Expanding the Mandate

When it was established in 1947, the National Security Council was assigned the task of advising "the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies . . . with respect to national security." In the ensuing years the term national security has come to be seen as a question of military preparedness and related foreign policy planning. General Maxwell Taylor, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thinks it is now time that the definition and the NSC were broadened.

Writing in the winter 1975 issue of Orbis, a quarterly journal of world affairs, Taylor maintains that in the next period of world development the U.S. will find that "the main threats to our security, at least in their initial stages, will take nonmilitary form." As a prime example he offers the 1973 hike in oil prices by the OPEC nations, which he calls "a kind of economic Pearl Harbor in which warnings bearing on its imminence were either ignored, misread, or filed without reaching the officials responsible for action."

The better to anticipate and forecast the effects of such dislocations in resources, Taylor proposes creation of a National Policy Council, which would be an expansion of the NSC from its present four members -- the President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense -- to seven, adding the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and a presidentially appointed representative of the economic sector. Policy planning and research would be broadened and proceed along four lines: foreign/milItary, economic, fiscal /monetary and public welfare. The four panels would work with relevant departments in Government and offer recommendations -- but steer clear of decision making.

Such an NPC might be so large it would become as unwieldy as the Executive Branch, but Taylor is surely right in suggesting a new emphasis on the interdependency of military and nonmilitary planning in the years ahead.

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