The primary goal of any organization, whatever the original intent, is the continued existence & influence of that organization.

National Security State - Reason.com: "It seems ages ago now, but there really was a time when some civil libertarians held out hope for Barack Obama's presidency...  They and many other Obama optimists woke up to a hell of a hangover, one that's lasted six years. The president has launched more than six times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush; ordered the remote-control execution of an American citizen; continued and expanded dragnet domestic surveillance programs based on a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act; and launched two undeclared wars...

The question Michael Glennon asks at the outset of his important new book, National Security and Double Government, is: "Why does national security policy remain constant even when one President is replaced by another, who as a candidate, repeatedly, forcefully, and eloquently promised fundamental changes in that policy?" His answer is altogether darker and more radical than you'd reasonably expect from a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee legal counsel and current international law professor at Tufts. Glennon argues, in essence, that the national security state has become a runaway train and that presidential elections are contests that determine who gets to pretend he's driving...

As power has shifted toward the permanent national security and intelligence bureaucracies, we face an "emergent autocracy" in the guise of a democratic republic. We've "moved beyond a mere imperial presidency," he writes, "to a structure of double government in which even the President exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of US national security policy." We're used to the idea that Congress has ceded most of its formal powers over national security policy to an aggrandizing chief executive. But it's counterintuitive, to say the least, to suggest that government's chief executive isn't really in charge...

The second conventional explanation for policy continuity is what Glennon calls the "government politics model." This emphasizes factors like the content of the president's character and the political pressures brought to bear on the presidency. Maybe, for example, what the Daily Brief really concentrates the president's mind on is political self-preservation. He becomes ever more aware that he's going to be held personally responsible if a bomb goes off anywhere in the country...

Glennon offers another explanation, one that has been overshadowed by the conventional wisdom's focus on the president as decider in chief. Policy continuity is better understood through the "organizational behavior model," he says, which looks to a "Trumanite network" of managers in the military, intelligence bureaucracies, and law enforcement "who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints." Glennon calls them "Trumanites" because of our 33rd president's role in founding the CIA, the modern Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Agency (NSA). Though Glennon doesn't describe his thesis in terms of public choice theory, it echoes that discipline's insight that institutions are run for the benefit of the people who run the institutions. For the Trumanites, Glennon explains, "benefits take the form of enlarged budgets, personnel, missions; costs take the form of retrenchments in each." Witness the vast archipelago of intelligence facilities-nearly three Pentagons' worth of office space-that have been erected in greater Washington, D.C., since 9/11."