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Special Carnegie/CDI Conference: Comments from Frank Hoffman, Former Staff Member, U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century
I guess I'm here to offer an opposing view to Adm. Baker. In the 'Jurassic Park' that is the Pentagon, I am the tethered goat.
Our illusions and our comforting complacencies suddenly came face-to-face with reality with a vengeance on Sept. 11. No longer does distance offer us any security, no longer do our oceanic moats in the Atlantic and Pacific offer us any security against tragedy. Sen. [Warren] Rudman, whom I used to work for, used to put it so very clearly: "Americans are not as secure as they believe themselves to be, and that Americans will likely die in large numbers on our soil." His prediction, which was really a sober conclusion from a very deliberate two-and-a-half-year-long analysis, was regrettably ignored by too many.
The threats of the 21st century are not going to be deterred by our overwhelming military superiority, or by the difference between spending $300 billion, $350 billion or $400 billion on defense. We no longer face a clear and present danger, one with clarity and a fixed purpose against us. In its place, we face ambiguity and the unknown. Instead of a known threat, we have almost infinite vulnerabilities due to the nature of our society and the economy, and the way of life we have constructed. For those who are looking for a new name to the post-Cold War era, I offer, "We live in an age of vulnerabilities."
We need more breadth in the security capabilities that we offer our nation in such an age, and we need to restructure our non-military entities and invest in effective systems if we're going to protect our citizens our freedoms and our way of life. I find the current tragedy very sad, since so much of it was predictable, and even preventable to some degree. However, I also realize that future attacks could even be much worse and even more cunning than that of the last month. It's very instructive that the terrorists, if you want to call them that, that have attacked us recently are using our own infrastructure, our own transportation networks, in essence our own way of life against us. We need to anticipate these vulnerabilities that the future portends and prudently define a framework that will successfully deter and defend against future attacks. And, we're going to have to respond far more effectively if and when such attacks occur. And I guess it's no longer an issue of 'if', it's just 'when'.
The current Balkanization of our outdated security of organizations should be rectified, so that we can protect our way of life, and our freedoms, in an age of vulnerability. Our adversaries are exploiting the gaps and seams in our current organizational framework. As the events in New York and Washington reveal, these gaps lead to horrific consequences, and will continue to do so. We now have a new debate. It's clear from these events in New York and Virginia that we have to think about transforming national security, not merely just defense and the Pentagon. Instead of debating a strategy of conducting two nearly simultaneously major theater wars overseas; we need to concentrate on our government's principal constitutional duties: providing for the common defense, broadly defined, and protecting our citizenry and way of life. Thus, instead of thinking only about 'away games' fighting the wars we like to fight, we need to think just as much about both 'home' and 'away' conflicts.
The Bush administration has decided to address the ineffectiveness of our domestic security apparatus with an overarching coordinator position, which Gov. [Tom] Ridge has taken. This is an awesome challenge, obviously, and we should applaud his courage and his dedication. But many wonder if he hasn't taken on a 'mission impossible'. The general consensus in Washington - at least, among the ones I listen to - is that Gov. Ridge is ultimately going to face enormous bureaucratic obstacles, hurdles and a misshaped structure. Hopefully, he will not, and, hopefully, he will be able to overcome these. But I am dubious, doubtful.
Homeland Security is a very complex challenge, with an equally complex array of participating federal agencies with no common direction or unity of effort. The president assigned Gov. Ridge to "lead, oversee, and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that might come." However, the president himself holds much of the mandate and responsibility for these tasks, and he did not arm Gov. Ridge with either the credibility or the authority to properly prepare this country's defenses against catastrophic attacks.
President Bush appropriately make Gov. Ridge an all-powerful czar for counter terrorism. Naming so-called czars for multi-disciplinary responses like drugs; proliferation terrorism is a frequent reaction to complex problems. But there's little evidence with success with this kind of approach - for those who have studied the drug office in any detail. Even people who've run that office have advised against relying upon it as a model for a function that's so critical, so much more complex, and so much larger.
There are benefits to the approach that the administration is taking, of course. So-called czars provide a visible face to a policy issue, they are an effective national spokesperson. They can be a rallying point for developing and explaining a national policy. They can be very effective at executing the nation's information management campaign to explain to the American people what is being done on their behalf.
But they do not control assets, they do not direct forces in the field, they do not deploy task forces, nor do they have an institutional capacity to develop and sustain programs. They are czars without Cossacks, and they usually end up like the last of the [Russian] czars, isolated or even buried.
For this reason, the recently completed U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission after its distinguished chairs, rejected this approach. We explored the benefits of this czar to improve strategy and oversight, and found some merits to it. But we ultimately rejected it as a weak reed. It treats the symptoms, but does very little for the disease itself, which really involves a lack of strategic direction, strategic cohesion, and the poor organizational structure that exists at the operational level.
The Hart-Rudman commissioners were also concerned about the risks of artificially separating Homeland Security from national security. A separate office connotes the idea that defending CONUS [the continental United States] is somehow not central to our national security strategy, or to the National Security Council itself - the NSC to be distinguished from the NSC staff. By law and by practice, the National Security Council is the president's principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior security advisers and his Cabinet. The council serves as the president's principal arm for coordinating these policies among the various government agencies.
The commission concluded that the National Security Council itself must address Homeland Security as a principal objective of national security, and incorporate the strategy, the priorities and requisite resources for this mission as an inherent element of our national security strategy, not a bifurcated byproduct.
The commission placed great stock in the concept of matching accountability with authority and responsibility. For those who have studied government and public administration, this should not be a bizarre concept. Line authority, responsibility and accountability go hand-in-hand. Gov. Ridge, though, is in a position with great responsibilities, but he has no authority, other than a mandate from the president and a moral authority that the tragedy of Sept. 11 brings to bear. He has no operational control over forces, however, and no budget authority. And thus, he has no true accountability for how resources are spent, and the performance of the respective departments and agencies that contribute to Homeland Security. His appointment offers an illusion that someone is in charge, which might be of some benefit, but no real accountability either to the Congress or the American people.
The commission also rejected options to give the Homeland Security czar some additional forces or real control over budgets of other departments. This could cause more confusion over priorities and generate resentment among the agencies themselves, as well as further operationalizing the White House staff, which should be some concern for folks who studied that tendency over the last 20 or 30 years. Again, this is treating the symptom instead of the NSC's disease of poor strategic planning, poor strategic integration and its culture of strong reactive or crisis management.
Likewise, the commissioners rejected dumping all the related missions into the Defense Department. There have been proposals for giving the entire mission to DoD, for giving the Internet to DoD, or for merging the FBI, the DoD and FEMA into the Department of National Security. Such super-agencies are too big and too unwieldy, too centralized, and unacceptable giving our values, freedoms and political traditions. Neither the so-called czar nor a super-agency can fix the strategy and the resource problem, which is the first most critical problem, as adequately as the National Security Council itself - if it can overcome its historical tendency to avoid strategic planning and resource allocation. Thus, the commission focused on National Security Council reforms as a means to fix the strategic problem.
The administration has taken a different tactic with Gov. Ridge's office and the Homeland Security Council to compete with the National Security Council for strategy resources and assets. The implication that others and I have drawn from this is that Gov. Ridge is a coordinator for domestic security, while Dr. [Condoleeza] Rice and the NSC will continue to focus on foreign policy, international relations and defense - in my view, creating potentially another false seam along outdated borders, which will further create more gaps. It is not clear to me how a comprehensive national security strategy which will incorporate all the various components relevant to Homeland Security (non-proliferation, threat reduction, diplomatic efforts, arms control treaties, intelligence tasking, border security and our economic interests) is going to be produced from such a structure.
For example, tradeoffs between Cooperative Threat Reduction and monies for Health and Human Services for smallpox vaccines are, in essence, competing, but who is producing that kind of prioritization integration in national strategy? Sen. [Richard] Lugar brought out that kind of debate in his comments. In short, I think the administration has pretentiously divorced the defensive side of Homeland Security from the international dimension, potentially confounding security priorities, confusing accountability and diffusing responsibility. Both the NSC and the HSC now have competing staffs, overlapping responsibilities for directing intelligence, contingency planning, exercises and investments that contribute to Homeland Security. The National Security Council and its larger, more powerful staff, along with its well fined crisis management machinery, is obviously going to remain the president's primary tool for national security. This could relegate Gov. Ridge's office and staff to a secondary and peripheral role, and perhaps it should be, but perhaps it should not.
Even if Gov. Ridge is successful at developing a comprehensive strategy, he's going to find the existing organizational machinery to be too encrusted and too outdated to execute the strategy he designs. The Hart-Rudman Commission concludes that most of the structures created for the Cold War could be adequately refocused without substantive change. However, in the case of adequate border security and consequence management, they recommended that some organizational realignment was needed. These two functions do not constitute a complete Homeland Security solution. But they are two of the most important. So accordingly, the commission proposed realigning those, particularly the border agencies, Customs, Coast Guard, and border patrol, under common leadership and common direction to enhance the prevention component of the strategy they developed.
It also strengthened FEMA, and consolidated a variety of emergency response mechanisms that are distributed within the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and FEMA and put them under one house. The idea behind this was to streamline federal programs, minimize federal bureaucracy inside the beltway, and maximize support to state and local authorities and the private sector. These prevention and response activities were consolidated into what we call the National Homeland Security Agency, which, in my own personal view, is a horrible name, but that's what they put out. It connotes an overarching super agency in my mind and it doesn't really respond to the specific functions that the commission has assigned to it.
This agency is not a new institution in any physical sense. There are no new organizations, no billets; only existing agencies and officers are realigned to make more sense, and more effective and more efficient response capabilities. This agency has no authority over the budgets of other departments, over the intelligence community, over the Justice Department; but it has all the resources necessary to incentivize such activities to be more cooperative in exercises and training.
It is a new institution, in the sense that it would have congressional legislation as a charter, with parameters, and left and right boundaries for its tasks and authorities and emergencies. It also has a Senate-confirmed director, who has a seat on the National Security Council to represent the interests of those agencies. This realignment should produce a highly professional, credible and sustainable organization with clear priorities and focus.
This is not a disruptive change. The border agencies don't move anywhere, they don't go away, they don't have their guts ripped out of them - if you're looking for the frequent accusation that we have proposed, you know, ripping the guts out of Treasury or Transportation. If you really know where the border patrol and the Coast Guard fit in the relative departments, you know you have to look an awful lot lower in the intestinal track to figure out where those agencies are represented.
But we have a lot of gaps and seams. I agree with the admiral that one wants to invest in ISR programs and think about the battle-space, but the battle-space that I consider just as relevant right now is along the borders, and our hospitals, and the public health system. And we don't have computers or ISR capabilities that are inoperable among those different agencies today, so I would put some resources there.
We've entered upon a long war, one without, perhaps, victory, or even an end. This is not like the phony war against drugs, nor is it going to be like the Cold War with 'clear and present' dangers. It's going to be a very long conflict requiring patience - something we're not good at, and with various campaigns and different fronts. We're well organized to conduct the offensive campaigns, the 'away games' that we focused so myopically on for the past decade with success. But this is not for domestic security. This is not a job for the Defense Department. The Defense Department does not have the requisite core competencies at most of the relevant tasks. They have other missions that they must do, and I wouldn't want to give incentives to our enemies to attack us here to distract the Defense Department from doing its valid missions overseas. Just as importantly, I don't want to see our freedoms, values and our way of life compromised even in the name of security.
The National Guard has a great role in this fight, along with the other state and federal agencies. They need the resources, the time and the attention to get the capabilities they need to both defend their communities as well as contribute to our war-fighting functions. However, you must remember that Sep. 11 is a signpost of things to come, perhaps worse things. The 21st century offers any number of potential vulnerabilities to states and non-state actors, to our safety, our economy and our freedoms. We need to move past quick fixes and cosmetic solutions to those problems, and deal with the necessary structure to conduct domestic security. Protecting our country in such an era of ambiguous wars will require more than a super coordinator, even one with Gov. Ridge's obvious talents.
A key animating concern behind the Hart-Rudman Commission was a concern that the way we are organized today - the way most of our minds work from years and decades of intellectual habit - and the way our resources are allocated as a consequence, do not reflect the problems most likely to confront us. The situation that now confronts us today bears out this concern. We find ourselves poorly organized and unprepared, despite the best efforts of a lot of talented people. The demons of bureaucratic inertia, myopia and complacency won the first round. I sincerely hope they're not going to be victorious over time. As Winston Churchill once reminded the House of Commons, "the Americans will eventually do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities." After the shock we have taken, it's about time, as Churchill said, for us to do the right thing.
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