By Jessica Binsch/MNS
James Locher III takes notes at a hearing of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee while Gordon Adams and John Pendleton (left) listen to a comment from James Thompson. Locher called on the president to take action to better sync the country’s national security agencies.
WASHINGTON — There’s general agreement that the nation’s security agencies need to be more unified to keep Americans safe, a fact on display at a House subcommittee meeting this week. What the experts and members of Congress cannot agree on yet is how to bring about that kind of reform.
“The national security system must be modernized to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” said James Locher III, head of the Project on National Security Reform, a government-funded think tank. “The task will be monumental, but there is no alternative.”
Unlike military threats during the Cold War, new challenges the U.S. might face include a flu outbreak, natural disasters or unstable states around the world that could become home to extremists. The military, diplomats, aid workers, law enforcement and many other agencies have to work in tandem to address these issues.
But the current system, based on the 1947 National Security Act, separates the departments and leaves little formal room for shared planning and action. Interagency collaboration, as it’s called, is underdeveloped. The difficulties are apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. has struggled to effectively combine civilian and military means.
“While national security activities, … require collaboration among multiple agencies, the mechanisms used for such activities may not provide the means … needed to meet modern national security challenges,” the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan watchdog, wrote in a 2009 report.
In struggle for funding, diplomacy and development often lose to defense
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s proposed shared national security budget would better integrate disparate departments — and it would also help civilian agencies get a bigger share of the fiscal pie. While funding for the military is usually granted even in times of fiscal strain, the State Department and development agencies can have trouble getting lawmaker’s ears for their funding requests.
This year, they got help from an unexpected side: the Pentagon. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to lawmakers to urging them to fully fund the State Department’s budget.
“Diplomatic efforts should always lead and shape our international relationships, and I believe that our foreign policy is still too dominated by our military,” Mullen wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner. He added that “diplomatic and developmental capabilities of the United States … reduce the need for military action.”
Communicating this reality to taxpayers can be difficult, as Gordon Adams, professor for U.S. foreign policy at American University, explained at a subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
“Getting the American people to understand that this long-term investment is in our national security interests is the challenge that every secretary of state has had every year in justifying their budget request,” Adams said.
AUDIO: Explaining why diplomacy needs funding is difficult, says Gordon Adams, a professor for U.S. foreign policy at American University. (Jessica Binsch/MNS)
Clinton, in her own words
Watch Clinton’s remarks about a shared national security budget on the State Department website (forward to about 49 minutes for this part of her statement).
Systems don’t align
Practical problems, however, prevent a closer integration of government agencies and effective information sharing. For example, the Pentagon collects information such as fingerprints or iris scans “in a way that make it incompatible with Homeland Security and FBI databases,” John Pendleton of the GAO pointed out at the subcommittee hearing Wednesday.
And it’s not just databases that don’t match. The State Department and Pentagon “divide the world up differently,” Pendleton said. Their regional bureaus hinder policy coordination.
Strengthen civilian agencies
The Pentagon dwarfs other agencies in both budget and manpower. (Military people like to convey that all the foreign service officers aren’t enough to staff an airplane carrier – of which the Navy has 10.)
The budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development combined make up about a tenth of the Pentagon’s, Pendleton pointed out.
Because of this lopsidedness, Gordon Adams recommended building up the civilian agencies. “The focus of reform needs to be on the civilian agencies and capabilities first,” said the American University professor and fellow at the non-partisan Stimson Center. The civilian agencies lack strategic vision, resources and trained personnel, Adams said. And they need those to be more helpful.
Better integration through a shared budget?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is painfully aware of the unequal distribution of resources. She was the first to call for a shared national security budget that covers all relevant activities. (See sidebar)
“We have to start looking at a national security budget,” she said at the Brookings Institution on May 27, when she presented President Barack Obama’s national security strategy. “We cannot look at a defense budget, a State Department budget, and a USAID budget without defense overwhelming the combined efforts of the other two, and without us falling back into the old stovepipes that I think are no longer relevant for the challenges of today.”
Such a joint budget would bundle the departments together under a shared objective – protecting the nation’s security – and recognize how intertwined their activities are.
This would not only require the agencies to work together, but also the congressional committees that oversee them. Adams recommended in his written testimony that the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees work together to merge the defense and international affairs budgets and provide oversight on joint programs.
Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., who chairs the subcommittee that held the hearing, said, at the end of the process, every department active overseas should be included in such a common approach. That would range from the Department of Justice to the Interior, Agriculture and Treasury Departments, all of which are involved in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.
Rep. Susan Davis, D-Calif., suggested a way to start could be building a shared budget around a specific objective, such as empowering women or supporting the civil society of a nation.
Should Obama take the lead?
The president outlined a more integrated approach to foreign policy in his National Security Strategy, whi was released in May. The paper calls for steps such as:
- improving the integration of military and civilian skills and capabilities, so that they “operate seamlessly”
- improving coordinated planning and policymaking
- close cooperation with Congress
- merging the staffs of the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council
- aligning resources with strategic goals
- educating and training national security professionals
Despite these steps, Locher of the Project on National Security Reform criticized the lack of details for how these goals should be accomplished. He called on Obama to issue an implementation plan. Locher also recommended that the subcommittee convene a commission that would come up with a roadmap for national security reform, outlining steps to be taken over the next decade.
The example of the intelligence community
The departments can look within their own administration for guidance. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress pushed more than a dozen intelligence agencies to improve information sharing.
Since then, they have developed a system that requires each agencies’ leaders to spend time working at another agency. Once the executives return to their original employer, they bring a better understanding of their counterparts with them.
James Thompson of the University of Illinois – Chicago, who has studied how well the agencies have implemented this process, said the program can be considered successful but remains vulnerable. Turnover in employees destroyed some of the initial support, he said.
Intelligence community could be model for broader reform
| Obstacles | Lessons learned |
| Intelligence agencies needed to share information better (The 2004 National Intelligence Reform Act) | Agencies worked together to create “joint duty program” à slower process, but strong support from all parties |
| Different personnel and pay systems | Intelligence agencies created common pay and personnel management systems |
| Executives want to advance careers at their own agencies | Joint duty a requirement for promotion starting Oct. 1, 2010 – Thompson calls this “the real crunch” to see whether the program will be successful |
Long-term process just begun
Experts and congressmen agreed that unifying the national security system is a long-term project that will likely take years to complete. But it remains unclear which first steps will advance that goal.
“I think members throughout the Congress recognize that we have work to do,” Snyder said after the hearing. “It’s just that they’re not entirely sure where that work is going to take us. This discussion is just part of that ongoing effort.”