“The modern National Security Council, for example, created by Henry Kissinger, had no more than 50 people. It stayed around that level for most of the 20th century, though even so, by 2000 it had crept up to about 100. In the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, it doubled again. Under Barack Obama, it doubled yet again. Donald Trump shrunk it some, but President Biden has brought it back to more than 350, with lots of deputies, layers and complexity.”
“New York University scholar Paul Light says that the top five tiers of the Pentagon have gone from 363 people in 1998 to 870 in 2020. At the assistant secretary level alone, the numbers have gone from 193 to 629. There are now 33 layers of bureaucracy at the top of the Defense Department.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/heres-why-us-national-security-apparatus-keeps-producing-failures/