Identifying the National Security Council's Strategic Decision Space

摘要

Senior leaders often have difficulty sorting through the vast number of decisions confronting them. The senior leader will ask, 'Why do I have to decide now.' Ideally, they want to make the right decision about a 'way' or a 'means,' in time to affect an 'end.' Unfortunately, if they are unaware of how their decision impacts other agencies within the United States Government (USG) and the National Security Council (NSC), alliances, and international organizations also working toward that 'end,' they may either make a good decision too late or a bad decision too early. Their untimely decision may, at best, be disruptive to fellow senior leaders, or at worst, unravel a NSC way or means to a strategic end. This project will investigate if applying a hybrid of the Army's decision support matrix will illuminate a 'strategic decision space, ' thus allowing senior leaders to better leverage and nest time to make more effective decisions at the strategic level. I will offer the 'strategic decision space' model, and then apply USG planning in the Darfur region of Sudan in early 2006 against it. The Darfur case study will include Inter-Agency, United Nations, and NATO timings and decisions to test the model.