Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need for National Security Reform

The national security system of the United States was created in 1947 during the administration of President Harry Truman. That world no longer exists. Today the nation is confronted with a globalized, more unpredictable world with multidimensional threats. It is a system in need of massive restructuring according to The Project on National Security Reform, a two-year undertaking of some 300 scholars and national security experts under the leadership of James Locher. PNSR is about to release its recommendations to Congress and the next president for resolving the current national security system problems.

James R. Locher III, Executive Director of PNSR, will discuss the project’s recommendations for a comprehensive redesign of the system including draft presidential directives and a new National Security Act to replace many of the provisions of the 1947 legislation.

Ambassador James F. Dobbins, bringing over three decades of experience in European and global affairs, will offer his comments on the National Security Reform Project and the transformation of the national security system.

Speakers:

Speakrs

• James R. Locher III
  Executive Director, The Project on National Security Reform (PNSR)
• Ambassador James F. Dobbins
  International Security and Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation
• Daniel Serwer, Moderator
  Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, U.S. Institute of Peace

Panel's 'National Security' Construct Carries Major Budget Implications for DOD

By Jason Sherman

Defense Alert

December 4, 2008

Dec. 4, 2008 -- The Pentagon's annual budget request should be weighed against an array of non-military spending needs that also contribute to national security under a new framework that could, for the first time, directly pit requests for funding new weapon system programs against projects currently funded outside the Defense Department budget.

The congressionally mandated Project on National Security Reform, in a report released yesterday calling for sweeping reorganization of the federal government, argues that the U.S. government must create an integrated national security budget influenced by a new White House office, the President's Security Council -- which would replace the current National Security and Homeland Security councils.

The bipartisan panel of more than 300 experts argues that national security encompasses more than military might and the nation's collective wealth; it also includes “sound” economic policy, energy security, and robust physical and human infrastructures, among them U.S. health and education systems, especially in the sciences and engineering.

“A new concept of national security demands recalibration of how we think about and manage national security resources and budgeting,” the panel argues in its 792-page report. “Today's more complex challenges impose qualitatively more demanding resource allocation choices, even in good economic times. If we should face a period of protracted austerity in government, as now seems more likely than not, meeting those challenges will become orders of magnitude more difficult.”

The single-most reliable measure of the success of a policy is whether it is funded, the panel argues, noting that “we are unanimously agreed that the current system's gross inefficiencies risk collapse under the weight of the protracted budget pressures that likely lie ahead. We need to do more with less, but we cannot hope to achieve even that without fundamental reform of the resource management function.”

The Defense Department is allocated considerably more than all the combined total given to the other arms of the federal government that play roles in national security. In fiscal year 2006, for instance, the Pentagon was allocated $419.3 billion; the State Department, $31.8 billion; the overall intelligence community an estimated $60 billion; the office of the director of national intelligence, $1 billion; the Homeland Security Department $29.3 billion; and the Treasury Department $11.6 billion, according to the report.  

The current “resource allocation process fails to meet primary national security purposes in two ways,” the report argues: The process does not connect national security strategy to budget choices and it “does not address long-term national security needs in an integrated fashion across agencies -- it is simply not designed to address interagency needs.”

Current processes provide no means of considering “clear tradeoffs among priorities across agencies,” the report states. Because the Office of the Secretary of Defense largely oversees the review of budget requests and accompanying follow-on, five-year investment plans, with limited oversight from the White House Office of Management and Budget, “it is nearly impossible to create a national security interagency trade-off review at the OMB/[Executive Office of the President] level,” the panel asserts.

Accordingly, it calls for all of the national security arms of these agencies and departments to adopt the Pentagon practice of preparing six-year budget projections in order to facilitate trades between agencies.

The proposed new President's Security Council would issue “national security planning guidance” to inform these six-year investment plans, according to the panel.

“We recommend the creation of an integrated national security budget to provide the president and the Congress a government-wide understanding of activities, priorities, and resource allocation, and to identify redundancies and deficiencies in the resourcing of national security missions,” the pane's report states.

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Project on National Security Reform Delivers Proposals to Obama

By Fawzia Sheikh

Inside the Pentagon

December 4, 2008

After two years of study, the Project on National Security Reform unveiled a long-awaited report for the next administration that recommends merging the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council, and shifting functions to the State Department from other agencies to undo the militarization of foreign policy.

The project involved former senior officials with national security experience and is sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Presidency. The final report released yesterday, titled “Forging a New Shield,” offers 38 recommendations falling under seven themes with interagency cooperation as a key.

The panel also calls for mandating an annual national security planning guidance and an integrated national security budget.

Moreover, it suggests initiating “highly collaborative, mission-focused interagency teams for priority issues.”

Recommendations in the report are grouped by themes such as new approaches focused on national missions and outcomes; unity of purpose; decentralized management of national security issues; resources linked to goals; alignment of personnel incentives with strategic objectives; improved flow of knowledge and information; and a partnership between the legislative and executive branches.

The proposals were delivered last Wednesday to President Bush, President-elect Obama, House Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Cheney, PNSR Executive Director James Locher told a group of reporters at a Dec. 2 briefing. He said he expects the findings to save money in the long run for the government. Previous failures to impose national security reform hurt the U.S. government’s ability to formulate policy, he noted.

“Our government is in vertical stovepipes wearing concrete shoes at a time in which we need to be able to rapidly integrate our expertise and capabilities,” Locher declared.

The project’s mandate to bring together the skills and experience of different government departments and agencies was touched on during a Dec. 1 press conference in which Obama announced his national security team. “To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy, our intelligence and law enforcement, our economy and the power of our moral example,” Obama said.

Locher said he has not heard back from Obama’s team about the new guidance.

The report notes that major and subordinate recommendations are constructed as a single integrated proposal. These themes and recommendations are dependent on each other for their effectiveness “no less than a building’s foundation, superstructure and functional systems must be conceived as an aggregate for any part of it to work as intended,” it notes.

The recommendations are meant to respond to several problems with the national security setup, the first being a grossly unbalanced system, Locher said. “We have these strong department capabilities linked in with their congressional committees, and we have incredibly weak integrating mechanisms. The National Security Council, the national security adviser, they have only advisory responsibilities. So we have a headquarters without headquarters powers, and it’s tremendously small.”

Second, the government lacks strategic direction, denying the national security system “unity of purpose,” Locher noted. The United States does not undertake strategic planning or “visioning,” referring to a practice of looking ahead 20 or 30 years and preparing for these threats, he said. A key reason the government does not carry out this visioning is because the “dysfunctional system” requires all energy to be spent on solving problems “of today and tomorrow,” he asserted.

Another obstacle is a tendency to centralize the management of issues in the executive office of the president, he added.

A fourth hurdle is resources are not aligned with strategic objectives, he said. “It’s hard to believe that in our system, we don’t have the clear articulation of our strategic objectives, the missions we’re trying to accomplish and then match our resources to those,” he said. “The Office of Management and Budget is still really preparing the president’s budget based upon inputs, not based upon outputs. And this is one reason why we have this critical imbalance between the military and non-military budgets.”

Fifth, departmental interests “trump” national interests, he maintained. This occurs because the power lies within the departments but the personnel incentives are “working against us,” he asserted, adding this calls for “major changes” to the reward system.

Next, the system is not managed as a system and, indeed, is not considered as a system, including “lots of important tasks and strategic guidance,” Locher noted.

He said the last problem is Congress, which is “as stovepiped as the executive branch” and arguably even worse.