The National Security Strategy and the Pressure to Please

I. Introduction: A Strategy Document That Looks More Like a Manifesto

The National Security Strategy (NSS) is supposed to be a clinical assessment of the United States’ security environment and a plan for aligning the country’s instruments of national power. It is required by statute and intended to be the backbone of U.S. strategic thinking. Yet the 2025 NSS stands out from the rest of the series in ways that are not just stylistic, but statistically and structurally significant.

Across 35 years of NSS documents, the balance between strategy, policy detail, and presidential rhetoric has been remarkably stable. The 2025 NSS breaks that pattern. Its content distribution is a statistical outlier, with unusually low strategic planning and unusually high ideological framing. Those anomalies are not random. They are best understood as the visible imprint of human behavior in hierarchical institutions under strong presidential influence.

This is not a story about one officeholder’s moral failings. It is a story about how national-security professionals—uniformed and civilian—behave when the person at the top has a strong worldview and little patience for the discomfort that comes with clinical analysis.

II. What the National Security Strategy Is Supposed to Be

The NSS exists because Congress decided that strategy should not live only in classified cables, informal talking points, and occasional presidential speeches. Under the Goldwater–Nichols framework, presidents are required to submit a comprehensive national security strategy to Congress on a regular basis. Over time, that requirement has been satisfied by an unclassified NSS document, starting in the late Reagan era and continuing through both Democratic and Republican administrations.

In theory, the NSS is meant to:

• identify enduring U.S. interests;

• describe threats and opportunities;

• link “ends, ways, and means” in a coherent way; and

• integrate military, diplomatic, economic, and informational tools.

In practice, it has always had a dual character. It is both a strategy document and a messaging vehicle: part planning, part signal to Congress, allies, adversaries, and domestic constituencies. That dual character creates an opening for presidential preference to seep into what should be a clinical product. It also creates a familiar hierarchy problem: when analysts and drafters know that the president signs the document and that political staff will care about its tone, they begin—often unconsciously—to write for the boss.

III. How Human Beings Behave in Hierarchy

The mechanisms that produce distortion in national-security analysis are not new, but the magnitude of distortion evident in the 2025 National Security Strategy is unprecedented in the modern record. Hierarchical pressure, deference to leadership preference, and the subtle reshaping of analysis to fit expectations have existed since the early Cold War. What distinguishes the 2025 NSS is not the presence of these forces, but the degree to which they appear to have reshaped the final product.

Sherman Kent, the early theorist of U.S. intelligence analysis, spent much of his career insisting on a bright line between information and policy. Intelligence, in his view, existed to describe the world as it is, not to help policymakers justify decisions already made. But even during Kent’s time, the line was hard to maintain.

During the Vietnam War, assessments under two administrations often reflected optimistic narratives about progress that were difficult to reconcile with conditions on the ground. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, intelligence estimates about weapons of mass destruction were presented with a level of confidence that subsequent inquiries found was not fully supported by the underlying data. In the campaign against ISIS, investigations examined whether negative assessments had been softened to align better with a preferred public story.

The pattern is not that analysts and commanders suddenly become incompetent, or that they knowingly fabricate reality. It is that, in a hierarchy, people do what people do: they avoid confronting the boss with things the boss clearly does not want to hear. They frame the truth “constructively.” They emphasize what seems helpful and under-emphasize what seems obstructive. Over time, that instinct erodes the discipline of analysis.

The costs are real. Consider Guatemala in 1954, when the United States backed the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. His agrarian reforms had angered powerful interests; the intervention succeeded in removing him. But he left the country on a plane shared with a young Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The experience helped radicalize Guevara, who soon joined Fidel Castro and became a central figure in revolutionary movements across Latin America.

A rigorous multi-scenario assessment in 1953–1954 could have looked beyond the immediate land-policy dispute. It could have articulated a best case, a middle case, and a worst case, including the possibility that using covert power to topple a popular government would inflame anti-U.S. sentiment, inspire radicalization, and shape regional politics for decades. That kind of analysis was not demanded, and so it was not performed. The system answered the narrow question it thought it had been asked, not the broader one history would later pose.

Vietnam and Iraq, in different ways, repeat the same story. So do more recent episodes where short-term political or narrative needs outran careful consideration of second- and third-order effects.

IV. A 35-Year Baseline: How NSS Documents Normally

Look

From 1987 through 2022, the unclassified National Security Strategy documents follow a surprisingly consistent pattern when you categorize their content into four buckets: strategic planning, policy-programmatic detail, ideological framing, and narrative scene-setting.

Across those documents:

• Strategic planning (articulation of interests, priorities, and ways to pursue them) averages just over 51 percent of the total content, with a standard deviation of about 7 percent.

• Policy-programmatic material (specific initiatives, tools, and instruments) consistently falls in the mid-20 percent range, with moderate variance across earlier administrations.

• Ideological framing (values language, presidential worldview, broad civilizational or cultural claims) averages around 12–13 percent, with a standard deviation of less than 7 percent, meaning nearly all past NSS documents fall comfortably within a single standard deviation of that mean.

• Narrative material (storytelling, scene-setting, and rhetorical transitions) hovers around 10 percent, and varies very little over time.

In statistical terms, more than 95 percent of all pre-2025 NSS reports fall within the expected two-standard-deviation envelope for each of these categories. That is exactly what one would expect from a mature interagency product shaped by multiple actors, with strong norms and habits that resist extreme swings in form.

This empirical baseline is important. It tells us that, despite different personalities and parties in the White House, the NSS series has behaved like a reasonably stable genre with recognizable proportions.

V. The 2025 NSS as a Statistical Outlier

The 2025 National Security Strategy departs sharply from that long-settled pattern. While some portions of the document still follow historical norms, two categories of content fall far outside what decades of data would lead one to expect.

First, strategic-planning content drops to roughly 25–30 percent of the document. That places it more than three full standard deviations below the long-term mean, making this NSS an extreme outlier in the 35-year record when it comes to time spent on defining interests, mapping threats, and setting priorities.

Second, ideological framing rises to approximately 35–40 percent of the document. That is more than four standard deviations above the historical average. It represents a dramatic expansion of value-laden and identity-laden content relative to past practice, where ideology was present but modest and generally subordinate to strategy.

These are not small fluctuations. In a distribution of this size, deviations of that magnitude are statistically rare. They cannot be easily explained by “every strategy is different,” nor by normal stylistic evolution, nor even by shifting threat environments. The 2025 NSS looks less like the next point on a drift line and more like a document that has broken away from the cluster.

When an interagency product that has been stable for decades suddenly shows this kind of divergence—lower strategic content, much higher ideological content—the analytically responsible conclusion is that strong directional forces shaped it. You do not need to know what was said in private meetings to infer that presidential preferences and the perceived need to align with them played a role.

VI. Statistical Position of the 2025 National Security Strategy Relative to NSS Documents, 1987–2022

Methodological note:

Percentages reflect the proportion of total NSS content devoted to each category, based on consistent categorical coding applied across all NSS documents from 1987 through 2022.

Standard deviations reflect observed variance across that historical corpus. Z-scores express the distance of the 2025 NSS from the historical mean in standard deviation units. “Expected years per occurrence” is a heuristic translation of tail probability, assuming one NSS per year, used solely to convey magnitude of deviation.

Content Category	Historical Mean (%)	Standard Deviation (%)	2025 NSS (%)	Z-Score (σ)	Tail Probability (approx.)	Expected Years Between Occurrences
Strategic Planning	51.0	7.0	28.0	−3.29σ	0.05%	2,000
Ideological Framing	12.5	6.0	38.0	+4.25σ	0.001%	100,000
Policy / Programmatic	26.0	5.0	24.0	−0.40σ	~69%	1.5
Narrative / Scene-Setting	10.5	3.0	10.5	0.00σ	50%	Annually

Interpretive Summary

• Strategic Planning ContentThe 2025 NSS falls more than three standard deviations below the historical mean. In a 35-year record characterized by remarkable stability, this represents an extreme negative outlier. Deviations of this magnitude are statistically rare and not plausibly attributable to ordinary stylistic evolution or changing threat environments.

• Ideological FramingThe 2025 NSS exceeds the historical mean by over four standard deviations, placing it deep into the extreme tail of the distribution. Under standard assumptions of variance, an outcome of this magnitude would be expected once in tens of thousands of years. This is the strongest quantitative indicator of directional influence in the document.

• Policy and Narrative ContentBoth categories fall well within expected historical variance, indicating that the document is not globally distorted. The deviations are selective and asymmetric, concentrated specifically in strategy and ideology.

VII. How Presidential Preference Shapes Output Without Explicit Orders

It is tempting to imagine that very senior leaders—four-star flag officers, combatant commanders, service chiefs, and career ambassadors—are immune to this kind of distortion. In reality, they may feel its pull more acutely than anyone else.

At that level, they are chosen because the president and the system believe they can be trusted with extraordinary responsibility. Ideally, that trust should mean they are relied upon to be professionally independent, not politically aligned. But access to the president, and influence on decisions, inevitably depends on being perceived as constructive, not obstructive.

When a president has a strong worldview and makes preferences clear, the dominant question in a senior leader’s mind is often not “Should I defy this?” but “How do I present the truth in a way the president can hear?” That question sounds reasonable. It is often asked in good faith. But over time, it can produce distortions:

• Worst-case scenarios are mentioned but minimized.

• Best-case scenarios are elaborated more fully, because they align with what the principal hopes is true.

• Middle-case scenarios, which usually represent the statistical center of gravity, get less emphasis, because they are less emotionally compelling than either triumph or catastrophe.

The underlying data may still support a full curve of possible futures. The problem is that the curve no longer appears clearly in the prose.

It is also important to recognize that this distortion likely originates, not with the analysts or senior uniformed leaders at all, but with civilian policy advisors. Much of the technical and strategic content feeding an NSS is produced by career professionals whose work is often careful, balanced, and grounded in established analytic norms. The shift toward ideological framing in the final document may reflect not their judgments but the political filtration that occurs between the interagency drafting process and the publication of a White House–signed strategy. In many administrations, political appointees revise, reframe, or restructure language to emphasize themes the president prefers or to present the administration’s agenda in a more affirming light. If that secondary filtering becomes dominant, even a well-balanced analytic foundation can emerge from the pipeline as a document whose proportions no longer resemble the underlying work. The statistical anomalies in the 2025 NSS are fully consistent with this dynamic: an institutional editing process that amplified presidential narrative and compressed strategic content, regardless of how professionally the initial inputs were prepared.

In nursing, we learn to separate the clinical truth from our emotional response so we can provide for both the intellectual and emotional needs of our patients and their families, not our own comfort. National security requires the same discipline: hard, sometimes unwelcome analysis paired with humane concern for the consequences. That discipline is especially important in products like the NSS, where the pressure to align with presidential narrative is strong but the need for clear-eyed assessment is even stronger.

VIII. What Any President Who Wants the Truth Should Demand

An NSS that looks more like a manifesto than a strategy is not just an oddity; it is a warning sign. But it is also an opportunity to ask what presidents who genuinely want accurate information and sound strategy should be demanding from the system.

At minimum, any president serious about strategy should insist on three things:

• First, a clear separation between information and advocacy.Raw reporting should state what is known, how it is known, and how confident analysts are. Analytic sections should spell out assumptions, explore alternative interpretations, and acknowledge uncertainty. Policy sections should lay out options, costs, and risks without collapsing everything into a single “recommended” answer. When those boundaries blur, strategy documents become vehicles for justifying choices, not tools for making them.

• Second, disciplined scenario analysis.Every major strategy document and decision memorandum should present a best case, a worst case, and a most-likely case, with plain-language explanations of what would have to happen in each and how probable they are. A thoughtful president may strive for the best case, but should assume the worst case is always possible and prepare contingencies accordingly. In practice, that means aiming to steer the country toward a manageable middle, rather than planning as if the best case is guaranteed.

• Third, genuine long-range projection.Strategy is not a one- or two-year exercise. It should include ten- and twenty-five-year outlooks that take into account demographic trends, technological change, leadership succession abroad, and the possibility that today’s peripheral actor may become tomorrow’s pivotal one. Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam in the 1960s, and Iraq in the early 2000s all illustrate what happens when the United States underestimates the long-term consequences of its choices.

These are not exotic reforms. They are extensions of basic analytic discipline.

IX. Conclusion: Strategy Requires Clarity, Not Comfort

The 2025 National Security Strategy does not look like its predecessors. It devotes much less space to strategic planning and much more space to ideological framing than any other NSS in the 35-year series. By any reasonable quantitative benchmark, it is a statistical outlier. That alone should concern people who care about the quality of American strategy.

But the deeper concern is what that outlier status reveals about institutional behavior. When a strategy document of this importance shifts so sharply toward ideology and away from analysis, it signals that the system is struggling to tell the president—and the country—the unvarnished truth. It suggests that pressures to reassure a president or to fit a preferred narrative have displaced strategic clarity.

Ultimately, the responsibility for fixing that problem lies with the officeholder, not just with the analysts and drafters. Only a president can make it safe for subordinates to speak candidly about unwelcome truths. Only a president can insist that the National Security Strategy read less like a validation of a presidential worldview and more like a hard, honest briefing to the country on the world as it is. And only a president can set the expectation that subordinates are there to test presidential instincts against reality, not to wrap those instincts in institutional prose.

If presidents fail to do this, future NSS documents will continue to drift in the direction of whatever story the incumbent most wants to tell. The numbers from 2025 suggest that this drift is already well underway. For a republic that depends on informed consent and free, independent thought—in its leaders and in its citizens—that is not a cosmetic flaw. It is a structural risk.