Graham T. Allison - Research Paper Example

national security and defense policy with a special interest in terrorism. He was an assistant secretary of defense in the first Clinton Administration. As director of BCSIA, Dr. Allison has assembled a team of more than two dozen leading scholars and practitioners of national security to analyze terrorism in its multiple dimensions”2. He catapulted to fame from the books that he wrote all involving foreign policy decision making, terrorism, and other conceptual models that became bestsellers.

Contributions In the field of public management, Lynn (2001) cited the contention of Allision in a seminal article that emphasized, ‘The effort to develop public management as a field of knowledge should start from problems faced by practicing public managers’3 .From among his notable books were: his first book, the “Essence ofDecision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), was released in anupdated and revised second edition (1999) and ranks among the all-time bestsellerswith more than 450,000 copies in print.

His latest book, Nuclear Terrorism:The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, is now in its third printing and wasselected by the New York Times as oneof the ‘100 most notable books of 2004’”4.The three models of decision-making were deemed to be based on different levels of analysis. The Rational Actor or Unitary Government model assumed that the presence of the following factors: “unitary optimizing actor; government as a black box; government processes information according to the rules of optimizing rational action; complete information;and the internal structure of decision-making are based on rationality”5.

The Organizational Process Model takes into perspectives the goals of the organization to be well defined and established; the choices are restricted on SOPs; where mission statements are explicitly stated and strategies and policies are directed towards the defined mission; and activities are dependent on the resources and budget of the organization. Finally, the Governmental Politics Model, also called bureaucratic politics or government bargaining model, identified assumptions that focused on key individual decision makers as the unit of analysis; consider both formal and informal networks of power and communication as contributory and influential in decision-making; and where government action presupposed political bargaining process has been undertaken by various key players; to name a few.

The different books that have contributed to expanding the knowledge of practitioners in the field of public management and foreign policy decision making are as follows: Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy; Bureaucratic Politics; Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Essence of Decision; Fateful Visions; Remaking foreign policy; Windows of Opportunity and the latest, Nuclear Terrorism:The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe6 . The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs John F. Kennedy School of Government (BCSIA) (2004) has acknowledged the recognition and awards attributted to Allison as follows: “He served as Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense under President Reagan and as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, during which Dr.

Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations