Project on National Security Reform

INTRODUCTION:
Foreign intelligence services have stolen U.S. national security secrets for decades. The damage Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and Chinese agents have inflicted on U.S. national security has been incalculable. To remedy this problem, the office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) was established in 2001 to provide strategic direction to U.S. counterintelligence (CI) and to integrate and coordinate the diverse CI activities of the U.S. government (USG). Nevertheless, interagency struggles and a lack of authority have frustrated the new office. American secrets remain excessively vulnerable to foreign intelligence services.

This case study, written by the first National Counterintelligence Executive appointed by the President, discusses the challenges of leading and integrating the U.S. CI enterprise. It discusses issues ranging from the practical details of setting up and staffing a new USG office to the interagency mechanisms for reaching consensus and implementing policy. The study also explains the significance of the first national counterintelligence strategy, which established new policy imperatives to integrate CI insights into national security planning and engage CI collection and operations as a tool to advance national security objectives.

STRATEGY:
U.S. counterintelligence duties have historically been dispersed among independent departments and agencies. By creating the NCIX, the Congress sought to replace this divided approach with a more integrated and effective U.S. CI apparatus. The Counterintelligence Enhancement Act established the duties of the NCIX, which include: identifying and prioritizing the foreign intelligence threats of concern to the United States; developing a strategy to guide CI plans and programs to defeat those threats; evaluating the performance of the CI agencies against those strategic objectives; and ensuring that the budgets of the many CI organizations of the federal government are developed in accordance with strategic priorities. In 2005, the NCIX issued the first National Counterintelligence Strategy, which set forth consistent, clear, and new strategic direction for U.S. counterintelligence. The subsequent creation of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, to whom the NCIX now reports, consolidated the NCIX mission within the new architecture of U.S. intelligence.

INTEGRATED ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL POWER:
Getting the departments and agencies to work together with the NCIX to implement the national CI strategy has proven an elusive goal. Efforts towards this end have been complicated by the unique history of the disaggregated U.S. CI enterprise, deficiencies in the NCIX and DNI organizations, and a seeming lack of awareness of the gravity of foreign intelligence threats among national security leadership. Interagency cooperation in many cases proved anathema to the U.S. government’s CI organizations. The FBI, for example, which consumes the lion’s share of U.S. CI dollars and billets, unilaterally withdrew most of its personnel from the NCIX office. In addition, the FBI’s counterintelligence division published its own “national strategy for counterintelligence” two months after the NCIX’s presidentially approved strategy was issued. The creation of the DNI did not facilitate cooperation––in fact, the DNI has worked to weaken the NCIX as it has eclipsed that office’s authorities in counterintelligence budget, collection, and coordination.

EVALUATION:
The Counterintelligence Enhancement Act established a national leader to bring strategic direction to U.S. counterintelligence, but the legislation failed to establish a strategic counterintelligence program. While charging the NCIX with responsibility for heading counterintelligence, the law did not assign the NCIX the authorities needed to manage a strategic CI program. Though the NCIX office is responsible for providing strategic direction to U.S. counterintelligence, it does not have the power to direct budget allocations. Program and budget authorities for CI activities remain divided among the departments and agencies and subject to their individual priorities, which too often take precedence over national objectives.

Similarly, NCIX is given the responsibility to evaluate department and agency performance, but it is not empowered to direct programmatic changes. Under this model, the NCIX is inherently advisory, rather than authoritative. In addition, within the office of the DNI, authorities and lines of responsibility for counterintelligence have become blurred, diluting the concentrated focus and guidance that the NCIX was created to provide.

RESULTS:
A series of government and independent analyses have documented the high costs of the seams in U.S. counterintelligence strategy. Failing to establish an effective national CI leader threatens to replicate past costs. Seven years after the NCIX was created, no single entity is capable of providing a comprehensive threat assessment of possible foreign intelligence successes, supporting operations, or formulating policy options for the President and his national security team. While CI-related cooperation among the FBI, CIA, and the military services has increased, this collaboration has failed to provide the comprehensive, well-integrated CI strategy and policies required to uphold U.S. national security.

CONCLUSION:
The NCIX seemed poised to succeed when created. It had widespread congressional support, a consolidated National Strategy, the endorsement of a highly respected commission, and the President’s personal backing. Yet, the statutory intent to integrate U.S. CI efforts has been repeatedly frustrated. Due to the weaknesses of the NCIX and the lack of a strategic program, individual agency priorities have eclipsed USG-wide CI integration. As a consequence, Washington has inadequately addressed the threats posed by foreign intelligence agencies to U.S. national security.

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INTRODUCTION:
This case study examines the formation and implementation of U.S. policies in response to three of the most important national security crises between the United States and the People’s Republic of China: the June 1989 decision by the Chinese military to employ force to suppress unarmed student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square; the accidental May 1999 bombing by U.S. aircraft of China’s embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War; and the April 2001 collision between an American EP-3 surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter aircraft off China’s coast.

Three considerations make a study of how the United States has managed crises with China important for the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR). First, managing security relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been, and will probably remain for at least several more decades, one of the most important national security missions of the U.S. government. Second, assessing the U.S. interagency response to three short-term incidents sharing common characteristics provides examples of how the American national security system reacts to unexpected international crises. This evaluation complements other PNSR case studies that review how the U.S. government forms and executes strategies during longer-lasting events. Third, the three cases highlight various differences in American policies towards China that clarify the formation and execution of U.S. national security strategy.

STRATEGY:
The leading national security policy makers in each of the three administrations under consideration held different views about the appropriate U.S. strategy toward China even if they subscribed to a general consensus that a more democratic, less bellicose PRC would be a more favorable partner than an authoritarian regime that pursued repressive domestic policies and confrontational foreign policies.

George H.W. Bush entered office with a well-formulated strategy toward China. The President, who inclined toward a realpolitik perspective of great power relations that focused on the external rather than the internal behavior of countries, emphasized the need to prevent a rupture in Sino-American ties despite the end of the Soviet threat that had united the two countries during the Cold War.

In principle, the overarching strategic framework of the Clinton administration toward China was that of “constructive engagement.” Its adherents sought to promote China’s domestic liberalization, global economic integration, and responsible international behavior gradually by deepening bilateral dialogue and interaction on a range of issues. In practice, due to the lower level of presidential interest and other factors, the Clinton administration was divided over its strategic priorities regarding China. Some elements were most concerned with promoting human rights, others with securing commercial advantage, others with curbing nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation, and still others with pursuing defense diplomacy with a reclusive but increasingly powerful PLA. Absent senior White House direction, the U.S government agencies primarily responsible for America’s China policy often failed to integrate and prioritize these objectives.

The second Bush administration came into office with a strategic framework that saw China as a long-term strategic competitor, but the EP-3 collision occurred too early in the new administration for it to have developed a coherent strategy, with supporting interagency procedures, regarding China or many other important issues. The crisis might have accelerated the development of an integrated strategy that treated China as a potential near-peer competitor if the September 2001 terrorist attacks had not quickly overwhelmed U.S. government planning efforts and directed policy makers’ attention away from China and toward countering international terrorism.

INTEGRATED ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL POWER:
The three specific incidents under review encompass a wide range of actors that have participated in the formation and execution of U.S. security policies towards China. These include several executive branch departments, agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, influential members of Congress and their staff, and diverse non-governmental organizations. Yet, each of the three administrations under consideration employed distinct processes for formulating and executing American security policies towards China.

U.S. policy toward China during the first Bush administration was directed by the President himself. George H.W. Bush relied primarily on his most senior advisers when making key policy decisions toward China after Tiananmen. These officials would reach decisions and then seek to implement them without necessarily requiring formal advanced or post-decisional meetings of the established NSC committees. Although this centralized system received criticism for being too closed, the fact that it involved key actors who played important roles in both the formal and informal structures helped keep the two processes in sync.

The priority that President Clinton and other senior U.S. government officials placed on winning the war in Kosovo perhaps disinclined them from attempting to disrupt formal U.S. government decision making structures and processes by substituting ad hoc procedures. That said, for much of the period leading up to the Belgrade bombing incident, the administration had experienced problems integrating the various components of its comprehensive engagement toward China. Diverse executive branch agencies readily engaged with Beijing, but often on their own terms in pursuit of distinct agendas. By the time of the embassy bombing in 1999, Chinese officials had become distrustful of Clinton administration statements and actions, since these were often contradicted by at least one U.S. government agency.

Since the EP-3 collision occurred so early in the life of the second Bush administration, the executive branch had yet to establish clear interagency procedures regarding China or many other issues. Decision makers resorted to several ad hoc interagency mechanisms to establish and implement policies during the crisis. The U.S. military heavily influenced the initial U.S. government response since one of its planes was directly involved in the incident and because much of official Washington was not yet awake. After the non-DOD agencies became more engaged, however, the defense establishment adopted a lower profile and allowed Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush to manage the public response more effectively.

EVALUATION:
The realpolitik approach of the first Bush administration created tensions in executive-legislative relations, as diverse members in Congress sought to challenge the administration’s policies. The White House felt compelled to threaten presidential vetoes to prevent Congress from adopting sanctions that the executive branch strongly opposed. Yet, the Bush administration, like other foreign governments, proved unable to prevent the Chinese leadership from inflicting widespread human rights violations or induce Beijing to alter other policies obnoxious to American values and interests.

The priority of the Clinton administration was to settle the Belgrade bombing crisis in a way that quickly returned the Sino-American relationship to pre-crisis conditions and allowed the U.S. government to continue to concentrate on winning the war in Kosovo.

The initial U.S. response, which failed, was simply to hope that expressions of contrition by American leaders would assuage Chinese authorities, who would then suppress the public demonstrations. Most participants in the interagency working group established to monitor the crisis subsequently acknowledged feeling they were making decisions excessively hastily, with incomplete information. Constraints on the president’s time, congressional attacks on the Chinese government, and other impediments also complicated the U.S. government’s ability to handle this crisis.

The second Bush administration sought to settle the EP-3 crisis through a solution that, while not worsening Sino-American ties, would not compromise future U.S. intelligence operations against China. In this case, differences in interagency perspectives, especially between U.S. civilian and military actors, hindered policy implementation.

RESULTS:
In response to Tiananmen, President George H. W. Bush felt compelled to engage the Beijing government directly by circumventing traditional diplomatic and U.S. government channels. This approach had the advantage of flexibility but meant that, when details of the tactic became public, members of Congress felt less reluctance to attack the effort because they had never been briefed on the issue. More generally, congressional pressure continually forced the first Bush administration to pursue a harsher policy toward China than the President preferred. In terms of implementing its desired policy toward China, however, the main obstacle was not lack of interagency cooperation, but the dependence of the strategy’s effectiveness on Beijing’s response. Chinese policy makers proved unwilling to curtail their internal repression sufficiently to avoid undermining congressional support for the White House’s approach of pursuing long-term cooperation with China.

Despite having possessed several years of in-office experience conducting policies towards China, the Clinton team encountered problems orchestrating its diplomatic, economic, military and other foreign policy instruments before and during the embassy bombing crisis. The lack of interagency integration resulted from the embassy bombing’s unexpectedness and the White House’s preoccupation with winning a war in Kosovo that was proving much more difficult than originally anticipated. The military and intelligence communities proved reluctant to share information about their target selection procedures with their civilian colleagues, let alone the Chinese. As a result, the civilians in the State Department were left assuring the Chinese government that the incident had all been a mistake while acknowledging their limited understanding of why the intelligence failure had occurred.

The second Bush administration eventually achieved its immediate crisis objective of securing the return of the EP-3 crew and subsequently the plane. Nevertheless, the hard-line stance taken by U.S. military leaders was not well integrated with the softer approach of the U.S. State Department. A more integrated response might have helped secure the release of the crew and aircraft faster. Faced with unanswerable counterfactuals, however, one can acknowledge that the “good cop/bad cop” approach actually adopted, whether consciously or by accident, might have yielded the best results. In any case, congressional pressure for harsh U.S. retaliation if the Chinese failed to return the crew appeared to have strengthened the administration’s bargaining position by making its implicit threats more credible to Beijing.

CONCLUSION:
Several patterns emerge from the three crises under consideration. First, even those presidents that assumed office with well-integrated strategies often found it hard to implement them within the U.S. interagency framework. Second, absent close presidential attention, the agencies would often develop and pursue their own China policies, contributing to undesirable policy incoherence. Third, responding to the immediate crisis almost always involved a mixture of formal and ad hoc interagency processes. Fourth, serious problems arose when the crisis occurred early in a presidential transition since the new administrations had yet to establish fully functioning interagency processes or secure Senate approval of many mid-level political appointees. Fifth, since the Tiananmen crackdown, sustained tensions have affected executive-legislative policies regarding China , with Members of Congress often advocating much more confrontational policies than the executive branch deems wise. Finally, the main achievement of the U.S. government response to all the crises involved costs avoided—normally not a major accomplishment, but important here, when mismanaging events could have escalated into nuclear war.

INTRODUCTION:
Despite impressive progress in security made by the Surge, the outcome of the Iraq War remains in question. Though a comprehensive narrative of the war is not yet possible, an investigation of the major early decisions made at the presidential, interagency, cabinet department, and theater levels is important to the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR). The strategic significance of Iraq and the complex contingency character of much of the fighting alone warrant a comprehensive analysis of the decision to invade the country. In addition, evaluation of the U.S. government (USG) planning effort reveals critical shortcomings that the U.S. national security system must rectify to avoid similar errors in the future.

STRATEGY:
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, the regime of Saddam Hussein assumed a new, more ominous appearance in Washington. Military operations against Iraq were first suggested by the Pentagon as early as September 12, 2001, but it was not until November 2001 that the President asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to begin planning for potential military operations against Iraq. The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), headed by General Tommy Franks, was tasked with planning for the mission. The Chairman, General Richard Myers, USAF, and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Peter Pace, USMC, played a supporting role. In the end, Secretary Rumsfeld assumed a uniquely preeminent position in the development of the battle plan and the invasion force.Rumsfeld envisioned a lightning-fast operation in Iraq, followed by a swift handover of power to the Iraqis. Later, Rumsfeld even deactivated the military’s automated deployment system–questioning, delaying, or deleting units on numerous deployment orders.

While CENTCOM and the JCS did not underestimate the challenge of Phase IV stability operations, civilian leaders at the Pentagon remained critical of the need for a large troop presence. Phase IV planning was uneven within CENTCOM itself. All of the invading divisions and separate brigades believed that they would return home as soon as practicable after the cessation of hostilities. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), charged with carrying out initial stabilization and reconstruction activities, was not established until January 2003, at which time it was subordinated to the Secretary of Defense, who placed it under the authority of Central Command.

Colin Powell, with the strong backing of the United Kingdom and other U.S. allies, convinced President Bush in August 2002 to exhaust diplomatic efforts before going to war. While Secretary Powell was successful in restarting weapons inspections in Iraq, he was never able to build a consensus for decisive action in the Security Council. The President fared better with Congress and received strong, bipartisan approval for prospective military operations against Iraq.

In March 2003, the U.S. military commenced Operation Iraqi Freedom and effectively toppled Saddam. By May 2003, however, an anti-coalition insurgency had begun to develop. The military had not prepared for a counterinsurgency campaign and required approximately a year to adjust its field operations. The civilian ORHA plan for postwar Iraq was also scrapped and replaced by more than a year of formal American occupation under the Coalition Provisional Authority led by Ambassador L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer.

INTEGRATED ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL POWER:
Though Saddam’s perceived possession of WMD unified diverse factions within the administration in support of the war, USG efforts were not well integrated. While formal war planning was in high gear from Thanksgiving of 2001 up to March 2003, planners in the civilian agencies were not included in Pentagon close-hold briefings. They did not begin to make meaningful independent contributions until summer 2002. Moreover, postwar issues were divided and addressed by different groups that often worked in isolation from one another, sometimes for security reasons and sometimes for bureaucratic advantage. Complicating matters, very few humanitarian planners had access to the war plan, while very few war planners cared about anything other than major combat operations.

Though Powell and CIA Director George Tenet supported the President’s decision to wage war, a significant number of officials in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency dissented, sometimes through disruptive media leaks. Within the Pentagon, Franks––who shared Rumsfeld’s belief in the importance of speed––was caught between trying to placate his boss and satisfy the physical needs of his forces. Though the subordination of ORHA to the Pentagon appeared to streamline the chain of command, it also dampened interagency cooperation. The dysfunctional tension between clear lines of command and cross agency coordination continued when ORHA was replaced by the CPA. Bremer emphasized his status as Presidential Envoy and did not report consistently to or through either the Secretary of Defense or the National Security Advisor.

EVALUATION:
The Iraq war is a classic case of failure to adopt prudent courses of action that balance ends, ways, and means. Policy queuing was a problem. The tentative scheme to manage postwar Iraq was approved in October 2002, but little could be done as diplomats vainly attempted to solve the problem without recourse to arms. After major combat operations had ceased, U.S. efforts were hampered by ineffective civil and military plans for stability operations and reconstruction. The U.S. government deployed inadequate military forces to occupy and secure Iraq. Washington has also been unable to provide a sufficient number of trained civilian officials, diplomats, and aid workers to conduct effective stabilization and reconstruction missions. The State Department and USAID remain underfunded and insufficiently operational, while military manpower has been overextended. Exacerbating the situation, the U.S. government was slow to appreciate the ferocity of the Iraqi insurgency. Problematic U.S. funding and contracting mechanisms also delayed the provision of services and basic reconstruction.

From the outset, the underlying assumption that major combat operations would be difficult but that securing peace would be easy had a corrosive effect on planning. Faulty intelligence on Iraq’s suspect weapons of mass destruction, the state of Iraqi infrastructure, and the usefulness of Iraqi police contributed to “rosy scenario” predictions. Whether motivated by wishful thinking, stress, or predisposition, decision-makers failed to properly account for the extensive countervailing analysis, which warned of the dangers in postwar Iraq. In addition, one consistent problem demonstrated by the first Bush administration has been a failure to partner successfully in the interagency, with the Congress, and with our allies.

RESULTS:
As of mid-2008, the Iraq War had cost the United States over 4,100 dead and over 30,000 wounded. U.S. military allies have suffered hundreds of additional casualties. Iraqi civilian dead may number more than 90,000, while over 8,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers have been killed. Fifteen percent of the Iraqi population has become refugees or displaced persons. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the USG now spends over $10 billion per month on the war. Total direct appropriations for Operation Iraqi Freedom from March 2003 to June 2008 have exceeded $524 billion.

Globally, U.S. standing among friends and allies has decreased substantially. At the same time, operations in Iraq have had a negative effect on efforts in other facets of the war on terrorism, which have taken a back seat to the priority of the war in Iraq when it comes to manpower, materiel, and decision makers’ attention. The U.S. armed forces––especially the Army and Marine Corps––have been severely strained. American efforts in Iraq have fostered terrorism and emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East.

CONCLUSION:
The central finding of this study is that U.S. efforts in Iraq were hobbled by a set of faulty assumptions, a flawed planning effort, and a continuing inability to create security conditions in Iraq that could have fostered meaningful advances in stabilization, reconstruction, and governance. With the best of intentions, the United States toppled a vile, dangerous regime but has had great difficulty replacing it with a stable entity. Notwithstanding recent progress under the Surge, this case study exposes serious mistakes in U.S. government policy making and execution regarding Iraq.