“Transforming the National Security Bureaucracy”

by

Michèle A. Flournoy

Based on a panel presentation before the
National Defense University Joint Operations Symposium

Meeting Key U.S. Defense Planning Challenges

November 17, 2004

In recent months, there has been a rising chorus of calls for a “Goldwater-Nichols II” for the national security agencies within the U.S. Government. But few, if any, have articulated exactly what such sweeping reforms might look like. Everyone seems to like the idea, but no one knows exactly what it would entail.

For the past two years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has been engaged in a study entitled, “Beyond Goldwater Nichols: Defense Reform for a New Strategic Era.” The Phase I report was published in March 2004, and Phase II is now underway. The aim of this study is to offer actionable recommendations to civilian and military leaders early next year.

One of the reasons we called the study, “Beyond Goldwater-Nichols” is that we understand that the Department of Defense (DoD) does not operate in a vacuum. In today’s international security environment, virtually every policy the United States executes and every operation it conducts is fundamentally interagency in character. In all cases, the U.S. Government (USG) must achieve unity of effort across an array of agencies to achieve its objectives. In this context, we need to extend our notion of “jointness” to the interagency -- and often the international -- level.

In the past decade and a half, the United States has experienced repeated failures in integrating the political, military, economic, humanitarian, informational and other elements of our national power in complex contingency operations. In Somalia, the absence of an integrated strategy for achieving our objectives eventually yielded the battle of Mogadishu and the untimely withdrawal of the United States and the United Nations from the country. Most recently, the failure to plan adequately for post-conflict operations in Iraq allowed a security vacuum to develop that gave precious time and space to the insurgency and has cost the U.S.-led coalition dearly – in time, credibility with the Iraqi people, and lives lost. And in nearly every operation from Somalia to Iraq, a lack of rapidly deployable civilian capabilities has left military forces performing numerous tasks for which they do not have a comparative advantage and has substantially extended the duration of their deployments.

So, the question is: How do we achieve greater unity of effort across the USG?

First, we have to better understand the problem, which has five key elements:

1. An ad hoc approach to planning and conducting interagency operations. Unlike the U.S. military, which relies on doctrine and has a standard approach to planning operations, the U.S. government as a whole lacks established procedures for developing integrated strategies and operational plans. Each new administration tends to reinvent this wheel, issuing new guidance on how interagency strategy development and planning is to be done, often overlooking the best practices of and lessons learned by its predecessors. (This, in my view, is a particularly costly example of throwing of the proverbial baby out with the bath water.) This ad hoc, reinvent-the-wheel approach is hardly conducive to institutional learning over time and has had very real and negative impacts on USG performance on the ground.

2. No agreed division of labor among agencies. When it comes to orchestrating a coherent U.S. response to a crisis overseas, the U.S. Government does not have anything akin to the National Response Plan that has been developed to orchestrate the responses of multiple agencies and entities to domestic disasters. When it comes to complex contingencies abroad, there is no agreed assignment of agency roles and responsibilities, and no clear alignment of agency authorities and resources to match agency responsibilities. While in some task areas, a de facto division of labor exists, in others there is confusion and sometimes conflict about which agency should play a supported role and which should contribute in a supporting role. Unfortunately, this state of affairs often results in costly delays in response time on the ground due to bureaucratic in-fighting and funding disputes.

3. Lack of a planning culture and capacity outside DoD. Whereas military officers are taught to see planning as critical to success in operations and are trained in its finer points, planning for operations is largely foreign to other agencies like the Departments of State and Treasury. Most civilian agencies focus on policy development rather than the conduct of operations and therefore lack an operational culture. Few emphasize the importance of planning for operations, fewer have dedicated planning staffs or expertise, and fewer still undertake a detailed planning process before conducting operations. The absence of both rigorous agency planning and integrated interagency planning frequently results in costly gaps, poor performance, and time delays once an operation gets underway.

4. Lack of rapidly deployable capacity – personnel, funding and appropriate authorities – in civilian agencies. Even though civilian agencies such as the Departments of State and Treasury may be tasked with performing critical tasks in a particular operation, they generally lack personnel who are trained and ready for these missions as well as the authorities and resources to rapidly deploy them and quickly establish programs in the field. In practice, this means that the U.S. military has few civilian partners on the ground in the opening weeks and months of an operation. This can be a recipe for both mission creep, as military personnel are pressed to step into the vacuum and conduct tasks for which they are ill-suited or ill-prepared, and longer deployments for the military, as milestones that will ultimately enable their exit strategy take longer to achieve.

5. Few incentives for “jointness” at the interagency level -- and plenty of disincentives. There are few incentives or requirements for civilian professionals in the various national security agencies to take time away from their home agency to participate in interagency education programs or work in another national security agency. Quite the contrary: rotations out of one’s home agency are often viewed as the kiss of death for upward mobility. The system generally rewards staying in one’s institutional stovepipe rather than breaking out of it. As long as this is the case, the U.S. Government will face very real cultural barriers to creating real unity of effort in execution.

So how can we address these problems? Although the following list of reforms is ambitious, it represents only a starting point for achieving greater unity of effort in the planning and conduct of interagency operations.

Reform must begin at the top with clear guidance and leadership by the President and National Security Advisor. Specifically:

Each President, early in his or her tenure, should review and update the guidance establishing standard operating procedures for the planning of complex operations. This guidance should articulate: a clear interagency division of labor, specifying which agencies should be prepared to lead or support others in various task areas; the mechanisms and process that will be used to integrate interagency planning, such as Interagency Crisis Action Teams or Executive Committees; and a standard planning paradigm, including a template for a pol-mil plan, when and how interagency rehearsals shall be conducted, and so on.

The President should designate a Deputy Assistant to the President on the National Security Council (NSC) Staff with lead responsibility for integrating agency strategies and plans for operations and ensuring greater unity of effort among agencies during execution. In this capacity, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Plans would co-chair all Deputies Committee meetings related to responding to international crises and would be supported by a new NSC office for Stability and Reconstruction Operations. This new office would be responsible for developing integrated interagency plans, developing policy direction to guide agency operational planning, reviewing and integrating agency plans for complex operations, helping to resolve differences or gaps between agency plans prior to execution, and monitoring the implementation of plans as an operation unfolds.

For every operation being considered, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Plans should establish an Interagency Crisis Action Team. This team should include the relevant NSC regional and functional Senior Directors as well as the relevant Under or Assistant Secretaries from agencies likely to be involved in the operation. The Deputy Assistant to the President should be given the staff and resources to be able to support at least three Interagency Crisis Action Teams simultaneously. Ideally, a core of this staff would remain in place as administrations change to provide continuity.

For each specific operation, the President should designate a senior civilian official to be in charge of and accountable for integrating USG operations on the ground. In some cases, this senior official will be the U.S. Ambassador to the host country. In many cases, however, the United States may not have an Ambassador in country. In that case, a “Special Representative of the President” (SRP) should be appointed and charged with leading interagency operations on the ground once major combat operations have ceased. He or she would be supported by a staff of agency detailees and other experts mobilized for the operation (see below). (During combat operations, lead responsibility in the field would obviously rest with the military chain of command.) In the case of a U.S.-led coalition operation, the SRP would also lead the coalition effort in the field. If the United States were participating in an operation led by the UN, NATO, or another nation, the SRP would be the principal civilian U.S. interlocutor with the UN “Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG), senior NATO representative or the senior representative of the lead nation.

In order for this Special Representative to be able, on behalf of the President, to bring the full range of U.S. capabilities to bear in a timely manner, Congress should give the President more flexible funding authorities for such operations, such as, notwithstanding authority for the provision of assistance to respond to crises, a flexible and replenishing emergency account for stability operations, and more flexible contracting and procurement procedures to jump-start reconstructions more rapidly on the ground.

Each Presidential Special Representative should also be supported by an interagency task force (ITAF) in the field, involving military and civilian representatives from multiple agencies working side by side, to achieve greater unity of effort on the ground. This is a new concept that requires further development, but it has great potential to ensure improved U.S. performance in an operation, from its earliest stages to its final days. Although such an integrated civilian-military task force would have to rely on the U.S. military to provide its security, communications backbone, logistics support and so forth, civilian experts would play key roles in several functional areas, such as intelligence, planning, and operations. Priority should be given to fleshing out this notion in more detail, drawing on the lessons learned from recent operations like Afghanistan and Iraq and paying particular attention to what would be required to rapidly deploy and sustain such an organization in the field. The IATF concept also needs to be harmonized with the requirements for deploying various military Joint Task Forces in the field.

In addition, we must give priority to building greater capacity for the planning and conduct of operations in non-DoD agencies, most importantly the State Department. This means providing more personnel and resources to both functional offices and the offices of the various Regional Assistant Secretaries so that they can participate fully in the interagency planning process and undertake more rigorous agency planning efforts.

In addition, Congress should create a new Agency for Stability Operations, with a Civilian Stability Operations Corps (CSOC) and Reserve. The responsibilities of this new agency would include: assessing and preparing for stability operations; organizing, training and equipping civilian capabilities for such operations; and rapidly deploying civilian experts and teams to the field. The proposed Agency for Stability Operations would essentially take the recently established Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the State Department and make it into an independent, fully resourced agency, with its own operations-oriented culture, that would report directly to the Secretary of State. Its principal functions would be to: monitor and assess crises that could result in U.S. involvement in stability operations; plan for the non-military aspects of such operations; participate in the development of interagency plans for stability operations; catalogue non-military capabilities and resources within the U.S. government that could be used in such operations; establish standing mechanisms, such as Memoranda of Understanding with other agencies and contract vehicles for certain types of services, to enable the rapid deployment of U.S. civilians to operations; establish and manage a Civilian Stability Operations Corps (CSOC) of 200-300 USG civilians who are organized, trained and equipped to conduct stability operations; oversee the establishment and maintenance of a Civilian Stability Operations Reserve of civilian experts outside government, in areas ranging from the holding of elections to the rebuilding of infrastructure, who agree to be “on call” for rapid deployment overseas; interface with relevant international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and foreign partners; and mobilize civilian personnel for deployment to operations, including providing staff support to the President’s Special Representative in the field. Congress should provide this new agency with the authorities and resources necessary to support deployment of civilian teams to the field within days or weeks.

One important aspect of this is ensuring that the President and his Cabinet Secretaries have the authorities they need to send selected civilian personnel to operations on a non-volunteer basis. Congress and OPM should consider creating new incentives, such as enhanced pay and retirement benefits, for civilian professionals who are willing to sign up in advance to be available for deployment to operations abroad.

Another critical component of building interagency capacity for the planning and conduct of interagency operations is establishing a new Training Center for Interagency and Coalition Operations. Congress should create such a Training Center with the following key missions:

· Training NSC and agency personnel in integrated planning for complex contingencies;

· Providing pre-deployment training to interagency personnel tapped for specific operations;

· Training new officials coming into posts with responsibilities for operational planning and/or oversight;

· Developing and certifying a cadre of civilian experts (including CSOC personnel and reservists) who could be called on to participate in future operations;

· Hosting international training sessions and exercises that would include U.S. civilian and military personnel as well as their counterparts from allied and partner countries to develop standard operating procedures for the planning and conduct of complex operations; and

· Collection, analysis and dissemination of lessons learned and best practices, including providing fellowships to enable senior personnel just returning from the field to capture and share their lessons learned with others.

To ensure an interagency perspective and to maximize participation by both military and civilian professionals, the Training Center should be jointly run by DoD’s National Defense University and the State Department’s National Foreign Affairs Training Center.

Clearly, all of this “capacity building” requires more funding and more personnel billets in civilian agencies to enable people to engage in planning, interagency education and training, deployments to operations and so on. However, given the potentially significant improvements to U.S. performance in operations that might result, it would be a worthwhile investment for Congress to authorize and fund for the State Department and other key civilian agencies a 10-15% personnel increase comparable to that which is authorized for the military for these purposes.

Finally, the U.S. Government needs to create incentives to motivate more “joint” behavior at the interagency level. One of the most profound changes in the original Goldwater-Nichols legislation was the creation of the Joint Service Officer designation and the associated incentives for officers in the U.S. military to seek joint service as a way of advancing their careers. Once joint service became a virtual requirement for promotion to Flag or General Officer, the best and brightest in each of the Services began to actively seek joint assignments. This cross-fertilization across the Military Services created the human and cultural foundation on which increasingly integrated joint military operations have been built over the last 18 years. But there is no comparable system of incentives or requirements to encourage interagency education and rotations among civilian professionals across the national security agencies. In an era of interagency operations, we need to find ways to encourage and reward interagency experience.

Building on the success of the original Goldwater-Nichols legislation, Congress should work with OPM to establish a similar incentive structure to encourage civilian professionals in agencies that play a key role in national security -- Defense, State, AID, Treasury, Commerce, Justice, Energy, CIA, and Homeland Security -- to gain interagency expertise and experience. Specifically, we have recommended making promotion to and through SES (or equivalent) contingent upon some interagency education and spending a 2-3 year rotation in another agency. This would likely turn the prevailing attitude toward interagency rotations on its head: Rather than being seen as a distraction from, if not a detriment to, advancement in one’s home agency, it would be seen as the most important ticket to punch for promotion.

In conclusion, building jointness at the interagency level is absolutely critical to U.S. success in the new security environment. None of the challenges we face -- be it fighting terrorism, stopping proliferation, or building democracy –can be met without the effective and integrated use of all of the instruments of our national power. Creating unity of effort across the national security agencies in policy execution and in the conduct of complex operations is imperative. Doing so will require some fairly major changes in our thinking, institutional cultures, resource allocation across the USG, and incentive structures within the USG. This is a tall order, but one that must be filled if the United States is to successfully meet the security challenges of the 21^st century.