strategic culture

This revelatory history of the elusive National Security Council shows how staffers operating in the shadows have driven foreign policy clandestinely for decades. When Michael Flynn resigned in disgrace as the Trump administration's national security advisor the New York Times referred to the National Security Council as "the traditional center of management for a president's dealings with an uncertain world." Indeed, no institution or individual in the last seventy years has exerted more influence on the Oval Office or on the nation's wars than the NSC, yet until the explosive Trump presidency, few Americans could even name a member. With key analysis, John Gans traces the NSC's rise from a collection of administrative clerks in 1947 to what one recent commander-in-chief called the president's "personal band of warriors." A former Obama administration speechwriter, Gans weaves extensive archival research with dozens of news-making interviews to reveal the NSC's unmatched power, which has resulted in an escalation of hawkishness and polarization, both in Washington and the nation at large.

When U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, it signaled the end of the longest conflict in the nation's history. Yet we are still at war--no longer with other states, but with a host of new enemies, from nihilistic terrorists and narco-traffickers to transnational criminal cartels, lone wolf assassins, and modern-day pirates. Standing against these foes is a tight-knit fraternity of soldiers, cops, lawyers, and spies. Together, these men have broken down the cultural and institutional boundaries among their respective agencies to engineer a new, network-centric way of fighting: one that uses a seamless web of intelligence analysts, high-tech information networks, and Special Forces units to take the fight to America's enemies as never before.