emerges to shape the behavior of individuals within the organization.”⁴⁰⁴⁰ Ibid., 145. Perhaps the most obvious way an organization is able to control the behavior of its employees is by using external incentives to impose organizational decisions.⁴¹⁴¹ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 9 Organizations have the authority to implement reward structures that “prescribe certain patterns of belief and behavior and penalize those who do not conform to them.”⁴²⁴² Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 70. These reward structures, in turn, are frequently shaped by the organization’s culture. Returning to our Cairo embassy example, all of the embassy’s employees represent the United States, but work for different organizations within the US government. Those in charge of preventing terrorist attacks from occurring will be assessed by their immediate sub-organization on whether the Egyptian officials they are dealing with are assisting with practical steps and concrete information, not whether those officials are protecting the religious freedom of Coptic Orthodox Christians or have been implicated in repression of anti-government activists. These issues are handled by representatives of different organizations. Meanwhile, the State Department official tasked with ensuring compliance with US dictates on preventing trafficking in persons will not dismiss evidence of Egyptian non-compliance in this particular area even if the Egyptian government cooperates with the United States in other areas, such as trade – which would be highlighted and praised by the Commerce Department.

Organizations can also influence members internally by “establishing in the operative employee himself attitudes, habits, and a state of mind which lead him to reach that decision which is advantageous to the organization.”⁴³⁴³ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 9 “One function that organization performs is to place the organization members in a psychological environment that will adapt their decisions to the organization objectives, and will provide them with the information needed to make these decisions correctly.”⁴⁴⁴⁴ Ibid., 92. To spur action in individuals, organizations need goals that are “operational” – that is, those for which “there are some means, valid or illusory, for determining the connections between alternative actions and goal satisfaction.”⁴⁵⁴⁵ March and Simon, Organizations, 177. Finding operational goals often requires substituting more concrete sub-goals for broader non-operational goals, such as increasing national security or “promoting the general welfare.”⁴⁶⁴⁶ Ibid., 176. In particular, an organization’s structure and culture “provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.”⁴⁷⁴⁷ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 110. An organization’s leadership frequently takes on this task of creating operational sub-goals in its shaping of the organization’s essence and culture. In some instances, however, “[w]hen the [organization’s] goals are too vague or ambiguous to permit them to become a ready basis of task definition, the tasks will often be shaped not by executive preferences but by the incentives valued by the operators.”⁴⁸⁴⁸ Wilson, Bureaucracy, 48.

These are important observations and often manifest themselves in real-world events. For instance, in 2010, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) decided to employ Ugandan contractors to renovate a facility at Kisangani in eastern Congo. The Congolese government, however, protested against the use of Ugandan nationals in a complaint to the bilateral US ambassador, William Garvelick, fearing that the presence of the Ugandans could be interpreted as recognizing Ugandan claims and interests in the region. Ambassador Garvelick contacted General William “Kip” Ward, the AFRICOM commander, who agreed that the Ugandans would be withdrawn immediately and passed along this directive to his staff. “Immediately” was not specifically defined, however, and after a week, Congo’s defense minister called Garvelick to complain vociferously that Ugandan personnel were still on Congolese soil. Garvelick and Ward together checked with the commanding officer on the project, who, responding to pressures to control costs, wanted to let the Ugandans finish up their work, rather than incur the millions of dollars to terminate the contract, remove the Ugandans, and find alternate contractors. Ward, with Garvelick at his side, made it clear that the damage that would be done to the US–Congo relationship outweighed the additional military construction costs and delays that would be incurred by the sections of Africa Command charged with overseeing the Kisangani project. The Ugandans departed Kisangani within two days and the crisis was averted.⁴⁹⁴⁹ Murray and Quainton, “Combatant Commanders, Ambassadorial Authority,” 181–182. But the incident highlighted how, for the officers charged with overseeing the renovation of the Kisangani base, an order to stop the use of the Ugandan contractors was viewed, not through the lens of the urgency of the US embassy in Kinshasa or of the State Department more generally, but against the metrics of completing a task ahead of schedule and under budget to meet and exceed the standards set by the US military’s construction and facilities offices, meaning that General Ward’s seemingly unambiguous order for the “immediate” removal of the Ugandans was interpreted to mean eventual compliance, not instantaneous action.

Since the 1960s, the emergence of theories about how organizations impart “roles” to their members and how these roles guide employee behavior and expectations (organizational role theory) has contributed to a greater understanding of this process.⁵⁰⁵⁰ B. J. Biddle, “Recent Developments in Role Theory,” Annual Review of Law & Social Science 12 (1986): 73–74. Herbert Simon, in turn, concluded: “One does not live for months or years in a particular position in an organization, exposed to some streams of communication, shielded from others, without the most profound effects upon what one knows, believes, attends to, hopes, wishes, emphasizes, fears, and proposes.”⁵¹⁵¹ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 18. Asked to sketch out a map of Iran on a chalkboard, a US Navy surface warfare officer begins by drawing the Straits of Hormuz, whereas a US Army special operations officer might instead concentrate on key land borders. Put simply, years of training and service in the US Navy lead the naval officer to draw the water first.⁵²⁵² This example is based on an actual incident in which one of the authors observed a former naval officer drawing a map of Iran on a blackboard and was surprised to see the sketch begin with the water.

Routines and Standard Operating Procedures

Much of the day-to-day creation and enactment of foreign policy happens when no one is looking. The president, for example, can pay attention to at most five to ten issues at any given time, with many, many domestic and foreign policy priorities competing for attention.⁵⁶⁵⁶ Ben W. Heineman Jr., “Obama’s Chief of Staff Will be the Most Important Appointment of His Term,” The Atlantic, January 14, 2013, at: www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/obamas-chief-of-staff-will-be-the-most-important-appointment-of-his-term/267124. Even expanding the circle to the president’s senior leaders, only a small fraction of the decisions that must be made every day will get senior attention. Instead, many foreign policy actions are less premeditated decisions than the logical outputs of organizational processes running quietly behind the scenes. Action within an organization is generally initiated by some stimulus – for example, a presidential directive, or a request from another organization. Sometimes, responses are “routinized” in that “a stimulus evokes a response – sometimes very elaborate – that has been developed and learned at some previous time as an appropriate response for a stimulus of this class.” Other times, the response requires significant “problem-solving activity directed toward finding performance activities with which to complete the response.”⁵⁷⁵⁷ March and Simon, Organizations, 160. Sometimes the response will fall somewhere in between, with a limited or moderate amount of problem-solving required to correctly categorize the stimulus and select the appropriate routine in response. Which end of the spectrum a response falls on will depend upon both the familiarity of the stimulus and the organization’s decision-making standards.

Even with problems disaggregated and split across organizations, government agencies generally do not tackle one issue at a time using the rational decision-making process described in Chapter 3. The unitary state perspective assumes that the decision-maker optimizes – that is, they choose the alternative that is better than all the others by some agreedupon criteria. In contrast, the organizational process perspective assumes that organizational decisions are made by satisficing – choosing the first available alternative that meets some set of criteria that define minimum standards.⁵⁸⁵⁸ Ibid., 161. Satisficing was introduced in Chapter 4 as a means by which individuals adapt to cognitive limitations – here we find that this same concept can be applied to organizations, which also face a form of cognitive constraint. As its name suggests, optimization is the only way to ensure that the best option is chosen. Satisficing, however, “may lead to error, but there is no realistic alternative in the face of the limits on human knowledge and reasoning.”⁵⁹⁵⁹ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 119. In a satisficing world, two things are very important: how organizations search for alternatives, and how they define acceptable standards. Both are shaped significantly by organizational culture. “Organizational search for alternative courses of action is problem-oriented: it focuses on the atypical discomfort that must be avoided … Patterns of search reveal biases that reflect factors such as specialized training, experience of various parts of the organization, and patterns of communication within the organization.”⁶⁰⁶⁰ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 171. Similarly, as discussed in a previous section, an organization’s interpretation of its mission, and conversion of this mission into operational objectives, will guide definitions of acceptable performance.

Thus, organizations faced with large numbers of tasks that need to be accomplished each day, and needing to standardize behavior to allow for coordination across divisions and agencies, often respond to tasks as they come up, more or less automatically, using familiar organizational routines and more formalized standard operating procedures (SOPs).⁶¹⁶¹ Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 77. An SOP is a formalized routine, similar to a computer program of the form “if X, then Y.” When the organization perceives some outside stimulus, one or more members of the organization categorize the stimulus as being of type X, which then triggers one or more SOPs that detail how the organization should respond. In their simplest form, these SOPs are executed by street-level bureaucrats. For example, when a consular employee receives an application for a visa, she or he initiates the pre-existing procedures for determining whether the visa should be granted, and then either proceeds with issuing or denying the visa. The existence of such SOPs allows organizations to carry out many more tasks, in much less time, than would be possible if each employee had to determine from scratch the optimal action every time an individual came to the consul window with a request. The consul will be assessed by how closely she or he adheres to those procedures, and has very little independent authority to make exceptions or dispense with the regulations based on her or his own personal assessment as to what would best serve US national interests.

However, in following the rules for visa issuances, the consul may end up creating other problems for American foreign policy. In 2014, for instance, several Hungarian officials were removed from a list maintained by the US embassy in Budapest of those who were approved to receive US visas because the embassy had received credible allegations that these individuals were engaged in corrupt practices – which would automatically necessitate denial of their visa requests per State Department regulations. The timing of that action, however, was inauspicious, as it occurred right before a critical meeting between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto to try and repair strained ties between the two allies – and this incident ended up contributing to a further setback in the overall effort to improve relations.⁶²⁶² Rick Lyman, “US Denial of Visas for 6 in Hungary Strains Ties,” New York Times, October 21, 2014, A11, at: www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/world/europe/us-denial-of-visas-for-6-in-hungary-strains-ties.html. Yet the consular officers had no authority to arbitrarily or unilaterally change visa regulations on their own recognizance to avoid creating problems in the US–Hungary relationship. A similar crisis erupted in 2017, when Indonesian Military (TNI) Commander General Gatot Nurmyanto was informed that he could not be issued with a visa to attend a conference on combating violent extremism to which he had been personally invited by General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even though Dunford is the highest-ranking uniformed American military officer, his invitation clashed with procedures at the Department of Homeland Security’s US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which indicated that Gatot could not be cleared for entry into the United States. His visa request was thus rejected by the US embassy in Jakarta, creating a diplomatic incident and risking the efficacy of US–Indonesian security cooperation.⁶³⁶³ “Indonesia Seek Clarification on TNI Commander’s Denial of Entry to US,” Netral News, October 22, 2017, at: www.en.netralnews.com/news/currentnews/read/13566/indonesia.seek.clarification.on.tni.commanders.denial.of.entry.to.us.

Nevertheless, a primary benefit of SOPs is efficiency. “Habits and routines may not only serve their purposes effectively, but also conserve scarce and costly decision-making time and attention … The establishment of such rules and routines is itself a rational decision.”⁶⁴⁶⁴ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 89. “If the SOPs are appropriate, average performance – i.e., performance averaged over the range of cases – is better than it would be if each instance were approached individually (given fixed talent, timing, and resource constraints). But specific instances, particularly critical instances that typically do not have ‘standard’ characteristics are often handled sluggishly and inappropriately.”⁶⁵⁶⁵ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 178. Simon describes organizational routines as a “counterpart” to individual habits. “Habit performs an extremely important task in purposive behavior, for it permits similar stimuli or situations to be met with similar responses or reactions, without the need for a conscious rethinking of the decision to bring about the proper action. Habit permits attention to be devoted to the novel aspects of a situation requiring decision”⁶⁶⁶⁶ Simon, Administrative Behavior, 100.

In addition to efficiency, SOPs allow for coordination – individuals in one part of an organization know what behavior to expect from other parts of the organization, which aids in planning. “Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.”⁶⁷⁶⁷ Ibid., 110. They also facilitate “equitable treatment,” which is particularly important for government agencies.⁶⁸⁶⁸ William T. Gormley, Jr. and Steven J. Balla, Bureaucracy and Democracy (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004), 26. “Max Weber said that the great virtue of bureaucracy – indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic – was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.”⁶⁹⁶⁹ Wilson, Bureaucracy, 334. Finally, SOPs can set bounds to make it less likely that important rules or constraints are violated: “All large bureaucracies have SOPs; public bureaucracies have many more because in addition to the managerial problems that arise out of size and complexity they must conform to the politically enforceable constraints asserted by external constituencies.”⁷⁰⁷⁰ Ibid., 133.

When are SOPs likely to carry the day? “Behaviors that most easily can be defined by rule tend to be those that are frequent, similar, and patterned – those that are routine.”⁷¹⁷¹ Ibid., 339. This may not seem to be a good description of foreign policymaking, however: “Even where bureaucratic behavior is not so routinized that it can be conveniently prescribed by rule, we insist on rules when there is a significant risk of an impermissible outcome.”⁷²⁷² Ibid.

The preceding discussion assumed organizations were taking action on issues not of significant concern to senior policymakers – the background operation of the governmental machine. In fact, the bulk of foreign policy decisions fall precisely into this sphere. Much of the attention in the study of foreign policy analysis is drawn to high-level decisions taken during times of crisis, because, as Erik Stern notes, “crises are consequential, dramatic, vivid, and emotionally charged.” Crises also have the advantage of receiving greater media scrutiny that can lift the veil on decisions. It is therefore understandable that crisis decisions that focus on the President and his immediate circle disproportionately draw the attention of scholars as tempting windows onto decision-making. But Stern also warns that this is “sometimes to the neglect of other fundamental but less thrilling aspects” of foreign policy.⁷³⁷³ Erik K. Stern, “Crisis Studies and Foreign Policy Analysis: Insights, Synergies, and Challenges,” in Foreign Policy Analysis in 20/20: A Symposium, ed. Jean H. Garrison, International Studies Review 5(2) (2003): 183. Foreign policy, as a whole, goes beyond these “visible, dramatic, newsworthy events” and, as foreign policy scholar Bahgat Korany points out, ends up as “a continuous, wider phenomenon, embracing general objectives, stated strategy, and a series of routine actions: trade exchanges, cultural encounters, exchange of diplomatic notes.”⁷⁴⁷⁴ Bahgat Korany, How Foreign Policy Decisions are Made in the Third World (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1986). Much of this is handled by organizations within government operating according to standardized, prescribed routines.

To provide a better sense of the scope of these sundry routine incarnations of foreign policy, consider that in any given week the State Department sends upwards of two thousand formal diplomatic cables to American embassies around the world.⁷⁵⁷⁵ This figure is extrapolated from estimates of the total annual number of cables that the State Department has transmitted in recent years. It should be noted that these annual totals vary significantly year to year and are derived from informal estimates provided to the authors. This weekly estimate is therefore not intended as an authoritative number, but merely as a rough approximation to illustrate in a general sense the scope of US diplomatic communications. Although every one of these diplomatic messages is sent in the name of the secretary of state, acting on behalf of the president, she or he is obviously not directly involved in (or even aware of) all of these hundreds of daily instructions, clarifications, follow-ups, updates, and so forth. Moreover, this outbound communication is only the tip of the communication iceberg, with embassies also initiating their own inbound reporting and response messages in the name of the chief of mission, and all of this authoritative “front channel” communication is supplemented by less formal modes such as email, video conferencing, and telephone calls. In other words, the abundance of American foreign policy is conducted below senior levels, without reference to senior officials, and usually without the direct knowledge of top officials.

Even something as formal and important as negotiating a binding international agreement on behalf of the United States is in most cases a surprisingly routine matter. More often than not, such agreements are handled at lower levels of government by technical experts embedded within specific organizations of the US government without the involvement or even awareness of top officials. Looking at 2016 as a representative year, the United States concluded some ninety bilateral and multilateral international agreements. While some, like the United Nations Paris Climate Accord, received attention at the highest levels, most did not. In fact, all but a few of the international agreements concluded year in year out pertain to a wide array of mundanely routine matters. A few illustrative examples from 2016 include treaties or agreements with Chile on Extradition, Philippines on Cooperation in Countering the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Italy on Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes, Malawi on Military Cooperation, Algeria on Opening an American International School in Algiers, Vietnam on the Program of the Peace Corps in Vietnam, the United Kingdom on the Use of Defense Facilities by Civil Aircraft, Albania on the Exchange of Terrorism Screening Information, Sweden on Cooperation in Nuclear Safety Matters, Vanuatu on Maritime Law Enforcement Operations, and so on and so forth.⁷⁶⁷⁶ US Department of State, “Diplomacy in Action: 2016 Treaties and Agreements,” at: https:///.state.gov/s/l/treaty/tias/2016/index.htm.

Of course, policymakers may begin to pay attention when following the rules suddenly produces consequential outcomes that had not been anticipated – especially when these are disastrous – resulting in rules that are hastily modified, waived, or scrapped altogether (see Box 5.3 The Mission Goes On … US Military Personnel in Niger for one example). Sometimes those who have been following these rules scrupulously find themselves facing censure. But what of those issues that are already on the radar of the president or his senior advisors, for which they make significant decisions? As we will see in the next section, even these issues rarely escape the imprint of organizational outputs.

Shaping the Decision Environment: Information and Options

One of the primary roles organizations play in policymaking is information processing: “the collection, classification, and understanding of information.”⁷⁷⁷⁷ Hammond, “Toward a General Theory of Hierarchy,” 122. As discussed above, specialization is a key part of organizational structure. “By virtue of specialization, most information enters an organization at highly specific points.”⁷⁸⁷⁸ March and Simon, Organizations, 187. Organizational culture also plays a key role in information processing: “the world tends to be perceived by the organization members in terms of the particular concepts that are reflected in the organization’s vocabulary.”⁷⁹⁷⁹ Ibid., 186. “Staffing procedures determine what information is acquired, to whom it is distributed and when, what analyses are performed in the normal case, and what form decision package or memos take.”⁸⁰⁸⁰ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 266

In processing information, organizations engage in uncertainty absorption. After lower echelons of an agency collect and analyze information, what is passed along to other parts of the agency or upwards along the hierarchy is not the raw information itself, but rather the judgments and specific interpretations the unit has drawn from the information.⁸¹⁸¹ Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 79. “[T]hese conclusions then become the ‘facts’ on which the rest of the organization acts.”⁸²⁸² March and Simon, Organizations, 176. Uncertainty absorption will be formalized “[w]here it is important that all parts of an organization act on the same premises, and where different individuals may draw different conclusions from the raw evidence.”⁸³⁸³ Ibid., 188. What happens, as John C. Ries concluded as a result of his studies of the US defense bureaucracy in the 1960s, is that a “process of substituting inferences or judgments for facts” occurs, and that “if the chain of communications is very long, each link must take the judgments of lower echelons and use them as facts.”⁸⁴⁸⁴ John C. Ries, The Management of Defense (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 49–50. If senior policymakers are involved in the issue, they also make decisions based on these organizationally created facts – which may reflect not the true situation but what the organization wishes to present as the situation.⁸⁵⁸⁵ Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 79.

Additionally, information that organizations push up the chain will be influenced by the organization’s interests. Organizations are eager to pass on information that supports their performance of tasks deemed to be core to the organization’s essence, but will be reluctant to share information that might result in a favored capability being taken away, or mission shared with another organization.⁸⁶⁸⁶ Ries, The Management of Defense, 49–50; Halperin et al., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 49–50. This type of information distortion to influence bargaining position may be done intentionally by individuals (as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapters 6 and 8), but it may also flow from the processes and incentives built into the organizational structure.⁸⁷⁸⁷ This was a particular complaint of Henry Kissinger, that material sent up to his office would reflect the distortions introduced by the organizational dynamics of the State Department. See Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (London: Little, Brown, 1982), 440.

Similarly, the standard operating procedures and other routines an organization has in place – along with the physical capabilities it has invested in, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 – shape the options from which senior policymakers may choose. A president cannot order a brigade combat team to deploy if no such thing exists. On the flip side, the president may not have considered punishing a rogue regime by placing immediate sanctions on its senior officials if the Treasury Department did not have existing processes in place to do so.

Here, we see important seams between organizational process and other perspectives. Organizational process explains “deviations from ideal rationality at the moment of decision by highlighting the ways in which organizational routines constrain the formation of options, and it explains deviations from perfect instrumentality after decisions are made by revealing how routines affect implementation.”⁸⁸⁸⁸ David A. Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” International Security, 17(2) (1992): 117. But the organizational process perspective does not explain how senior policymakers actually make decisions within this constrained environment – for this, we must turn to the other perspectives’ discussions of bounded rationality, cognitive biases, small group dynamics, and different levels of bureaucratic bargaining.⁸⁹⁸⁹ Ibid., 117.

Key Questions for the Analyst to Ask

Understanding Foreign Policy Mistakes

When viewing the world through the organizational process perspective, foreign policy mistakes result from the application of organizational routines that are inappropriate for the situation at hand. These mistakes can be errors of commission – wrongly categorizing an event as being of type X and applying the indicated standard operating procedure with bad consequences; errors of omission – failing to recognize a situation as being of type X and thus not applying the appropriate procedure; or even both, given the plethora of categories and SOPs available in most organizations. In assessing the US response to the emerging Al-Qaeda threat that eventually led to the September 11, 2001 attacks one could conclude that too many organizations – in the intelligence, law enforcement, diplomatic, and military communities – were faithfully executing their organizational procedures, including pre-existing bans on sharing information, with their own attention channeled to particular sources of information by organizational structure and culture.⁹⁷⁹⁷ See, for instance, the narrative and assessment in “Case Study: We Have Some Planes,” Navigating the Theater Security Enterprise, ed. Nikolas K. Gvosdev (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2017), 171–218. Wilson anticipated this when he noted: “There are aspects of organizational life that make people risk averse. Indeed, it would be surprising if they did not, since organizations are created in the first place to reduce uncertainty and risk.”⁹⁸⁹⁸ Wilson, Bureaucracy, 69. In fact, one of the principal complaints raised by the so-called “Jackson Subcommittee” (the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery), convened during the 1960s, chaired by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and charged with examining the reasons for foreign policy failures, found that “qualities which enable an individual to survive and advance in the organization” might not be the ones most advantageous to the national interest in terms of intellectual flexibility and creativity.⁹⁹⁹⁹ US Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations, “Basic Issues,” Administration of National Security (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 22.

While SOPs are frequently created to allow the organization to operate efficiently, they are also inherently tied to the culture of the organization: “SOPs are grounded in the incentive structure of the organization or even in the norms of the organization or the basic attitudes, professional culture, and operating style of its members. The deeper the grounding, the more resistant SOPs are to change.”¹⁰⁰¹⁰⁰ Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 170 “Sometimes the cultural routines clash with criteria of efficiency. Efficiency often loses.”¹⁰¹¹⁰¹ Ibid., 155. Halperin provides the example of Army officer rotations during the Vietnam War. Switching to two- or three-year tours would likely have improved the Army’s effectiveness in the conflict, but would have harmed morale both among those who were deployed for extended periods of time and among those who were never deployed, and thus found themselves passed over for promotions.¹⁰²¹⁰² Halperin et al., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 56.

Similarly, in non-routine situations, “mistakes” can happen when organizational routines result in policymakers having incomplete information, being presented with a set of options inappropriate to the situation, or failing to see their decision through to implementation. Presidents frequently have an incentive to be vague in their decisions, whether to maintain a shaky bureaucratic consensus, to distance themselves from a policy in case things go wrong, simply to conserve precious time and attention.¹⁰³¹⁰³ Ibid., 244–245. This vagueness can give organizations significant discretion in implementing policy – in preparing options, in establishing timelines for when and how to act, and to let them assess if they have successfully executed policy.¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁴ Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy, 156–158. At the same time, members of different organizations, particularly at the lower echelons, “have no way of grasping the nuances behind decisions, no guidance as to exactly why they were told to do what they were told to do. That makes it very difficult for them to implement the policy, to make day-to-day decisions that conform to the president’s desires.”¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁵ Halperin et al., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 349.

Let us return to some of the examples posed at the beginning of this chapter. In October 1962, the Air Force and CIA continued to test and probe Soviet air defenses and responses in the Pacific according to a set flight schedule that was not altered or changed simply because there was now a brewing crisis over nuclear missiles far away in the Caribbean basin. No one within the relevant organizations was prepared to question the scheduled flights. Meanwhile, the president and his national security team in Washington were unaware of this routine mission, their attention being occupied by more pressing matters related to Cuba until the accidental overflight was reported, reportedly causing President John F. Kennedy to curse, “There’s always some [S.O.B.] that doesn’t get the word.” In this case, the word was to avoid needlessly provoking the USSR during this time of crisis over Cuba.¹⁰⁶¹⁰⁶ Quoted in Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 221.

The proposed Marine exercise of storming the beaches in Yemen had a better outcome. US ambassador Barbara Bodine, having learned of the exercise via routine briefings conducted by her military attachés, contacted Central Command (CENTCOM) and asked that it be stopped. Despite protests that the Marines had been planning for this simulated assault for a long time, that “it was on the books,” and that not going through with the enterprise would incur the loss of sunk costs, Bodine’s objections won the day and the exercise was cancelled, despite the inconvenience to the Marines and the US Navy and the risk that not having this training opportunity might create problems for readiness down the road. Meanwhile, the elections went ahead as scheduled, resulting in a victory for Ali Abdullah Saleh, viewed as a moderate and who, as president, continued to deepen Yemen’s relationship with the United States.¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁷ Murray and Quainton, “Combatant Commanders, Ambassadorial Authority,” 181.

The Special Forces raid in Iraq in August 2008 that caused Prime Minister Maliki to temporarily cease his contacts with the United States at a delicate point in the negotiations over a status of forces agreement was approved without key pieces of information about the specifics of this raid being submitted to or understood by higher echelons in the US military command in Iraq, since it was understood to be a routine action taken within the parameters of the ongoing campaign against Shi‘a militants in southern Iraq. The request for the raid neglected to highlight that the village in question, Hindiya, was Maliki’s home town, or that the house that would be targeted was owned by Maliki’s own sister. It was understood to be a “typical raid” that should not have raised any flags or questions – until the US embassy and the military command in Iraq had to deal with the consequences.¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁸ Sky, The Unraveling, 260.

Foreign policy mistakes can also result from a mismatch of organizational process across states: “if important information is known to only part of the government of state A and part of the government of state B, international messages may be misunderstood by those parts of the receiver’s government that do not match, in the information they have, the part of the sender’s government that dispatched the message.”¹⁰⁹¹⁰⁹ Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” 473–474; in a footnote, Jervis references Roger Hilsman’s account in To Move a Nation of U-2 flights during the Cold War as an example.

Challenges for the Organizational Process Perspective

While understanding and applying the organizational process perspective can be quite useful for both foreign policy analysts and practitioners, there are also a number of difficulties that arise in applying the organizational process perspective. The additional information required to apply the organizational process perspective can be overwhelming:

Organizational complexity – particularly when analyzing the US national security establishment – makes it difficult to predict which SOPs will be applied in any particular instance, or what the result of multiple interacting SOPs will be. This limitation is particularly frustrating to academics, who struggle to come up with generalizable, falsifiable hypotheses from the perspective.

Similarly, it can be difficult to predict when policymaking will be routine and when it will not. Some everyday actions will clearly be off the senior decision-makers’ radar, but as described in Chapters 4 and 7 on the cognitive and palace politics perspectives, whether other more significant decisions rise to the level of senior policymakers may depend on the president’s personal preferences, who is in the room that day, or what has received significant media attention lately. And, as noted above, attention from senior policymakers can shift over time, particularly when organizational outputs lead to policy failures. The degree to which the president and other senior policymakers focus on an issue will influence the degree to which they are constrained by organizational routines.

Finally, practitioners and policy analysts are sometimes frustrated by this perspective’s seeming dismissal of individual agency and accountability. The organizational process perspective assumes that individual officials at the lower levels do not possess coherent belief systems about policy, or, if they do, have no opportunity to express them in the context of the actions they oversee.¹¹¹¹¹¹ Derek Beach, Analyzing Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 108–109. It also ignores the reality that people are often motivated to join the federal government to take part in implementing a president’s agenda or to support specific agenda items.¹¹²¹¹² See, for instance, Juliet Eilperin, Lisa Rein, and Marc Fisher, “Resistance from Within: Federal Workers Push Back against Trump,” Washington Post, January 31, 2017, at: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/31/c65b110e-e7cb-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html?utm_term=.642dacee4160. Instead, this perspective works from the premise that lower-level officials engage in simple decision-making based on standardized routines as imposed from above, with no deviations or distinctions – that every Army colonel, Foreign Service officer, or office staff director will act in near-identical fashion based on the controlling sub-routines of the particular organization in which they happen to find themselves. Indeed, as the very name of the perspective suggests, it concentrates overridingly on process (meaning institutional rules and structures that shape and constrain choices) rather than politics (meaning purposeful actions by human beings to influence choices). Yet many of the actions that are attributed to organizations in the organizational process perspective are actually taken by people, and different people in those roles might lead to different outcomes, as will be explored in greater detail when we go “beneath the surface” to examine sub-bureaucratic politics in Chapter 8.

Despite these difficulties, the organizational process perspective illuminates aspects of foreign policy decision-making that the other perspectives miss. It also sets the stage for the next perspective that will be examined – the bureaucratic politics perspective – which focuses on how leaders of organizations use the organization’s information and capabilities as bargaining chips in the grand policymaking game, as we will discuss in Chapter 6.

Conceiving Organizations as Habitual Actors

Unpacking Organizations

Foreign Policy as Organizational Output

Applying the Organizational Process Perspective