GAO urges changes in budgeting for national security
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 18, 2010; A15
The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the U.S. government establish a central national security budget and then set aside money by responsibilities, breaking with the current arrangement of letting departments and agencies decide how best to arrange their budgets.
That setup has created "a patchwork of activities that waste scarce funds and limit the overall effectiveness of federal efforts," said Gene L. Dodaro, the GAO's director and acting U.S. comptroller general.
"Different organizational structures, planning processes and funding sources to plan for and conduct their national security activities . . . can hinder interagency collaboration," Dodaro said, with the result being "budget requests and congressional appropriations that tend to reflect individual agency concerns." His comments came in a speech about national-security budgeting at National Defense University this month.
Dodaro cited a couple of examples for his position. Since 2005, he said, separate efforts to improve governance within Iraq's ministries -- by the State and Defense departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development -- have "contributed to U.S. efforts not meeting the goal for key Iraqi ministries" to take more responsibility for reconstruction projects.
He also said the Pentagon's regional commands -- such as Central Command, which includes the Middle East and Central Asia -- "are aligned differently" and cover different areas than do the State Department's regional bureaus. That makes coordination "more challenging and [creates] the potential for gaps and overlaps in policy implementation," Dodaro said.
His call for developing and implementing "overarching strategies to achieve national security objectives" reflects the findings of a December 2008 report by the Project on National Security Reform. The report recommended "issuing an integrated national security strategy and creating a unified national security budget"; several leading members of the Obama administration were involved in that project, including Adm. Dennis C. Blair, now director of national intelligence, and James B. Steinberg, now deputy secretary of state.
More recently, the Center for American Progress -- a think tank led by John Podesta, President Obama's transition chief -- came out with a similar recommendation. Last November, in a report titled "Integrating Security," it called for "a unified national security budget that enables policymakers to more readily make the trade-offs necessary between defense, economic development and diplomacy."
That report went further than did Dodaro, saying a unified national security budget could be put together by the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget, and would "identify . . . security priorities within budgetary constraints." It would also include "a prioritized list of critical missions; and identify the major federal programs, infrastructure and budget plan designed to implement the strategy," the center suggested.
Dodaro also focused last week on other weaknesses in the Pentagon's dealing with taxpayer dollars. He started with the oft-repeated fact in such reports that, the Defense Department "is one of the few federal entities that cannot accurately account for its spending or assets," even though it represents a major part of the federal budget.
For 20 years, he said, the GAO had urged changes in the department's financial management, with little success. But he said: "Problems with asset accountability further complicate critical functions such as supporting current plans to withdraw troops and equipment from Iraq."
The Marine Corps this year, he added, will audit its 2010 statement of budgetary resources as a test case for the rest of the Defense Department.
James L. Jones and the Committee to Run the World By Laura Rozen
Foreignpolicy.com's The Cable blog
February 9, 2009
In an interview with the Washington Post published Sunday, retired Marine Corps Gen. James L. Jones,
Obama's national security advisor, gave his most detailed public
comments yet on his vision for how he plans to run the National
Security Council (NSC).
Jones declared that Obama's NSC would be
"dramatically different" from its predecessors, in terms of enhanced
power and government-wide coordinating authority across a larger group
of federal agencies involved in the modern national security project.
He vowed to eliminate "back channels" that allowed certain executive
players to subvert the interagency process in the Bush-Cheney years,
and to centrally coordinate and include a broader collection of federal
agencies involved in the current national security project. "The most
important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you're the
guy around which the meetings occur," Jones told the Post. "When we chair a principals meeting, I'm the chairman."
National
security experts interviewed said a more powerful and integrative NSC
makes sense given the more complex security challenges the United
States confronts. But some said the reason why such lines of authority
have been blurred and crossed in the past and the NSC has been a
relatively weak institution are equally complex, having to do with the
style and preferences of the president, the personal and professional
relationships among players that bypass sanctioned interagency lines,
and the fact that in the U.S. government, power and influence reside
largely in the departments and agencies, with large numbers of
personnel, resources, and connections to their Congressional committees.
"The
single biggest factor in determining whether the NSC is important is
the involvement of the president in national security policy," said David Rothkopf, author of a history of the powerful council, Running the World.
"If you go back and look at national security advisors, the more
important ones than the others are the ones in a real partnership with
president who wanted to be involved.
"For that reason, I think
there's plenty of evidence already to suggest that this will be a very
powerful NSC," Rothkopf continued. "Because Obama is engaged, and he
does want to be involved. It seems to me that Obama is going to carry
forward the long-term trend of having the center of gravity in national
security policymaking increasingly be the White House."
"To
produce the kind of teamwork [needed for current national security
challenges] takes a tremendous amount of integration," said James Locher,
executive director and president of the Project on National Security
Reform, a congressionally funded, independent initiative that has
studied how the U.S. government should be organized and in whose
guiding coalition Jones participated. "The problem we've been
experiencing, whether it's 9/11 or Iraq or Afghanistan in stability
operations or in the response to Hurricane Katrina, is that we could
not produce that integration across departments and agencies."
"General
Jones says he would have a more central role, and ... he has great
leadership and management skills," Locher continued. "He will play much
more of a role in terms of guidance out to the system. One of the
problems that we have had in the past is that we have gone from crisis
to crisis and focused on handling the issues of today and tomorrow, and
not spent time managing the system from a strategic perspective.
General Jones shows that he is disciplining himself, that we have got
to make these organizational changes if we ever hope to get on top of
this."
For all its access to the president, the NSC is relatively
tiny. Its budget is estimated at only about $9 million, going to
salaries and operating expenses. Of the current NSC staff,
approximately 30 percent are employed by the NSC, and 70 percent are
assigned there by other departments and agencies, one source said on
background.
"As [George H. W. Bush's national security advisor Brent] Scowcroft said
often, the national security advisor job has two main components,"
Rothkopf continued. "Staffing the president" -- giving him talking
points, handling phone calls, answering his questions, supporting him
minute-to-minute on international issues -- "and running the national
security process. And it's a balancing act."
"The best-run
process ever, by consensus, was Bush 41," he said. "And part of the
reason it was the best-run process was the president was the best
friend of the national security advisor [Scowcroft], [plus] he was
deeply engaged and knew exactly what he wanted."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates
told Rothkopf that when he was a deputy national security advisor
during Bush 41 and he had a question at an NSC deputies meeting, he
would get up, walk down the hall, ask the president, and go back to the
meeting. "It was a very congenial process with very clear direction
from the top."
Some observers said that differences between
on-paper and in-practice lines of authority had emerged in recently
publicized stories about appointment selections, including that of former Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni,
who said Jones offered him and then rescinded the Iraq ambassador job.
They described a "hidden hand" and "black box" of White House
decision-making that suggested other forces prevailing in the process.
"They
-- at NSC and State -- are trying to base selections on real, true
expertise," one former NSC source said on condition of anonymity. "But
... Presidential Personnel is ... a black box. In every important
decision, people making the decision need some protection. ... The
silver lining may be that the hidden hand, which presumably waved
through Geithner and Daschle's problems, is now discredited, and the
focus could shift back to expertise."
"Personalities and knowing
how the system works are very important," said a former Hill Democratic
foreign-policy hand with ties to the Obama team. "Those relationships
are established de facto and de jure. Saying this is how it's going to
work is not the same as how it's going to be." He suggested that the person who actually has Obama's personal confidence in the NSC more than any other is Denis McDonough,
the top foreign-policy advisor from the campaign who is now deputy
assistant to the president and director of strategic communications in
the NSC.
"The president loves Denis," the former Hill staffer
continued. "If the president is calling anybody at 2 a.m. on a
foreign-policy question, it's Denis. In every meeting with the
president, whether it's [with Middle East envoy George] Mitchell or on
North Korea or Iran, Denis is in the room. He is always in eye-contact
location with the president. He usually walks into the meeting with the
president and leaves with him."
McDonough "is becoming more powerful by the day," he said.
UPDATE: A Hill foreign-policy hand writes, "Picking up on this excerpt from your post: 'As
Scowcroft said often, the national security advisor job has two main
components. ... Staffing the president ... and running the national
security process. And it's a balancing act.' I wonder if Obama
has smartly structured his NSC so that he is relying on Jones and
[deputy national security advisor Thomas] Donilon to run the
interagency process while relying on Denis [McDonough]/[NSC chief of
staff] Mark [Lippert] to do the POTUS staffing work – at which they are
very good and experienced based on their campaign time. Sort of a
division of labor to allow everyone to maximize their strengths."
Obama's NSC Will Get New Power
Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2009; A01
President
Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security
Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set
strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.
The
result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush
administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was
established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic
and military matters, according to national security adviser James L.
Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we
live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations
that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are
terribly useful," he said.
Jones, a retired Marine general, made
it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of
national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that
at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the
vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out
of view of the others.
"We're not always going to agree on
everything," Jones said, and "so it's my job to make sure that minority
opinion is represented" to the president. "But if at the end of the day
he turns to me and says, 'Well, what do you think, Jones?,' I'm going
to tell him what I think."
The new structure, to be outlined in a
presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones,
will expand the NSC's reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign
policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet
and departmental seats at the table -- historically occupied only by
the secretaries of defense and state -- determined on an issue-by-issue
basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.
"The
whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national
security community -- which, historically has been, let's face it, the
Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State
Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce
Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug
Enforcement Administration, all of those things -- especially in the
moment we're currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership," he
said.
New NSC directorates will deal with such
department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy,
climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the
functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate
White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is
still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a
separate body within the White House.
Over the next 50 days, John
O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for
counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones's deputy, will
review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility
for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related
domestic disasters. In a separate interview, Brennan described his task
as a "systems engineering challenge" to avoid overlap with the new NSC
while ensuring that "homeland security matters, broadly defined, are
going to get the attention they need from the White House."
Organizational
maps within the government will be redrawn to ensure that all
departments and agencies take the same regional approach to the world,
Jones said. The State Department, for example, considers Afghanistan,
Pakistan and India together as South Asia, while the Pentagon draws a
line at the Pakistan-India border, with the former under the Central
Command and the latter part of the Pacific Command. Israel is part of
the military's European Command, but the rest of the Middle East falls
under Central Command; the State Department combines Israel and the
Arab countries surrounding it in its Near East Bureau.
"We are going to reflect in the NSC all the regions of the world along some map line we can all agree on," Jones said.
The
national security process, he said, will also be "transparent to its
clients" inside the administration, with meeting agendas and outcomes
made available to "the whole community" in real time. Each department
will appoint someone to monitor the NSC process, enabling senior
officials across the government to be ready to jump into issues without
steep learning curves.
Directorates inside Jones's NSC staff will
oversee implementation of decisions. "It doesn't mean that we
micromanage or supervise," he said. "But you have to make sure, . . .
particularly if it's a presidential decision, that the president is
kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn't just fall off the
end of the table and disappear into outer space."
Most modern
chief executives have issued an early directive outlining a structure
for making national security decisions. Although the 1947 National
Security Act created the NSC and listed its membership -- including the
president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense
-- each president has redefined it to fit his own needs and style. In
recent administrations, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and at times the Treasury secretary have regularly
attended principals meetings. At the same time, the role and power of
the president's national security adviser, and the size of his staff,
have grown larger or smaller depending on the president's wishes.
But
initial presidential intentions have often been waylaid by
personalities and events. George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton's NSC
style as rambling and indecisive. Over the next eight years, however --
as first-term Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice was outmaneuvered by Vice
President Richard B. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
and as Bush's second term became mired in an unpopular war and a
failing economy -- decision-making quickly became more reactive than
strategic, and deliberations were opaque to all but a small inner
circle.
The Obama administration -- with powerful figures such as
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates -- appears crowded at the top of the national security pyramid
and heavy with military officials, including Jones himself and retired
Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence. Special
envoys to trouble spots -- former diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and former senator George J. Mitchell to the
Middle East -- have been given broad presidential authority.
Although
Jones said he strongly supports increased resources for the State
Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding
missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken
proponent of a "pro-active military" in noncombat regions. He has
advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with
nongovernmental organizations abroad.
But Jones said he sees an
administration filled with colleagues rather than competitors. Since
Jan. 20, "I've had more meetings with the secretary of state and the
secretary of defense than I've had in my entire lifetime," said Jones,
who served as Marine Corps commandant, NATO military chief and, under
Bush, a special Middle East envoy.
During a midafternoon
interview last Thursday, Jones said he had already spoken face to face
with Gates and had four telephone conversations with him that day. He
has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton
together in his office.
"I believe in collegiality . . . in
sounding out people and getting them to participate," Jones said. "I
notice the president is very good at that." But he made clear he plans
to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. "The most important thing
is that you are in fact the coordinator and you're the guy around which
the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I'm the
chairman." One of the first of many internal Bush administration
clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair
NSC meetings.
In his initial conversations with Obama before
taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being "in charge" and
having open and final access to the president on all national security
matters. "We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was
already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty
well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the
national security adviser," Jones said of Obama.
The NSC will
take on all national security matters that are strategic in nature and
"of such importance that the president of the United States would care"
about them, he said. Action groups from various departments and
agencies will be formed around specific issues for as long as it takes
to resolve them. "Some of these things will be very short-term. When
the problem goes away, the group goes away." Others will be ongoing.
"An Afghan strategic review, that's going to take a while," Jones said.
"The policy that is generated from that review, and the implementation,
is going to take a while."
Some principals will be regulars at
the NSC "just by force of issues," he said, and "you can't just
designate the whole government as being there." But everyone should be
kept aware of "what's going on" and given an opportunity to say, 'Wait
a minute, I've got something to say here.' "
By Michelle Van Cleave
Sunday, February 8, 2009; B03
Back
in 2002, I got an unexpected phone call from the White House. "Would
you be interested in serving as the head of U.S. counterintelligence?"
they asked.
The Obama administration may already have placed such
a call and picked someone to handle my old job: identifying and
stopping other nations' spies. But my successor will have his or her
work cut out for them.
In 2003, when I began my three years as
the first congressionally mandated national counterintelligence
executive (known by the unpronounceable acronym NCIX), Washington
seemed ready to transform the fight against foreign espionage into a
focused, coherent enterprise. But today, this vital national security
mission is on life support.
Think this isn't a big deal? Think
again. Most Americans would be astonished to learn how successful
foreign intelligence services have been at stealing our national
security secrets and threatening our vital interests.
The Chinese
stole the design secrets to all -- repeat, all -- U.S. nuclear weapons,
enabling them to leapfrog generations of technology development and put
our nuclear arsenal, the country's last line of defense, at risk. To
this day, we don't know quite when or how they did it, but we do know
that Chinese intelligence operatives are still at work, systematically
targeting not only America's defense secrets but our industries'
valuable proprietary information.
The Soviets, of course, were
especially aggressive at spying -- a tradition that has roared back to
life in Vladimir Putin's Russia. It was bad enough that the KGB learned
so much about U.S. vulnerabilities, but scores of hostile intelligence
services and terrorist groups have also been schooled in the tradecraft
that the Soviets perfected.
If left unanswered, these growing
foreign intelligence threats could endanger U.S. operations, military
and intelligence personnel and even Americans at home. But across the
government, our counterintelligence capabilities are in decay. The
struggle against foreign intelligence threats has a national leadership
in name only. Nor is it driven by any overall strategy, which means
that integrating the efforts of the 16 agencies that make up the U.S.
intelligence community has taken a back seat to individual agencies'
priorities. Meanwhile, we are losing talent at an alarming pace. Take
it from me: This is as unnecessary as it is dangerous.
Given the
stakes, it may seem strange that, until very recently, there was no
such job as "head of U.S. counterintelligence" -- no one person
responsible for identifying foreign intelligence threats to U.S.
national security or economic well-being and figuring out what to do
about them. Instead, counterintelligence responsibilities were divided
among the FBI, the CIA and the three military services, with no central
leadership or overarching structure to unite them. That created
inherent seams that adversaries could -- and did -- exploit.
Then
came the 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence chief
who turned out to have been spying for the Soviets for nine long years.
Through "dead drops" in Washington and meetings with his handlers
abroad, Ames handed over comprehensive blueprints of U.S. collection
operations against the Russians, including the identities of the very
clandestine agents he was sworn to protect. At least nine people lost
their lives because of Ames.
His treachery sparked a searching
reexamination: What was wrong with U.S. counterintelligence? That
anguished question became even more urgent with the February 2001
arrest of Robert Hanssen, an FBI special agent who had been working for
the Russians for more than two decades -- to devastating effect.
Hanssen handed over more than 6,000 pages of classified documents on
some of our most sensitive national security programs, including
details on U.S. nuclear-war defenses. He also revealed the identities
of Russian agents working for the United States, two of whom were tried
and executed.
How could such spies have operated unseen at the
very heart of our national security enterprise for so long and with
such success?
The answer was staring us in the face: We had no
coherent game plan for identifying, assessing and stopping such
threats. As the new head of U.S. counterintelligence, it would be my
job to develop and execute the nation's first strategy for finding and
neutralizing foreign spies.
This, I knew, would not be easy. I
had worked on espionage issues for two presidents and the Senate
Judiciary Committee. I knew that counterintelligence was little
understood within the national security community, where it was largely
overshadowed by the far more familiar world of intelligence gathering.
I
also knew that the United States is a spy's paradise. Our free and open
society is tailor-made for clandestine operations. And most of the
golden eggs worth collecting are found within our borders: military
plans and diplomatic strategies, weapons designs, nuclear secrets, even
proprietary R&D from companies such as Bell Labs or Dupont.
And
business is booming. Today, most of the world's governments (even
friendly ones) and roughly 35 suspected terrorist organizations run
intelligence operations against the United States. The Russians, for
example, still have as many spies here as they did at the height of the
Cold War. That's daunting enough. But the counterintelligence challenge
isn't just one of sheer numbers. The scope of these activities is an
even bigger problem.
Historically, embassies and other diplomatic
establishments within the United States have served as ready-made safe
houses for foreign spies masquerading as diplomats, which is why the
20,000-strong diplomatic community has traditionally commanded the
lion's share of counterintelligence attention. But in America today,
there are thousands of foreign-owned commercial establishments,
hundreds of thousands of exchange students and visiting academicians,
and countless routine trade and financial interactions. Hidden beneath
these open and legitimate activities can be darker purposes. With our
open, rich society as cover, intelligence officers and their agents can
move about freely, develop contacts and operate in the shadows -- a
point no more lost on foreign spies than it was on the 19 hijackers
that September morning in 2001.
As a result, foreign powers are
running intelligence operations throughout the United States with
unprecedented independence from the safe havens of their diplomatic
establishments, leaving our counterintelligence efforts in the dust.
In
the past, America's default strategy has been to wait to engage the
adversary in our own backyard, rather than in his. Ninety percent of
our counterintelligence resources are concentrated within the United
States. We're playing goal-line defense rather than looking for
opportunities to get ahead of the game.
The new national strategy
approved by President Bush was a sharp departure from the past. It
declared that we would no longer cede the initiative to foreign
intelligence services working on U.S. soil. Following the age-old
wisdom that the best defense is a good offense, the new strategy
directed the intelligence community to marshal its resources and go
after the most worrisome foreign intelligence services. Our goal was to
methodically disrupt their ability to work against the United States,
starting by focusing on targets abroad.
But when each of the
counterintelligence organizations across the sprawling intelligence
community was asked to map out its programs and resource allocations to
see whether they squared with these new goals, something miraculous
occurred: Somehow, all of those existing plans, programs and budgets
just happened to perfectly match the new national priorities. No real
changes were needed -- no new starts, no hard choices. It was
unbelievable -- literally.
This is where the 2003 law that
created my job fell short. As the quarterback of our
counterintelligence efforts, I was responsible for providing strategic
direction and evaluating how well various agencies were performing. But
I had no power to move funds around or establish new programs. The law
created a national executive but not the means of execution.
Things
got even more confused after 2005, with the creation of the nation's
first director of national intelligence (DNI), an idea that arose from
the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. When my office was placed
under that of the DNI, I hoped that working for the new overall leader
of the intelligence community would give us more clout, especially the
ability to give marching orders and fix budgets.
No such luck. In
setting up his new office, the first DNI, the veteran diplomat John
Negroponte, delegated the authority for much of our work to his own
newly created deputies. True, I was named the "mission manager" for
counterintelligence and made Negroponte's principal adviser on the
problem. But an adviser is not a leader.
With no central
leadership of the fight against foreign intelligence threats, the FBI,
the CIA and the military services tend to go their separate ways. And
my position and staff became just another layer of the weighty
bureaucracy of the office of the DNI.
Seven years after we
created my old office, there is no central clearing-house to support
operations against the spies who are working against us around the
globe or to formulate policy options for President Obama and his top
aides. And we still know surprisingly little about hostile intelligence
services relative to the amount of harm they can do.
How
important is all of this, really? Cynics will scoff and say, "There
will always be spies." But I have read the file drawers full of damage
assessments; I have catalogued the enormous losses in lives, treasure
and crucial secrets that foreign intelligence work has caused. The
memory of what's in those files -- and the thought of the people and
the operations still in harm's way -- can keep me awake at night.
So
we have to choose. We can handle these threats piecemeal, or we can
pull together a strategic program -- one team, one plan, one goal -- to
reduce the overall danger. We can chase individual spies case by case,
or we can target the services that send them here. The next devastating
spy case is just around the bend. I fear that when it comes, we will
all ask ourselves why we didn't stop it. I suspect I already know the
answer.
Michelle Van Cleave served as head of U.S. counterintelligence from
July 2003 through March 2006. She is a senior research fellow at the
National Defense University and a special adviser to the Project on
National Security Reform.
Smart Intelligence
By Limor Ben-Har and Myra Howze Shiplett
Government Executive
January 28, 2009
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently announced guidelines that will revolutionize the way 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community manage their employees. The move will encourage greater innovation, cooperation and cross-pollination among national security agencies and functions.
The guidelines create descriptions of intelligence jobs and skills, making it easier to assemble teams of experts from different agencies to respond rapidly to crises and to work together on assignments. They also address the joint-duty program, which requires employees to complete at least one assignment outside their home agency before they can move up to senior-level positions.
Employees who gain experience working in another agency are more likely to cooperate with colleagues across agency lines. The current stove-piped system, which discourages joint assignments and interagency cooperation, has hampered collaboration and policy implementation at historical junctures.
America's national security system, created in 1947, has failed to keep pace with changing threats. At the request of Congress and the Defense Department, a coalition of think tanks and experts established the Project on National Security Reform to identify problems and develop recommendations to transform the national security system into an interagency community that can respond to today's threats and opportunities.
In December, the coalition released its recommendations in a report titled "Forging a New Shield." The report flagged the need to strengthen the national security workforce as an essential core reform. People are an organization's most valuable resource, but the intelligence community -- and the rest of the national security system -- fails to make the best use of its talents.
Through a broad range of measures such as the establishment of core values, common job descriptions and new incentives for collaboration across agency lines, the coalition will strengthen efforts to create a national security workforce that functions as a unified team.
Without a culture of collaboration national security agencies struggled to bring in the right people at the right time to build provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. The botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina is another example of what can go wrong when agencies fail to work together.
The Project on National Security Reform has developed more than 100 case studies of success and failure during national security crises. A continuing theme in most failures was the inability to quickly get government agencies at all levels to work together to take necessary actions.
Presidential leadership is essential in serious national security reform. President Obama must work with Congress and Cabinet secretaries to ensure that the system encourages a culture of unity and collaboration. But the right incentives and programs have to be in place to turn the president's directives into reality. The coalition's recommendations call for developing an incentive system linked to goals in the periodic national security strategic assessment.
National security challenges are growing in magnitude and frequency, and without meaningful change they will be hard to overcome. Success will require a system that is holistic, highly integrated, collaborative and fast. Human capital management policies and programs must support these values.
New policies, such as the ODNI's guidelines, are critical to attracting and keeping employees with the proper skills. The Project on National Security Reform recommends significant investments in training to make sure agencies have the talent needed to carry out their missions.
Structural and procedural reforms alone will not solve the national security system's problems. They must be buttressed by an effort to build a shared culture and opportunities for education and assignments that keep employees on the cutting edge. An integrated national security workforce must be a major component of this effort.
Limor Ben-Har is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency. Myra Howze Shiplett is president of the RandolphMorgan Consulting LLC and heads the Human Capital Working Group for PNSR.
Intelligence Pick Fields Panel’s Questions By Walter Pincus The Washington Post January 28, 2009
Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, whose nomination to be director of national intelligence is scheduled for a vote today before the Senate intelligence committee, dealt with some critical issues in a written response to panel members' questions, indicating support for disclosing the annual national intelligence budget figure, opposition to the creation of a domestic intelligence agency separate from the FBI and support for informing Congress when the Pentagon conducts covert intelligence activities.
After Blair's hearing last Thursday, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had additional questions. The arrival of his answers set the stage for today's expected favorable vote. The committee also scheduled Leon E. Panetta's hearing on his nomination as CIA director for next Tuesday.
Under one law, the CIA and other government intelligence agencies must report covert operations to Congress, but the Pentagon at times has said that such activities come under a different law.
Blair said that different laws governing covert activities were written during the Cold War and "currently slow and degrade the conduct of operations in the field." He said that some CIA covert activities need military support and that other military actions need intelligence agency cooperation. "There is often not a bright line between these operations," he said, but they "must be carefully considered and approved by appropriate authorities."
He also said he favors some changes to the White House national security apparatus as recommended by the Project on National Security Reform, of which he was deputy executive director. Two changes he mentioned were the creation of an integrated national security budget that would cover all departments and intelligence agencies, and the creation of interagency teams and crisis task forces under the Executive Office of the President to oversee interagency execution of policy for situations such as those in Afghanistan and Iran.
Asked about reducing the staff of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, a longtime concern of the committee, Blair said he would make it a "priority to assess this issue," adding: "I believe that large staffs can sometimes interfere in the effective management of a large organization."
Blair's financial statement, released by the committee yesterday, shows that he collected substantial sums as a director of several companies doing defense business. As a member of the board of Tyco International, he was paid $80,000 in fees and had stock awards totaling $120,000. Two years ago, the Pentagon inspector general reported that Blair had violated conflict of interest rules when, as head of the Institute for Defense Analyses, he did not disqualify himself totally from a study that involved the F-22 aircraft at a time when he was on the board of two subcontractors, one of which was Tyco.
At his hearing last week, Blair said that was a mistake, and in his written answers he said he would consult with the DNI general counsel if potential conflicts or the appearance of conflict arose after he was confirmed.
Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, President-elect Barack Obama's incoming
national security adviser, will be given sweeping new powers if Mr. Obama takes
the advice of a little-noticed task force charged with recommending reforms to
the nation's security apparatus.
The Project on National Security Reform's executive board last month issued
a report recommending updates to the National Security Act, the 1947 law that
established the National Security Council. Among other things, it recommended
giving the national security adviser more budget authority over the State
Department, the Pentagon and military and intelligence agencies.
The report could be considered one of the kind that is often requested but
rarely acted upon in Washington, except for one thing: Gen. Jones was a member
of the panel that crafted it.
Not only did Gen. Jones participate in the study, but the task force that made
the recommendations also included incoming Deputy Secretary of State James B.
Steinberg and incoming Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele A.
Flournoy. The deputy chairman of the task force was retired Adm. Dennis C.
Blair, whom Mr. Obama has chosen to be director of national intelligence (DNI).
Also, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. held Senate hearings last
year on national security reform, during which he heard testimony from the
project's executive director, James R. Locher III.
In addition to the input on agency budgets, the task force recommended
renaming the position of national security adviser to make it national security
manager and expanding the number of departments and agencies represented in the
National Security Council. The council currently includes the secretaries of
state and defense, the director of national intelligence, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security adviser and the president and vice
president.
"I think the way to think about it is that those individual secretaries
and DNI will have important jobs and a tremendous amount of power," Mr.
Locher told The Washington Times. "We need something more, though. We need
that ability to integrate. We need a manager. Gen. Jones will have to play a
more important role than national security advisers have in the past."
The project's recommendations, which would have to be approved by Congress,
urge the next president to "broaden the scope of national security beyond
security from aggression to include security against massive societal
disruption as a result of natural forces and security against the failure of
major national infrastructure systems and to recognize that national security
depends on the sustained stewardship of the foundations of national
power."
That means, according to project staff members, that the U.S. policy on
climate change or a new pandemic would be forged inside the National Security
Council instead of being farmed out to the Environmental Protection Agency or
the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, those agencies, which normally do not participate in the
National Security Council, would have representation inside that body.
With budget guidance going through the National Security Council and not the
Office of Management and Budget, there is a chance that Gen. Jones could emerge
as the most powerful national security adviser since Henry Kissinger held that
job and the job of secretary of state for Presidents Nixon and Ford.
"Right now, there is a strong consensus that the current system is not
working," Mr. Locher said. "It was designed in 1947 for a different
world after World War II and with the approaching Cold War in mind. It
reinforced the departments and agencies. We created a weak integrating mechanism."
Mr. Locher knows a few things about changing well-established bureaucracies.
He was one of the main staff authors on the Senate Armed Services Committee of
the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which
increased the power of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Prior to that
law's passage, the chairman's role in mediating the interservice rivalries in
annual defense budgets was weak.
The leader of the project's working group on resources, David Berteau, said
that too often, large missions for the U.S. government overseas are designated
to the Department of Defense (DoD) because the military is the one institution
with sufficient personnel and budget.
"Today you go to DoD because DoD is the only readily equipped source,"
he said. "The question is, is that the right way to set it up? Probably
not for all contingencies. Let's use these other guys instead, but they are not
ready to go. They have no bench strength, no reserve capacity. At its top is a
budget issue; at its core is a strategy issue."
***************************************************************************************
December 15, 2008-- Audio of Jim Locher's presentation at the United States Institute of Peace, December 12, 2008.
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.
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.
The PNSR committee devised several recommendations to address
these problems.
Under the heading of adopting new approaches, the panel recommends
the Pentagon focus on national missions and outcomes, not departmental
missions, Locher told reporters. “That will require much more emphasis on an
integrated effort and on collaboration and agility,” he said. “We’re going to
urge the president-elect to appoint cabinet secretaries with collaboration
skills.”
The report also advises Obama’s team to replace the National
Security Council and Homeland Security Council with a President’s Security
Council. Locher said the panel would not specify the membership of this new
organization.
Further, the study advocates broadening the scope of national
security beyond security from aggression to security against disruptions
created by pandemics, natural disasters, climate change and failure of
infrastructure systems.
“And then we want to give attention to the foundations of national
power,” Locher noted. “A sound economic policy, energy security. You know, we’re
worried about education issues, science and technology, the things that are
really the foundations of our national security.”
In addition, the group’s study advocates creating a position of
director of national security. However, Locher concedes PNSR is “silent on the
issue of whether the assistant to the president for national security affairs
continues to exist.” This person would be the principal assistant to Obama on
national security issues and have “authority in his own right,” he explained, adding
it should be created in statute.
Locher’s team also asks the president to issue an executive order
on the national security interagency system that would have “longer term
standing across administrations,” he said.
Under unity of purpose, the report urges the executive office of
the president to focus on “high policy, grand strategy and strategic system
management.”
Locher told reporters the system is not undertaking these tasks
since it is only concerned with “today and tomorrow.”
To this end, the committee would mandate a national security
review near the beginning of each administration, and annually the president
would issue national security planning guidance to each department and agency
with a role in national security, he explained. The guidance would articulate
strategic objectives and missions.
Moreover, the executive secretary of the President’s Security
Council should “pick up the issues of supporting system management,” including
strategic guidance, macro-resource allocation and assessment, among other
things, he added.
Decentralizing management of national security issues is another
theme. The report proposes shifting the management of national security issues
from the President’s Security Council staff to interagency teams with one common
mission. The president may then begin with a small set of priorities in which
“he would like to make rapid progress,” Locher said.
For crisis situations, the report urges the next administration to
create interagency task forces with “a single integrated chain of command.”
Linking resources to goals, the fourth theme, asks Obama to issue
six-year budget projections based upon national security planning guidance, and
hold reviews of budget submissions jointly through the President Security
Council and the Office of Management and Budget, the report states.
The fifth major report heading is aligning personnel incentives
with strategic objectives. This provision would create a human capital
strategic plan for the interagency world, a national security professional
corps specially trained to carry out interagency assignments, use promotion
requirements to “incentive people to serve in interagency positions” and
strengthen education and training programs, Locher added.
In addition, PNSR recommends improving the flow of knowledge and
information among government agencies. “The government knows a tremendous
amount; it just cannot get it to the point of application,” he told reporters.
“We don’t trust each other. There’s reluctance to share information. There’s
also the view that information is power.”
Consequently, Locher’s committee urges the creation of a chief
knowledge officer on the staff of the President’s Security Council,
establishing a single security classification and access regime and consolidating
security clearance procedures and approval.
And, finally, PNSR suggests a better partnership between the
legislative and executive branches. A key proposal is forming select committees
on national security in the House and Senate, which would be headed by the
chairmen and ranking members of the committees with national security
jurisdictions, or their designates, he said. “What the Congress lacks is it
does not have a horizontal team that can focus on national security,” explained
Locher. “It has the expertise of all of the standing committees, but it’s
looking at this space between the departments and the president.”
PNSR seeks to strengthen the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
and the House Foreign Affairs Committee by empowering them to formulate and
enact annual authorization bills, the report states. It also aims to offer more
flexibility on reprogramming, transfer of funds and contingency funding. It
establishes a goal of revising the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by December
2010, and advocates consolidating congressional oversight of Homeland Security.
The PNSR committee has in mind three types of reforms to transform
the national security system, Locher said.
The first is an executive order, he said. On Jan. 21, Obama may
not have all the authority needed to make “the bold changes” required but he
has “lots of authority in place currently,” he said.
Another way to bring about changes is by introducing amendments to
the rules of the House and Senate, he added.
Instituting a new national security act is the final vehicle to
usher in change, Locher told reporters.
PNSR, a bipartisan, private-public partnership, was established in
2006 to address the urgent need for national security system reform, releasing
preliminary findings in July.
In October, Locher told
Inside the Pentagon PNSR plans to
collaborate with others working on national security reform and produce
recommendations in February or March.
Experts’ Report Urges Changes in
National Security System
By Walter Pincus
The Washington
Post
December 4, 2008
A bipartisan panel of foreign policy experts, including some associated with the incoming Obama administration, has recommended changes in the White House national security apparatus that would provide the president and his staff with new tools to ensure interagency cooperation.
Chief among its recommendations is merging the National Security and Homeland Security councils and creating a director for national security who would manage implementation of the president's policies rather than just coordinate the views of Cabinet members and present them to the president, as the national security adviser currently does.
"The basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed and complexity of emerging security issues prevents the White House from effectively controlling the system," says the report of the Project on National Security Reform, released yesterday.
As an example, the report said that "after more than seven years, the U.S. government has proved unable to integrate adequately the military and nonmilitary dimensions of the complex war on terror."
The two-year project, run under the auspices of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, was financed primarily with $6.4 million from Congress and employed 25 former senior national security officials. Several Obama appointees are among the "guiding coalition" that helped supervise the project, including retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, chosen to be national security adviser, Michèle A. Flournoy, one of the leaders of Obama's Pentagon transition team, and James B. Steinberg, the campaign's foreign policy adviser who is said to be a candidate for deputy secretary of state. Retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, thought to be the leading candidate for director of national intelligence, was the project's deputy executive director.
At yesterday's news conference introducing the report and recommendations, Blair described another project proposal that would call for establishing interagency teams directed at dealing with priority issues. Thomas R. Pickering, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Clinton administration, compared the proposed mission teams to the Executive Committee formed in the Kennedy White House that handled the Cuban missile crisis.
James R. Locher III, executive director of the project, said that the president could issue an executive order to establish the national security interagency system but that other elements of the project's proposals would require legislation.
If you wanted to propose the most significant changes in the U.S. national
security architecture in half a century,
James Locher III
would be a logical choice to lead the effort. A key architect of the
Goldwater-Nichols defense reforms of the 1980s, Locher went on to cajole
warring factions in the Balkans to embrace a joint national security system. As
executive director of the Project on National Security Reform, Locher this week
unveiled a blueprint for a revamped 21st-century national security system. He
recently spoke with
National Journal's
James Kitfield.
Edited excerpts from that interview follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.
NJ: With so many burning crises already in their inbox, why would a
new Obama administration and Congress want to undertake fundamental national
security reforms?
Locher: Well, I think Republicans and
Democrats alike agree that the system is broken, and that makes people
receptive to change. They watched the 9/11 attacks, and the problems the United
States encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the botched response to
Hurricane Katrina. All of those setbacks are not coincidental. They have
organizational root causes. And if we don't address those causes and adjust a
badly misaligned national security structure, we'll continue to suffer major
setbacks time after time.
NJ: What do you consider the root cause of those failures?
Locher: In simple terms, the challenges we
confront in the 21st century are horizontal problems whose solutions require
collaborative work across the government. Yet we're trying to deal with those
challenges with a government that is vertically oriented into stove-piped
agencies and departments. The boundaries between those agencies are
non-permeable, rigid and bureaucratic. There are powerful incentives designed
into the system that reinforce an inward-looking culture where people are not
rewarded for putting the national interest above the agency interest. In fact,
mavericks who do so often put their careers at risk.
NJ: So we have a mismatch between fluid threats and rigid
governmental structures and responses?
Locher: Look at terrorism and you see the
problem. The terrorism threat requires the cooperation of many foreign
governments, so the State Department must get closely involved. The Pentagon is
critical to the manhunt. Law enforcement and the Department of Justice are
equally central. Every element of the intelligence community is involved. The
Treasury Department is charged with trying to cut the money flow to terrorists.
The Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for managing the
consequences of an attack with weapons of mass destruction. So the problem
requires a complex, coordinated response that the government is incapable of
mounting. That's the cause of our recent failures.
NJ: If the national security system is so dysfunctional, why has it
survived for more than half a century?
Locher: Though it had some inherent weaknesses
and noted failures, the system worked reasonably well during the Cold War. Most
people in government today grew up with it, so it's also the only system
they've ever known. That makes it difficult for people to imagine fundamentally
reforming it to confront 21st-century challenges. We faced the same inertia
with the Goldwater-Nichols reforms [of the Pentagon] in the mid-1980s. The
evidence that the Defense Department needed reform had likewise mounted for 40
years, but first we had to do the intellectual and political spade work to make
reform possible.
In this case, we looked at 126 case studies involving
interagency operations. We worked with both presidential campaigns, briefed
more than 50 members of Congress and 20 senators, reached out to the various
agencies involved, and consulted more than 300 national security professionals.
So we've built a broad consensus and coalition for reform, and hopefully we'll
get it into the end zone with the passage of reform legislation by the end of
next year.
NJ: In your recommendations, why do you emphasize strengthening the
role and authority of the national security adviser and National Security
Council?
Locher: From my own experience in charge of
Special Forces at the Pentagon, I was very dependent on the interagency
process, but the National Security Council system was too weak in comparison to
the departments to take charge and manage that integration. The NSC can
formulate policy, but it is very weak on policy implementation. That's why we
recommend that the national security adviser be given a much bigger role, with
commensurate authority and seniority. We recommend renaming the position the
"Director of National Security," and empowering that person as the
principal assistant to the president for all matters concerning national
security. We have to elevate that position from someone who just brokers the
views of the Cabinet secretaries to someone who is really almost a super-Cabinet
official recommending to the president what needs to be done.
NJ: Why do you also look to the NSC to address the mismatches in
resource allocation among the national security agencies and departments?
Locher: Because that is a huge weakness in the
current system. Right now, OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] allocates
resources based on departmental requests and past budget levels, as opposed to
letting the president's stated objectives and missions drive the process. We
recommend that the national security adviser, working with OMB, play a much
bigger role in aligning resources with the president's priorities.
NJ: Why do you also call for greater strategic planning capability,
but below the level of the NSC?
Locher: Well, right now the NSC doesn't have
the kind of people who can do strategic planning. Their strategy documents are
mostly about public relations: they don't drive the activities or resource
allocation of anyone in government. That has to change. At the same time, we
don't think you should over-centralize all these functions in the NSC, and try
and manage everything from the top. The White House and NSC can only adequately
manage two or three issues at one time. They are so overwhelmed by immediate
crises that they can't really conduct strategic planning or address the dozens
of other problems that require attention. So our idea is that the president
create and empower interagency teams that are to some extent an extension of
the NSC staff, though they should probably reside away from the White House.
NJ: How would such interagency teams work?
Locher: Say
President Obama
decides that energy security is really important, and he realizes that the
issue cuts across many government agencies. Rather than just assign it to the Department
of Energy, he thus creates an interagency team, gives it the requisite mandate,
resources and authorities, and then tasks it with rapidly developing powerful
and creative ideas for solving the problem. The team stays focused on the
president's mandate and the broader national interest, but it pulls expertise
and capabilities from the various departments. The team also keeps the various
departments informed of their progress, because the departments will ultimately
play a huge role in the implementation of any plan or strategy. That's similar
to how Goldwater-Nichols empowered the Joint Staff to operate relative to, and
with the support of, the service staffs.
NJ: Are there other models for such powerful, interagency teams?
Locher: Private industry and commercial
businesses have created similar horizontal teams drawn from across the
enterprise to deal with the same challenge of complexity and rapid change. It
started with horizontal process teams at Toyota in the 1980s. Those teams
dramatically cut the time it takes Toyota to design and produce a car by
breaking down the functional stovepipes inside the company. They were so
successful at developing and implementing ideas quickly that the entire auto
industry had to follow suit. Government now has to adopt the same concept
because we can't afford to waste the time and energy expended by these large
bureaucracies pushing and shoving each other over turf.
NJ: Haven't a number of post-9/11 reorganizations already attempted
to address the issue of interagency cooperation, including creation of the
Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National
Intelligence?
Locher: To a degree. There's no question that
as we move forward, more activity will take place in that interagency space above
the Cabinet departments and below the president. The National Security Council,
the Homeland Security Council, the National Counterterrorism Center, the
director of national intelligence, even the embassies all operate in that
space.
The problem is many of those entities don't have the requisite
capability and scope. The National Counterterrorism Center is completely
ineffective, for instance, because it can develop plans but lacks the ability
to execute or assess implementation. That insufficient mandate is crippling.
Similarly, the reforms behind the director of national intelligence created a
shell or superstructure over the intelligence community but didn't give the
director the legal authority to demand cooperation from 16 separate
intelligence fiefdoms. The same is true of the Department of Homeland Security,
which pushed together all these entities without addressing the firewalls and
jealousies that keep it from operating as an effective organization. That's why
our recommendations go beyond just reorganizing the structure to focus on
shared values, common vision and a collaborative understanding of the mission.
You have to address the cultural and human capital dimensions to make this
work.
NJ: How do you change that dynamic in entrenched bureaucracies?
Locher: It starts with leadership. In today's
world of collaboration, department secretaries have to understand how they fit
into the larger picture as part of a common team. You can't afford to have this
competitive culture and instinct that we saw with [former Defense Secretary
Donald]
Rumsfeld, for instance, which led the secretaries of Defense
and State to being almost at war with each other.
As we did in creating a joint culture among the services with
Goldwater-Nichols, you also need to have a lot more cross-assignments between
agencies. In order to get promoted to a senior rank in government, you should
be required to serve in another department or agency. We need to achieve at a
national level what we accomplished with Goldwater-Nichols. If you visit any
combatant command today, you'll find service members thinking solely about
achieving the mission, rather than advancing the interest of the Army, Air
Force, Navy or Marine Corps.
NJ: So the "joint culture" that Goldwater-Nichols helped
create at the Pentagon needs to be grafted on to the multi-agency level of
government?
Locher: Yes. We have to create a culture where
it is no longer good enough to support the department's interest -- the goal is
to serve the larger national interest. That's a huge cultural shift, but I'm
convinced we can succeed because I've seen it done. The good news is that young
people today are already thinking in these terms. They are used to being
connected horizontally through all sorts of social networks. Young people are
comfortable with reaching out and sharing information in order to get things
done. They're interested in serving a larger cause. We need to see that same
sense of collaboration in the federal government.
The tasks before Barack Obama’s new national security team are huge:
execute the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, bring Afghanistan back from the
brink, and open what the president-elect has called a “new dawn of American
leadership” in the world. Few know these challenges better than James L. Jones,
a former NATO commander and Marine general who has been tapped as the next U.S.
national security advisor. In addition to his on-the-ground experience, General
Jones has—for the last two years—been part of a “guiding coalition” for the
Project on National Security Reform, whose new report recommends sweeping
reforms to the U.S. national security apparatus.
The
Project’s findings are brutally frank: The system is deeply flawed,
inefficient, and poorly coordinated. There is waste and misallocation. James R.
Locher III, the project’s executive director and a former assistant secretary
of defense, told
Foreign
Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson that national security reform is the
“number one security issue” facing the United States today. Locher’s report
offers a unique window into how General Jones and former Deputy National
Security Advisor James B. Steinberg, another past commission member who is
widely expected to land a top administration job, might approach the mission
ahead of them.
Foreign Policy: In your
preliminary findings, you describe today’s world as an unpredictable
place—filled with non-traditional combat, resource competition, and rapidly
changing circumstances. Can you give us a picture of that world from a security
point of view?
James R. Locher III:
The United States used to have one major
enemy that we focused on. Now, [we face a] whole range of different threats and
challenges. When we had to do multi-agency things [during the Cold War],for
example, the Vietnam War, we struggled a long period of time figuring out how
to integrate all the instruments of power. Now the world is a whole series of
Vietnam-type events. We also still have to worry about various state actors.
These
situations are incredibly complex and they’re changing very rapidly, which
requires that we work horizontally across the government. I often like to use
the example of the Global War on Terror. It’s a law enforcement issue, so we
need the Department of Justice. We’re working with lots of countries and
through the United Nations, so we need the Department of State. You have the
Defense Department involved in the killing or capturing of terrorists. You need
almost all elements of the intelligence community. We have Treasury involved
because we’re trying to stem the flow of terrorist finances. Transportation is
involved because that’s where terrorists like to strike—transportation
networks. We have Health and Human Services involved because we’re worried
about biological and chemical warfare. Then you have the Department of Homeland
Security that worries about the domestic terrorist threat.
You need
to integrate all that expertise and capability, and our government does not
have the mechanisms to do that. The National Security Council are headquarters
without headquarter powers. They are advisory only. The setbacks that we’ve had
recently—from 9/11 to the trouble stability of the operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan and the failed response to Hurricane Katrina—they’re all evidence
of this misalignment of our government with the challenges we’re facing.
FP: In the case studies discussed in this report, you look at some of the
crucial moments in U.S. national security, such as the decision to invade Iraq
and the handling of the crisis in Somalia in the early 1990s. Are there
underlying threads of weaknesses throughout these examples?
JL:
Somalia was really a policy formulation problem. How do we formulate
effective policy when we have a weak integrating mechanism and we have very
powerful departments who hold on to their perspectives for a long period of
time? The people on the ground in Somalia did not have a clear understanding,
there was not an understanding in Washington as to what the situation was on
the ground, and it lead to disastrous results.
With
respect to the decision to invade Iraq—we did not have a very effective policy
formulation. One of the first things that you have to do if you are going to
have effective policy is you have to have a really rigorous assessment. That
process did not occur.
FP: Was that a systematic failing, or was that more a problem of particular
people who happened to be working on it?
JL:
You always have the issue of personality; you never really get rid of
it. And there were lots of personality issues at play there—key people who were
allied on issues and who were incredibly powerful. You didn’t have that
objective, hard-nosed analysis that you might like to have. But the system
isn’t well designed in that regard. It can produce good policy on occasion—but
it can lead to lowest common denominator or lots of stalemates or working
outside of the system.
FP: Will Barack Obama read this report?
JL:
I’m hopeful he will read the executive summary, which is just 15 pages.
There are lots of people around the president-elect who are familiar with our
work, so we’re hopeful.
This is a
great time for our report to come out. [We have a] new administration that’s
talking about changes, and a huge economic crisis which means that we need to
learn how to do more with less—to be much more efficient. Right now, because of
our organizational dysfunction, we have wasted and lost resources.
FP: So it sounds like you definitely see the political will to get this
moving in the next administration?
JL:
I think the events of the last seven or eight years have led lots of
people to believe that something’s really wrong—that we have all of these
resources, that we have all of this capability in our national security
departments, and yet we’re having trouble handling these challenges. Our
methodology is very much focused on what’s wrong. You cannot really fix something
until you know what needs to be fixed. Washington often is too impatient to
fully understand the problems.
FP: Some of the people rumored to be in the incoming administration—people
such as James L. Jones and James Steinberg—served as members on the “guiding
coalition” of this project. Do you hope they will be advocates for the work
that you’ve been doing?
JL:
I’m hopeful they will, but I can’t speak for them. I think the people
who are going into the administration will go in with the understanding that
those problems.
One
challenge is that almost everybody only knows the system we’ve had for 60
years, and there is no sense of how outmoded it is. Today is very different
from 1947, and some people have a very strong attachment to the current system.
We need a new arrangement, and it will take time for people to get used to
that. This is the end of the beginning, and there will be a long debate in
[Washington] about all of these things.
There are
three avenues of reform we can pursue. First is an executive order. President
Obama could establish a new system on January 21. It wouldn’t be total, but it
would be a start. Second, we could amend House and Senate rules. Congress is as
stovepiped as the executive branch. Congress never had its own National Security
Act of 1947 [to clarify its role in U.S. foreign policy]—not even its own
mechanism for oversight. Finally, we need a new National Security Act.
FP: What is the one takeaway that you would like people to remember from
your work?
JL:
The one takeaway is that national security reform must happen. The gap
between the demands on our government and our ability to address them
effectively is widening—the world is changing faster than our ability to
evolve. If we don’t reform now, we will experience very painful setbacks.
National security reform is not something that would be “nice to do.” National
security reform must occur.
The
stakes are enormous. When I am asked what is the number one national security
issue, national security reform is it. You might ask, “How can you say that?”
Our ability to formulate policy in all situations depends on our system—and
more, is undermined by it. We have organizational dysfunction, and until that
is fixed, we will not be able to consistently form policy, resource our
agencies, or make critical decisions.
James R.
Locher III is executive director of the Project on National Security Reform and
a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense.
A congressionally funded organization recommended Wednesday that the government
overhaul its national security bureaucracy and congressional oversight of it,
following closely on the heels of a similar commission.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on National Security Reform argued that
Congress should enact a new law detailing the precise responsibilities of each
agency that is a part of the national security system.
Congress also should establish a new Select Committee on National Security
in both the House and Senate that draws its members from the committees that
oversee each national security agency, according to the organization, which is
funded by both Congress and outside donors and was intended to re-evaluate the
1947 National Security Act.
The organization’s list of 34 “themes and recommendations” includes:
• Producing a quadrennial National Security Review much like the Quadrennial
Defense Review.
• Preparing an integrated national security budget to present to Congress.
• Replacing the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council with
a “President’s Security Council.”
• Establishing a single classification system for all national security
agencies.
• Consolidating security clearance procedures for numerous agencies into
one.
• Expanding the Foreign Service.
• Creating several interagency groups to better coordinate the national
security bureaucracy.
“Unless we redesign what we have inherited from more than 60 years ago, even
the wisest men and women upon whom we come to depend are doomed to see their
most solid policy understandings crumble into the dust of failure,” the report
said.
The congressionally created Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass
Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism was officially releasing its report the
same day as the Project on National Security Reform, although its recommendations
leaked out in advance and have already been widely reported in the media.
"The simple truth
is that the world for which the [U.S.] national security system was designed in
1947 no longer exists. Today's challenges require better integration of
expertise and capabilities from across the government. . . . Instead,
departments and agencies are often working against one another, the White House
is unable to make timely and well-informed decisions, and there is an
over-reliance on military force."
That is an excerpt from
the introduction to a little-noticed, 648-page collection of national security
case studies on events that range from the Allied occupation of Japan in the
1940s to the deployment of foreign troops in Somalia in the 1990s to the
ongoing war in Iraq. The report was released seven weeks ago by a nonpartisan
group that has studied the way the U.S. national security structure has worked
over the past 60 years.
The Project on National
Security Reform, financed primarily with $6.4 million from Congress, has
employed the talents of 25 former senior national security officials and
benefited from the advice of a "guiding coalition" that includes
high-ranking officials from past administrations.
On Dec. 2, the project
will make public its recommendations, including steps that President-elect
Barack Obama might take after his Jan. 20 inauguration, and draft legislation
to change congressional oversight of national security and amend the 1947 National
Security Act.
Among the coalition's
members are James B. Steinberg, frequently mentioned as a potential Obama
national security adviser and Michèle A. Flournoy, one of the leaders of
Obama's Pentagon transition team. Neither will sign the project's final
recommendations because of their new status, said James R. Locher III, the
project's executive director.
The project's
examination of U.S. planning for the war in Iraq under President Bush revealed
"a national security system unable to develop an integrated strategy for a
post-war environment." The case study on the U.S. operation in Somalia
under President Bill Clinton demonstrated "how the U.S. government can
misalign objectives and resources in a disastrous fashion."
Among the
recommendations: The Pentagon should enlarge its planning process for complex
contingencies with inputs from other agencies. The study points out that
"the Clinton administration's oft-ignored bible on political-military
planning for complex contingencies, Presidential Decision Directive 56, was
headed in the right direction."
But it notes that
"early in the first term of President George W. Bush, the Pentagon blocked
an NSC staff draft of a new contingency planning policy, all in the name of
preserving the freedom of action of cabinet officers and keeping civilians out
of the contingency planning business. . . . While war plan security is
paramount, we need to strive for more integration in policy formulation and
execution."
Echoing what Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates has been saying for months, the case study volume
calls for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International
Development to receive increased funding because of the "need to become
more operational, that is, able to lead in the management of grand enterprises
in unsafe and austere environments."
The fewer than 8,000
Foreign Service officers in the department and USAID spend "less than
one-tenth of what the Pentagon does on its many missions," on all of their
functions, including security assistance, according to the study. "State
cannot be equipped only with good ideas while Defense has all the money and
most of the deployable assets."
The study recommends,
"At a minimum, over the next five years, the Foreign Service personnel
strength of State and USAID should be raised by fifty percent and the entire
budget of the State Department and USAID should be doubled, across the
board." Otherwise, they will remain "poor relations of the
Pentagon."
The legislative branch
comes in for criticism. Without naming the House and Senate armed services,
foreign relations, intelligence and government oversight panels, the study
finds, "Committees are organized to oversee individual executive branch
departments and agencies, not to supervise interagency mechanisms or multi-agency
operations, making accountability for 'national missions' a peripheral
concern."
The study notes
Congress's division of authority between committees that authorize spending and
those that appropriate money. It criticizes "restrictions on spending and
fund transfers," as well as lawmakers' "willingness to include
significant expenses unrelated to emergency operations in supplemental budget
appropriations [that as a result] impede the linking of resources to national
security goals and objectives."
Most people would agree
that Robert Gates has done a good job as Secretary of Defense (especially in
comparison to his predecessor) and it would be a good thing if Obama keeps him
on as Sec Def. That being said, when talking about “change,” I think its important
to focus more on the structure of the National Security system
rather than individuals. Its more than a matter of simply appointing
“good” people. On that basis, I want to flag an excellent post by Judah at the
WPR blog who frames the issue usefully:
"I just wanted to flag Richard
Weitz’s WPR column from last week, which ran on Election
Day and might have gotten overshadowed by the day’s historic events. But the
piece is really worth a look, because it presents the findings of a
non-partisan research group — the Project on National Security Reform — that
Richard headed which used exhaustive case study analysis to assess the
country’s national security system. And the conclusion was that it functions
inconsistently at best, and often as a result of non-reproducible factors like
personal relationships across agencies or individual initiative.
The piece is timely especially in light of the gathering
chorus calling for President-elect Obama to keep Def. Sec. Bob Gates at the
Pentagon, at least for another year. Now from everything I’ve read, that
certainly won’t do any harm. Gates has proven his ability to twist the right
arms and knock the right heads to get the Pentagon mobilized to fight the wars
we’re currently waging, without overcompensating to the COIN end of the
spectrum. And he’s managed to do all that in the midst of fierce factional infighting
within the Bush administration.
But it’s important to remember that America has, in fact,
carried out a wartime presidential transition, as recently as 1968. And Richard
Nixon didn’t hesitate to name a new Def. Sec. at the time. It’s even more important
to remember that Bob Gates is just one man, a talented one, yes, but there are
other talented men and women who could do a fine job as well.
But it’s most important to remember — and here’s where
Richard’s piece comes in — that the Defense Dept. is just one agency in the
national security system. And until a better interagency operational method is
put into place, the talents of one man or woman, no matter how great, will not
be enough to make it function effectively, and their efforts will often go towards
working the system rather than advancing America’s security interests.
Now obviously individuals can make a difference, and
systems are hard to change. But it’s unfortunate to see so much attention given
to Gates, and so little to the system in which he operates. Come to think of
it, Gates might be the right guy for the job of reforming that system. He’s
already run the CIA and DoD, and he’s reportedly counting the hours until Jan.
20. Why not let the poor guy go, but on condition that he head up an advisory
panel to overhaul the way in which the nation’s security agencies operate?"
Great post and I think
frames the issue more usefully than talk finding a good Sec-Def (Gates) vs a
Bad one (Rumsfeld). For those who want change in US foreign policy, its pointless
to simply talk about individuals without taking a deep look at the NS bureaucracy that they operate in.
A
organization partially funded by Congress that will recommend an overhaul of
national security laws and agencies may recommend the creation of a brand new
select committee to coordinate the oversight of defense, intelligence and other
security-related matters.
The
select panel would draw its membership from all the top security committees in
the House and Senate, said James R. Locher III, executive director of the
Project on National Security Reform.
The
Democratic and Republican leaders on each committee would select members to
serve on the new panel, which, Locher said, would be responsible for overseeing
national security issues in their entirety. The problem now, he added, is that
each of the current committees is charged with only looking after their piece
of the whole.
It can do
the parts, but it cannot look at the national security apparatus end to end,
Locher said at an American Bar Association discussion today of Congress'
current committee setup.
Locher
said Congress also has no formal way now of engaging with the White House
National Security Council, which is a problem given its important role in
protecting the country.
He said
the proposal has drawn interest on Capitol Hill because lawmakers like the
sound of "more jurisdiction."
Another
participant in the bar association discussion, however, was noncommital. Wyndee
Parker, staff director and general counsel of the House Intelligence Committee,
said she agreed there are problems with committees not being able to oversee
national security as a whole. But she said she thought the current committee
structure had handled President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and
other national security matters well.
Locher
said the project's recommendations would be released in the next month or so.
No matter who is elected president
today, the next leader of the United States should make reforming the U.S.
national security system a top priority. That's the conclusion of the Project
on National Security Reform (PNSR), a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization
funded and supported by Congress, foundations, and the private sector.
After more than a year spent analyzing case studies of how the U.S. government
mitigated, prepared for, responded to, and recovered from various national
security challenges, the PNSR research indicates that the U.S. national
security system's performance is inconsistent. And America needs better to
address the challenges it will face.
To be sure, some case studies showed relatively clear, integrated strategy
development and unified policy implementation. But others depicted flawed,
divided, contradictory, and sometimes nonexistent processes for formulating strategy
and putting it into action. Similarly, the system at times provided resources
efficiently, but at others did so inadequately and tardily. These flawed
responses recurred across issue areas and time, and the post-Cold War
organizational reforms enacted thus far have not resulted in consistent
improvements.
All too often, the case studies indicated that the U.S. national security
apparatus lacks an effective system for developing strategies that connect
available resources, desired end-states, and implementation procedures. Complex
contingencies are undertaken without requisite capabilities, rigid plans
inhibit performance in the field, and decisions are too rarely timely,
disciplined, or supported by adequate analyses of problems. Disunity of effort predominates
at a cost of lost American lives, resources, and power.
The negative effects of interagency fratricide are readily apparent.
Bureaucratic decision-making mechanisms fail to produce timely unified
strategic guidance. Individual agencies typically lack the ability to compel
action, while interdepartmental authorities are often ambiguous.
Institution-specific values prevail since a sense of interagency culture
remains limited. Information sharing is not the norm. Communications
predominately follow vertical channels.
Disorganized, nonexistent, or otherwise flawed strategies result from these
conditions. For instance, the Clinton administration's divided China strategy
-- torn between human rights, trade priorities, nonproliferation, and other objectives
-- hurt the president's ability to manage relations with Beijing. Likewise, the
absence of overarching, coherent policy towards Uzbekistan during the second
Bush administration generated mixed messages from the White House, the State
and Defense Departments, and Congress. Problems with various Cooperative Threat
Reduction projects have weakened Russian-American nuclear security and
nonproliferation cooperation despite the imperative of managing such threats.
Interagency cooperation remains possible at the tactical level even without
strategic and operational integration, but it requires serendipitous
cooperative relationships, exceptional policy entrepreneurship, or other
uncomfortably random conditions. In those cases where unity is achieved, the happy
coincidence of high-level policy attention, limited bureaucratic costs, or
personal relationships is likely at work. Yet, these limited successes do not
necessarily improve U.S. government performance in future national security
challenges since they rarely lead to changes in standard operating procedures
in Washington. In addition, absent an effective national strategy, successes in
the field are typically temporary and limited.
Even when the U.S. national security system does pursue clearly defined
objectives, it often does so inefficiently, leading to wasted money, time, and
other assets. Existing resource allocation processes complicate policy
execution and sustainment. Congressional and executive branch procedures hamper
the timely provisions and redistribution of people, money, and other resources
for national security strategies. Program managers find it difficult to make
long-term plans when future resource allocations are uncertain.
A related problem is that human resource systems are agency-focused. In many
cases, multi-agency institutions are understaffed due to department-focused
personnel systems. Interagency bodies find it difficult to attract the best and
the brightest people since career paths within such groups are limited. Rigid personnel
ceilings throughout the government encourage reliance on outside contractors,
often with a loss of accountability.
Although the national security adviser is institutionally positioned to promote
interagency collaboration and efficient policy implementation, the incumbent
often lacks the authority to achieve these ends given inadequate mechanisms for
consistently delegating presidential authority. Below the National Security
Council, interagency authorities are similarly anemic, despite the importance
of mid-level officials in addressing urgent national security decisions.
The resulting stalemate creates excessive veto opportunities, encourages a
search for consensus decisions based on the least common denominator, and
typically yields policies that favor slow, incremental, and middle-of-the road
courses of action. The Bay of Pigs failure demonstrates how policies or plans
that might have proved successful became so altered by the process of reaching
consensus that they produced embarrassing failures. Frustrated with the
impediments to developing integrated strategies, policymakers often bypass
established decision-making mechanisms and employ informal structures and
processes. The phenomenon of excluding key actors from decision making occurred
during the Iran-Contra affair, the Iraq War, and other instances, contributing
to poor policy choices.
The relative ease with which the interagency processes can be bypassed by
mid-level policy entrepreneurs, whether explicitly authorized by their
superiors or acting on their own initiative, is problematic since these
workarounds rarely yield enduringly positive results. Discarding established
standard procedures can also exacerbate systemic weaknesses and lead to
disasters like the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra. Ad hoc innovations typically
limit the availability of resources, entail the use of questionable legal
authorities, result in policies based on faulty but unchallenged assumptions,
and use subject experts and other institutional expertise poorly.
The importance of today's ballot is reflected in the finding that successful
policy development, implementation, and outcomes are often associated with
direct and sustained presidential engagement. Establishing the de facto
Sino-American alliance against Moscow in the 1970s and ending the
Soviet-American confrontation in 1991 without a global war depended on skillful
presidential leadership.
At the same time, the U.S. national security system's overreliance on
presidential leadership reflects, and exacerbates, the weak nature of its
interagency mechanisms. In the absence of direct and constant presidential
intervention, the development and implementation of integrated national
security strategies becomes problematic as policy coherence suffers under the
weight of bureaucratic infighting. Excessive dependence on the president to
enforce consensus in national security policy and to expedite policy
implementation creates an unmanageable span of control requirement for any
individual.
With few exceptions, it is infeasible to expect presidents to oversee the
complexities of strategy development and especially policy implementation. The
National Security Council staff is too small to ensure that all important
policies are undertaken effectively or efficiently. Many problems evolve into
disasters before receiving adequate attention. The next president will face the
delicate but essential task of empowering the national security apparatus in
order to strengthen his own effectiveness.
The new Congress we will elect today will need to assist the next president to
better manage U.S. national security. Recent history offers numerous examples
of debilitating executive-legislative conflict in policy development and
execution. Conflict over resources is especially prevalent, with both branches
resorting to various stratagems to circumvent the other. Although the
Iran-Contra affair provides the most egregious example of this problem, other
instances regularly occur. Questionable certifications by the president or
secretary of state regarding improved human rights situations (China and
Uzbekistan come to mind) or satisfied technical criteria for aid (the Russian
government's dismantling, securing, and controlling its nuclear materials) are
just a few examples.
The PNSR case studies offer a final reason for concern for the next and current
presidents: The U.S. national security system appears especially prone to
disjointed policy development and implementation during transitions between
presidential administrations. Steep learning curves, inchoate operating
procedures and lengthy confirmation processes for senior officials in the early
part of an administration make policy development and implementation difficult.
Towards the end of an administration, the departure of confirmed officials and
other senior political appointees deprives agencies of experienced leaders,
while political appointee resignations at lower levels result in staffing and
skills shortages. The cases that covered presidential transitions -- such as
the management of crises with China or the handoff of Somalia and NATO policy
between the Bush and Clinton administrations -- often reflected insufficient
strategic direction, unclear authorities, and heightened bureaucratic conflict
producing poorly integrated policies.
Fortunately, the PNSR's research also shows that the U.S. national security
system can learn from past failures. After several disasters made clear the
imperative of comprehensive military reform, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols
Reorganization Act proved remarkably successful at promoting a spirit of
"jointness" among the members of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air
Force. Later this month, the PNSR will propose a set of recommendations
designed to address system-wide security problems for national debate. Hopefully
WPR readers and other experts will contribute to this essential dialogue.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, the head of the PNSR
case study working group, and a World Politics Review contributing editor. His
weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday.
This article originally appeared in World Politics Review,
www.worldpoliticsreview.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Locher: Interagency Reform, New Presidential
Directives Needed
By
Fawzia Sheikh
Inside the Pentagon
October 30, 2008
The next administration must focus on interagency
reform before introducing other changes to the U.S. national security system,
James Locher, director of the Project on National Security Reform, tells Inside
the Pentagon.
The project, which involves 25 former senior
officials with national security experience, is sponsored by the Center for the
Study of the Presidency. It aims to introduce comprehensive proposals for the
next administration to consider.
The group, a bipartisan, private-public partnership
established in 2006 to address the urgent need for national security system
reform, released preliminary findings in July. A second report is due for
release in mid-November.
“We need to figure out how our whole government is
going to operate in the national security field in the 21st century,” he said
in an Oct. 21 interview. “And in that regard, we need to think about how we’re
going to integrate the expertise and capabilities of the different departments
and agencies. And once we have that figured out, we can decide what additional
reforms are required internal to the various departments and agencies.”
Presidential directives must also be introduced,
Locher maintained. Not enough strategic guidance at the presidential level is
given to government departments and agencies outlining “the key objectives the
president has in mind,” he said.
To this end, Locher sees opportunity for the new
president to lay out how the national security system should be operated and
organized.
“So we’ve been thinking about those presidential
directives, but we’re also thinking about one level up from that -- an executive
order,” he continued. Regardless of whether Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) or Barack
Obama (D-IL) wins the White House, the new president could usher in such
changes without additional authority from Congress, he said. PNSR would like
recommendations from its upcoming November report to be part of such a
directive or order that the new president would consider.
However, “the more ambitious ideas for transforming
the national security system” must be delayed until a new national security act
or another piece of authorizing legislation from Congress is brought in, he
added.
Amendments to the rules of the Senate and House are
another priority, Locher said. As it stands, he said, Congress focuses only on
government departments and agencies and lacks the ability to “look up at the
interagency space” through a specific committee.
“And so it can do the parts -- the departments and
agencies -- but it cannot do this whole-of-government [approach] toward looking
at national security missions from end to end,” Locher explained. “And to
create such a focus on Capitol Hill, the House and the Senate would have to
change their rules, and these are the rules that govern the committees’
structure and determine what the various committees could do.
“So, if we’re looking to have an effective set of
interagency reforms that are required, part of this will require the Congress
to do its part, to get itself prepared to both empower and oversee the
interagency system.”
Congress, moreover, should also consider the need
for more flexible funding in light of future crises, he advised. While the
United States has authorization and appropriations processes, it has “no easy
mechanism” for lawmakers to offer funding, he contended.
In addition, Congress slowly confirms senior officials,
often resulting in 10-month vacancies in presidentially appointed positions, he
said. He added that Congress must accelerate the process.
Locher said another priority is creating a select
committee on national security.
This panel would govern interagency issues and be
made up of the chairmen and ranking members of congressional committees with
national security jurisdiction or their designees, he told ITP. Representing
all the standing committees, this new committee would be like an interagency
team focusing on whole-of-government approaches to national security, he said.
Locher said he has had “dozens and dozens of briefings” with congressional
members and staff, many of whom see the need for “this kind of capacity on the
Hill.”
PNSR’s next report, scheduled for mid-November,
will draw attention to certain issues raised in its July draft, added Locher.
These include the inability to manage the national security system as a system,
the failure to link resources to strategic objectives and the fact that
executive departments are powerful but “capabilities to integrate across the
executive departments are tremendously weak,” he said.
The fall report will not be the final one, though,
he said. PNSR plans to collaborate with others working on national security
reform and produce recommendations in February or March.
No matter who wins the election this November, the
president will have numerous foreign-policy crises on his plate: Russia's
assault on Georgia and growing Russia-NATO tensions, the threat of a
nuclear-armed Iran, and increasing challenges for the Western coalition in
Afghanistan.
Our
national security apparatus, largely created on an ad hoc basis over the past
six decades, is ill-equipped to handle such multifaceted issues.
When a
disaster erupts, there is precious little time for study by the president and
his top advisers. They need an integrated system already in place that can
guide rapid, informed, and strong responses to today's security challenges.
Experience must be institutionalized, and barriers between agencies overcome.
The
Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), a nonprofit and nonpartisan
organization funded by Congress, seeks to achieve such improvements.
The
national security system has evolved slowly over the past 61 years. It now
consists primarily of the State and Defense departments, the National Security
Council, the intelligence community, the Homeland Security Department and the
Homeland Security Council. Others participate when specific issues in their
jurisdiction arise.
The trick
is getting them to work as a team rather than pursue their own bureaucratic
interests as competitors or adversaries. Feuding, jurisdictional disputes, and
lack of communication between cabinet secretaries and senior agency personnel
undermine US national security.
Other
common problems include excessive preoccupation by the president and his senior
advisers with day-to-day crisis management rather than long-term planning, a
budgetary process in Congress focused on individual agencies rather than joint
efforts by multiple departments, and increasing partisanship in Congress even
on vital national security issues.
History
is replete with examples of how our national security system impeded the
effective development and implementation of US national security policy. PNSR
is conducting case studies to learn from these incidents.
One case
study examines the infamous 1993 "Blackhawk Down" disaster in Somalia.
Eighteen US Task Force Rangers died and 73 were wounded in a firefight with
forces of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed. Photos of dead US troops being
dragged through the streets of Mogadishu triggered public outrage in the US and
led President Clinton to wind down the operation.
Little
known at the time, the Somalia operation was mired in confusion. During the
transition between the Bush and Clinton administrations, policy and strategy
changed to support larger objectives but resources fell out of sync with the
mission – a larger, well-equipped force left the country and gave way to a
smaller force with grave uncertainties over its mission and responsibilities.
As Maj.
Gen. William Garrison was planning and executing missions to snatch Mr. Aideed
and his senior leaders, US Special Envoy Robert Gossende and White House
officials were switching policy from the military track to a more diplomatic
solution. No one in Washington told General Garrison. President Clinton and
Secretary of State Warren Christopher were shocked, they said later, about the
fight. Instead of coordinating their activities, the State and Defense
departments each went off in their own direction, with grave consequences
President
Kennedy's botched 1961 invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba is another example
of communication failure. Unresolved differences over operational requirements,
which the inexperienced Kennedy team inherited from the Eisenhower
administration, produced a plan that proved inadequate to accomplish the mission
but sufficient to embarrass Washington by exposing the American government's
role.
More
recently, bureaucratic barriers and cultural tensions between the departments
of State and Defense circumscribed effective interagency cooperation in the
aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, despite the relatively successful example of
interagency planning for Kosovo that had been facilitated by a 1997
presidential directive. Once again knowledge did not bridge the change in
administrations. Then Sept. 11 brought home the serious flaws that the national
security establishment suffers.
The
threat landscape is constantly evolving. A new administration will assume
office in January, and planning cohesion could be further eroded. PNSR will
propose a new national security act of 2009 to address this critical void in
our national security apparatus.
Kenneth
Weinstein is a member of the guiding coalition of the Project on National
Security Reform (PNSR) and CEO of the Hudson Institute. Richard Weitz is a
senior fellow at Hudson and heads the PNSR case-study working group.
U.S. government
efforts to counter foreign spies remains fragmented and weak, despite a series
of highly damaging spy cases, said a report made public Monday by a former
high-ranking counterintelligence official.
Michelle Van Cleave,
the former U.S. national counterintelligence executive, stated in the report
that the FBI, CIA and other federal counterspy units lack both a needed focus
and strategy for thwarting the growing foreign intelligence threat.
"Our
counterintelligence capabilities are in decay. Instead of leadership and
strategic coherence, the [director of national intelligence's] office has given
us more bureaucracy," Miss Van Cleave said in an interview.
"Hostile
intelligence activities are a national security challenge of the first
order," Miss Van Cleave said. "The new administration will need to go
back to first principles and be willing to make some major changes, in order to
build a genuine strategic counterintelligence capability for the United
States."
Richard Willing, chief
spokesman for retired Adm. Michael McConnell, the U.S. director of national
intelligence (DNI), said the office was studying the report and had no
immediate comment.
Release of the report
follows a recent letter to Congress from former FBI agent Terry D. Turchie, a
counterintelligence official posted to an Energy Department nuclear weapons
laboratory, warning of "potentially catastrophic consequences" as the
result of a downgrading of counterintelligence at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.
Reforms that focused
on intelligence rather than counterintelligence "opened the way for major
security breaches involving [Department of Energy] installations and personnel
in the future," said the Sept. 1 letter to Rep. John D. Dingell, Michigan
Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The 88-page report was
authored by Miss Van Cleave for the private Project on National Security
Reform, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that, according to its Web site,
works to modernize and improve U.S. national security.
The National
Counterintelligence Executive office was set up in 2001 in the aftermath of the
devastating cases of FBI agent Robert Hanssen and CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who
both spied for Russia and compromised CIA-recruited agents, many of whom were
executed. The office reports to the director of national intelligence.
The office, which Miss
Van Cleave headed from 2003 to 2006, was established to coordinate efforts by
the FBI, CIA and other agencies to stop foreign spying.
But she stated in the
report that bureaucratic walls and differing missions have prevented the
federal government from launching a strategic effort against foreign
intelligence agencies.
Testifying before the
House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Mr. McConnell singled out
"China and Russia's foreign intelligence services" as "among the
most aggressive in collecting against sensitive and protected U.S. systems,
facilities and developmental projects."
"Their efforts
are reaching Cold War levels," he said.
Current National
Counterintelligence Executive Joel Brenner has made similar comments.
Miss Van Cleave's
report said that "strategic integration" of agencies that monitor
spying are hampered by "individual agency priorities."
"National
leadership exists in name only. Across the government, our
[counterintelligence] capabilities are in decay. We seemingly cannot get ahead
of the cycle of losing talent. And the potential costs of failure are
profound."
On the FBI, the report
noted that the FBI is skilled at enforcing counterespionage and related laws
but is not "organized, trained or equipped to collect or analyze
intelligence on the extensive foreign intelligence presence in the United
States beyond those personnel here under official or journalistic cover, or to
develop or execute offensive operations to mislead, deny or otherwise exploit
foreign intelligence activities against the United States."
Democratic
campaign ads and speeches tell us Sen.
Barack Obama will do great things to protect America
from dangers foreign and domestic. Republicans are telling us the same about Sen.
John McCain. But neither a President Obama nor a President McCain
will be able to take on all of America's national security challenges
single-handedly. No one could.
Our next
president will have to deal with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global
terrorism, Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions, the long-running
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a resurgent Russia as evidenced by its invasion
of Georgia, China's growing economic and military might, and much more. And
inevitably, new crises will arise.
To handle
all this, President McCain or President Obama will have to rely heavily on
White House assistants, cabinet secretaries and agency heads, military leaders
and the other roughly 4 million Americans serving the nation in the armed
forces and in civilian federal agencies working on national security.
Selecting
outstanding individuals to fill leadership posts will be important and
necessary, but not sufficient to deal with these mounting challenges.
How this
diverse group of public servants is organized and operates to protect our
nation is no longer just a question for doctoral theses and grad school
seminars. It is a vitally important for America's and the world's future.
You can
evaluate our national security system by asking some basic questions: Do the
agencies tasked with protecting our country cooperate as a team? Do they
respond rapidly, creatively and effectively to unforeseen crises? Can they
anticipate and nip trouble in the bud?
Unfortunately,
too often the answer to these questions is "no." That's because the
U.S. national security system - a bureaucratic infrastructure created by
legislation enacted in 1947 - is outdated, ineffective and broken. Fixing it
should be the top priority for our next president and Congress. These are not
just my personal views. They are the findings of a nonprofit and nonpartisan
group: the Project on National Security Reform.
The
project enlisted more than 300 experienced practitioners, experts and analysts
from think tanks, universities, the private sector and government to conduct
more than 100 case studies. They produced the most comprehensive evaluation of
America's national security system since President Truman signed the National
Security Act of 1947 into law.
In a
Preliminary Findings Report issued at the end of July that was mandated and
funded by Congress, the Project on National Security Reform said many of the
national security threats we face today require departments and agencies to
work as partners. But the report said the national security system fails to
make interagency cooperation easy or mandatory. Agencies resist sharing information
and looking beyond their parochial interests.
Frequent
jurisdictional disputes between Cabinet secretaries and other agency heads
force the president to spend too much time settling internal fights, waste time
and money on duplicative and inefficient actions, and slow down government
responses to crises. Because congressional committees focus oversight on
individual agencies, it is difficult for those agencies to coordinate their
activities and budgets to work together.