National Security Strategy

A National Security Strategy (NSS) is a high-level public or semi-public document in which a government articulates how it perceives the international environment, what it considers vital national interests, which threats it ranks as most pressing, and which diplomatic, military, economic, intelligence, and domestic instruments it will use in response. NSS documents typically integrate foreign policy, defence policy, and increasingly non-traditional issues such as climate change, cyber security, supply-chain resilience, pandemic preparedness, and disinformation.

In the United States, the NSS is mandated by the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which requires the President to transmit a strategy report to Congress. In practice it is published irregularly rather than strictly annually. Subordinate documents — the National Defense Strategy and National Military Strategy — flow from it.

Other states and organisations produce equivalents under different names:

• The United Kingdom has issued Integrated Reviews of security, defence, development and foreign policy (2021, refreshed 2023).
• France publishes a Revue nationale stratégique (latest 2022).
• Germany released its first standalone Nationale Sicherheitsstrategie in June 2023.
• Japan revised its NSS in December 2022, raising defence spending and adopting a counterstrike capability.
• The European Union operates under a Strategic Compass adopted in March 2022.
• NATO's equivalent is the Strategic Concept, most recently agreed at the Madrid Summit in 2022.

NSS documents serve several functions: they signal intent to allies and adversaries, provide a framework for budget and force-planning decisions, and offer a benchmark against which legislatures, think tanks, and publics can hold governments accountable. Critics note that strategies are often aspirational, overtaken by events, or vague on trade-offs between competing priorities. For researchers, comparing successive NSS texts is a useful way to track shifts in how a state defines threats — for example, the move from counterterrorism toward great-power competition in US documents after 2017.