Project on National Security Reform -

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/17/AR2010011702562.html

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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."

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/02/10/james_l_jones_and_the_committee_to_run_the_world

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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.' "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/07/AR2009020702076.html?nav=hcmodule

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Foreign Spies Are Serious. Are We?

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.

vancleavem@ndu.edu

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020603498.html

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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.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?filepath=/dailyfed/0109/012809mm.htm
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Intelligence Pick Fields Panel’s Questions
By Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
January 28, 2009

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."

(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/15/nsc-could-face-sweeping-changes/)

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.

Speakrs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303382.html?hpid=topnews)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/print_friendly.php?ID=no_20081203_9411)

T he 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.

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.

(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4564&print=1)
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"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."

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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 .

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

By Kenneth Weinstein and Richard Weitz. Reused with permission from the October 20 issue of The Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com ). © 2008 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. For permissions, contact copyright@csmonitor.com."

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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."

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."

that usually fight over turf coordinated their activities, and federal officials relied

from several vantage points: first as counsel to the Senate's investigation into

looking out for their own bureaucratic interests -- is widespread and detrimental

-- hundreds of generators; truckloads of tarps, cots and blankets; and millions of

Katrina. This is in no small part because the thousands of federal, state and local

error after Katrina and initially resistant to congressionally mandated changes,

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had, quite naturally, led to a myopic view of the

Third, while the reflexive reaction to Katrina was to call for yet another massive

improvements, such as creating processes to facilitate interagency coordination.

The successful post-Katrina reforms -- in particular, the process that led to them

-- are an example that can and should be followed as the United States considers

expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the

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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.