DrNatSecMgt

Welcome to Langley, Dr. David Petraeus

2011-09-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

On his first day as a civilian participant in the NSC, Petraeus will have a lot to digest.

(1) Inter-Services Intelligence arrested Younis al-Mauritani and two other Al Qaeda leaders.

(2) Kiwamu Ariga and Kuniteru Maeda are Ishikawa 81-year-olds who mined uranium for Japan.

(3) Chinese officials confirm reports of mid-July meeting by arms dealers with Libyan officials.

(4) (No stories in today’s NYT about Russia and Eurasian region.)

(5a) Sir Peter Gibson’s panel, established in July 2010, will also investigate Libyan renditions.

(5b) Shamal K. Leibowitz gave Israeli embassy FBI transcripts to blogger Richard Silverstein.

(5c) UN officials meeting in Mogadishu predict 750,000 more deaths in the next three months.

(6) July 20 video surfaces of Uruguayan UN peacekeepers sexually assaulting 18-year-old male.

(7) Jacques Chirac’s anosognosia prevents him from appearing at his ethics trial in Paris.

(8) Fereydoon Abbasi indicates Iranian willingness to accept “full supervision for five years.”

(9) Four witnesses undermine the prosecution in the Hosni Mubarek trial, sparking street fights.

Petraeus’s star power could be used either to strengthen Clapper’s role, or to undermine it.

The “Islamic Caliphate” Might Be an Organizational Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

2011-09-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

There are 8 points on the NSC compass -- SW, W, NW, N, S, NE, E, SE – plus CENTCOM.

SW: Sabar Lal fought Soviets, spent 5 years in Guantanamo, and was transferred on 9/07.

W: Typhoon Talas flooded Wayakama, Nara, and Kyoto, leaving 20 dead and 50 missing.

NW: WikiLeaks cables between Washington and Beijing endanger American sources in China.

N: The end of DADT on 9/20/11 re-opens the door for 13,000 discharged soldiers.

S: (N/A on Mexico, Central America, and South America in today’s NYT.)

NE: (N/A on Russia/Eurasia today in today’s NYT.)

E: Left Party, Green Party, Social Democrats, Christian Democratic Union, Free Democrats.

SE: Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his colleagues are struggling to release Subsaharan “mercenaries.”

CENTCOM: Bushehr power plant will be inaugurated on 9/12; what will Turkey/Israel do?

The U.S. might best prevent the rise of an “Islamic Caliphate” by carving up CENTCOM.

High Reliability National Security Strategy Team: A Sonnet

2011-09-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

The U.S. needs a High Reliability National Security Strategy Team (HRNSST),
Because the 9/1/11 NYT proves it is too complex a world for one person to lead.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading PACOM1?
Myanmar's 55 million are just as significant as Libya's 7 million.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading PACOM2?
Wikileaks decentralizes microstrategizing to the Philippines country team.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading PACOM3?
Drongdru, Tsering Tenzin, and Tenchum did not murder a 16-year-old monk.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading NORTHCOM2?
Russian leaders will be present today in the 60-country Libya meeting in Paris.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading NORTHCOM1?
London basements are an interesting part of the American soul.

Who is the NSS's national security executive leading SOUTHCOM?
Israel's 7.8 million people are protesting; Mexico's 112.3 million people aren't.

Who is the NSC Staff's national security executive leading EUCOM?
Denis Mamadou Cuspert was once Deso Dogg, but is now Abou Maleeq.

Who is the NSC Staff's national security executive leading CENTCOM?
Col. Crissman is holding at 4,465, but Al Qaeda killed more than 90 on 8/15.

Who is the NSC Staff's national security executive leading AFRICOM?
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt are part of the African Continent.

Donilon, McDonough, Brennan, and Rhodes are an effective uber-APNSA...
But I don't yet know the names of the national security executives they support.

High Reliability DOD IT Acquisition Reform

2011-05-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog probably know by now, I am spending the summer of 2011 strengthening my doctoral seminar on High Reliability Organizations. The “Prologue” is a review of the now-legendary Berkeley Studies that were triggered by Admiral Tom Mercer’s brilliant recognition that he could be a better captain of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson by studying Pacific Gas & Electric (electrical grids) and the Federal Aviation Administration (air traffic control). The twelve contexts I’ve identified are military systems, naval systems, aviation systems, petrochemical plant systems, nuclear systems, safety and security systems, space exploration systems, firefighting systems, healthcare systems, medical systems, governmental systems, and national security systems. The “Epilogue” is a collection of miscellaneous HRO contexts that are likely to be developed more fully in the years ahead.

Like I did a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about the Tuscaloosa Tornadoes, today I’d like to drill down into one of the twelve large research domains in the syllabus (national security systems), and discuss one of the 144 more precise research domains (Department of Defense Information Technology Acquisition Reform).

Today, there are three helpful studies that I would like to recommend for DOD IT Acquisition Reformers.

The first HRO study of IT Systems that might help DOD IT Acquisitions Reformers think differently about the future is from my favorite renegade collection of HRO scholars – the participants in the annual conferences on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM). The U.S. bias in its IT systems historically seems to have been toward tighter coupling through centralization of control of the systems. In contrast, the ISCRAM people – who have a high degree of international representation -- are more likely to be focused on distributed cognition, local situational awareness, and the exploitation of inexpensive off-the-shelf mobile devices. One exemplary paper of this difference between big-budget centralized U.S. systems thinking and small-budget decentralized non-U.S. systems thinking was presented in Sweden by two Portuguese scholars, Claudio Sapatièro and Pedro Antunes. Perhaps instead of saying “More Cowbell,” DOD IT Acquisitions Reformers should be saying “More ISCRAM.”

Second, a 2010 University of Maryland dissertation by Catherine L. Anderson presents a helpful study of 153 “IT infrastructure failures” in 70 organizations in 9 different industries. Anderson’s study is a helpful read for Department of Defense and other national security organizations because it will help them understand things differently than they might do otherwise. First, Anderson shows that all new IT systems are going to fail because they are highly complex and highly coupled (a condition that creates the phenomenon Charles Perrow called “normal accidents” in 1984) – to wait for a perfect IT system is to never take delivery of an IT system. Second, Anderson finds that the magic fairy dust that helps transform imperfect IT systems into potentially useful IT systems is the concept of “collective mindfulness” – to adopt a new IT system into a broken organizational environment will invite failure, but adopting a new IT system into a healthy organizational environment might lead to success. Third, Anderson expands on Weick and Sutcliffe’s useful distinction between anticipation and containment – “mindful anticipation” before the beginnings of an IT failure can help the system be more robust; “mindful containment” after the beginnings of an IT failure can help the system be more resilient. (My personal preference here would be to distinguish between three types of HROs – High Robustness Organizations draws on James Reason and others, High Reliability Organizations draws on Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe and others, and High Resilience Organizations draws on Erik Hollnagel and others.) If DOD IT Acquisition people thought more along the lines of Anderson, they might get faster, better, and less expensive IT systems.

Finally, the best study I have seen that might be useful to DOD IT Acquisition Reformers is from researchers at Cranfield University, who have not focused on the failure of IT systems after installation, as Anderson did, but on the failure to implement the IT system. David Denyer, Elmar Kutsch, and Elizabeth (Liz) Lee-Kelley point out that IT system acquisition failures are highly frequent and highly expensive:

It appears that every year billions of pounds are wasted on new IS programmes such as the US Advanced Automation System project (Nelson, 2007), or the UK National Offender Management System implementation (National Audit Office, 2009). In 2004, only 29% of all IS programmes succeeded in meeting their time, budget and specification objectives (Johnson, 2006).

Denyer, Kutsch, and Lee-Kelley expand on the insights that Anderson presented, and propose four HRO-inspired research questions that I believe could help the Department of Defense IT Acquisition Reform process:

RQ1: To what extent do programmes find an appropriate balance and consensus between reliability and other performance goals (e.g. scope, timeframe and cost)?

RQ2: To what extent do programmes reconcile the tension between the need for centralisation (formal structures, hierarchical decision making and adherence to plans, procedures and processes) and the need for decentralisation (anticipation of problems followed by rapid, improvised and mindful responses)?

RQ3: To what extent is learning, particularly from errors, incidents and near misses, achieved in programmes?

RQ4: To what extent is redundancy (e.g. technological, human and time) created, fostered and used in programmes?

The U.S. national security system could be more effective at accomplishing national missions, for far less money that it currently spends, and with a much higher level of national safety, security, robustness, reliability, and resilience, if it can move from its 19th Century IT Acquisition process to a 21st Century IT Acquisition process. These three studies, which their authors have generously made available on the Web, could be helpful in that reform effort.

Why World War II Was the End of Bureaucratic Strategies

2011-05-14T20:20:00.001-07:00

Malcolm Brady published an article in 2011 that merits attention for several reasons. Here is the abstract:

Purpose – The merit of improvisation over command and control as an organizational approach is the subject of much debate in the management and emergency literatures. The purpose of this paper is to examine tactics employed by the two leading protagonists at the Battle of Stalingrad – Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus on the German side and General Vasily Chuikov on the side of Russia – and seek to identify the reasons for Chuikov's victory over Paulus and draw lessons from this for practicing managers.

Design/methodology/approach – The research project examined over a dozen publicly available texts on the battle, in the light of the crisis management and strategy literatures.

Findings – The paper shows how Chuikov improvised to meet the demands of the situation, relaxed the command and control structure of the Russian 62nd Army and developed a collective mind among Russian troops and that this triple approach played a significant role in his victory over Paulus.

Originality/value – The case provides support for the view that improvisation is important in crisis response and can be applied within a hierarchical command and control structure. The paper puts forward a framework for managers to respond to crisis based on two continua: mode of response (improvised or planned) and means of control (via the hierarchy or via rules embedded in a collective mind).

(1) After several trips to see the museums and cemeteries in Normandy while I taught at HEC Paris from 1994-2000, I started arguing that June 6, 1944, was the end of the bureaucratic era (the command-and-control bureaucracy imposed by Rommel on the German Atlantic Wall) and the beginning of the network era (the loosely coupled, flexible, multinational invading forces proceeding under a general plan designed by Eisenhower). I cited the book The Longest Day to make this point, but Brady's article looks like a more rigorous scholarly attempt to make a similar point.

(2) I like the emerging theme in the HRO literature that suggests that the way out of a potentially catastrophic situation is not simply reducing complexity and reducing coupling; the use of cross-functional teams to create innovations or improvisations that overcome "failures of imagination" is a very different organizational tool. Brady's article seems to suggest that improvisation is a way to reduce the likelihood of catastrophes; that is a theme that sounds like Eric Abrahamson's wonderful book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder.

(3) I also like the possibility that the 107 case studies that the Project on National Security Reform commissioned can now be supplemented by other cases. The study by Brady is not likely to say anything -- directly -- about the U.S. national security system, but it could add to the argument I've been making about organizational resilience as the direction forward for High Reliability Individuals, High Reliability Teams, High Reliability Organizations, High Reliability Networks, and High Reliability Systems

Stay tuned for links to more of the 216 articles citing "high reliability organizations" that have been published -- sor far -- in 2011.

Bad Management Theory Leads to Bad National Security Outcomes

2011-05-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, at the third Legal Roundtable on National Security Reform, I made the following comments:

Bad Management Theory leads to Bad Management Outcomes, and the fundamental problem with the U.S. national security is its immunity from modern management theories. Three management theories that would inform discussions of intelligence reform are (1) Loosely Coupled Systems, (2) Organizational Sensemaking Processes, and (3) High Reliability Organizations.

Loosely Coupled Systems. Several people today have pointed out that it is unhealthy to construct a bigger and bigger -- more and more tightly coupled -- national security system Charles Perrow learned from his service on the Three Mile Island Commission that highly complex technologies and tightly coupled organizations can create high catastrophic potential. Washington DC is a town, though, that thrives on an outdated Napoleonic view of "great man" leadership, which creates a constant ideological push for increased centralization or what we might call supertight coupling. Gene Healy's book, The Cult of the Presidency, is a pretty strong indicator of this problem, and the iconic Sunday afternoon photo op of the nation's National Security Council proving to historians that they must have been in charge is the most recent evidence of this problem. Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton referred to this problem in 1981 as part of the threat-rigidity cycle: threat increases centralization and decreases lateral information sharing, which increases rigidity, which increases the threat. Intelligence reform must fight Washington's knee-jerk tendency toward centralization if it is going to avoid disasters such as 9/11, Iraq WMD, Katrina, Fort Hood, and Wikileaks.

Organizational Sensemaking Processes. Several people today have also called for a fundamental rethinking of what exactly it is that we are trying to accomplish with a -- let's say -- $100 billion per year intelligence budget. At an international conference in Stockholm in May 2009 on the future of the craft of intelligence, Greg Treverton and I were on the same page -- the era of secrets, data, and intelligence (in which the role of the intelligence community is to feed raw pieces of information into the White House so that the "policy-makers" can make brilliant decisions) is over. Instead, the crying need is for localized processing of complex information into high situational awareness. The "customer" is not the president anymore, but the ground-level team leader the military is starting to call the Strategic Corporal.

High Reliability Organizations. The first conference on High Reliability Organizations was held in 1987, and the fifth was held two weeks ago, here in Washington for the first time. Admiral Blair probably knows Admiral Tom Mercer, who championed the first HRO study by a group of Berkeley faculty members around the topic of aircraft carriers, air traffic control, and electrical grids. Since 1987, the research has spread to ten different HRO contexts: military, naval, aviation, petrochemical, nuclear, safety/security, space exploration, firefighting/emergency, medical, and interagency national security teams.

Jim Locher has heard me say this for four years, so I hope he'll excuse me for saying it again -- Washington needs a new Smithsonian museum to display all of the outdated management theories that live on here long after they've been replaced outside of Washington by more precise, evidence-based, and valuable newer theories. Some people in Washington might be reading What Would Google Do?, but I cannot imagine that anybody in Silicon Valley is reading a book titled What Would Washington Do?

An intelligence reform that is built on Napoleonic command-and-control bureaucratic management theory is going to lead to a replication of the current system. Unfortunately, though, the attorneys who will write intelligence reform are decoupled from the management theorists who understand new concepts. There is no congressional funding to get Capitol Hill up to speed on even the most basic management theory concepts.

The end result of all of this, then, is likely to be a new chapter in Jared Diamond's book Collapse -- in which Diamond tells the story of five great societies which failed because they were unable to change their basic assumptions about how the world worked. Our irrational allegiance to outdated management theories is going to lead us to an increasingly ineffective, inefficient, and unreliable national security system -- unless we fight to make sure that intelligence reform includes new management theories such as loosely coupled systems, organizational sensemaking processes, and high reliability organizations.

Dr. Shoe Clerk among the Fighter Pilots of National Security Law

2011-05-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

One of the read-aheads that I was sent for the third Legal Roundtable on national security reform tomorrow -- this time on the topic of intelligence reform -- is a 1997 classic article titled, "Fighter Ops for Shoe Clerks."

The article was written by two Air Force lieutenant colonels as a serious attempt to give attorneys an overview of Air Force operational language of the era, but it begins by highlighting the subcultural differences between attorneys and Air Force operators:

Shoe Clerk (shoo klurk) n. generally speaking, a person with close-set eyes, a sloping forehead, and thick spectacles; one who does not fly jets; a fighter pilot wanna-be; placed into groups, they constitute a FPLSS (fighter pilot life support system). "The pilot looked on with disgust as the shoe clerk, a man with cokebottom glasses, eagerly filled out the paperwork." See Paper Pusher, Lesser Being, Pencil-necked Geek.

Fighter Pilot (fi-tur pi-let) n. one who flies airplanes to avoid work; a graduate of pilot training, a program for ego-maniacs who aren't smart enough to get into law school; obsessed with fashion, wears a leather jacket to distinguish himself from shoe clerks; sells insurance to shoe clerks upon retirement. "The judge advocate looked on with compassion as the fighter pilot, crippled by attention deficient disorder, struggled to understand the issue." See Prima Donna.

I suppose the attorneys identify with "shoe clerks" and strive to be seen as legitimate by the national security "fighter pilots." But my suspicion, having worked for a Washington law firm before deciding to get my Ph.D., having watched one of my sons go through law school, and having worked in 2009 with a large group of attorneys at the Project on National Security Reform, is that Ph.D.'s are the shoe clerks and attorneys are the fighter pilots.

At the last legal roundtable, the five national security Ph.D.'s spoke very little, and the thirty-five national security Ph.D.'s were very loquacious, self-confident, and decisive.

Washington has been an attorney-run town for two centuries, and that is not likely to change tomorrow -- so I will have to check my ego at the door, despite the fact that I will be the only person in the room who wrote his dissertation on intelligence reform. So DrNatSecMgt and his overly large ego must put himself to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning as DrShoeClerk to spend a productive day among the valiant fighter pilots of National Security Law.

The U.S. National Security System as a "Meta-HRO"

2011-05-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

I discovered today a book that might be helpful to researchers trying to understand the creation of a high-reliability national security system: Paul E. O'Connor and Joseph V. Kohn (eds.) Human Performance Enhancement in High Risk Environments: Insights, Developments and Future Directions from Military Research. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2010.

Here is a relevant quotation from the book:

"In many ways, today's military is the ultimate HRO... Unlike HROs, the military is multifaceted and works in many different domains simultaneously -- covering a wide range of operational environments with an extremely diverse workforce (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines). In this way, the military may be more like a meta-HRO." (O'Connor and Kohn, Ch. 1, "Enhancing Human Performance in High Reliability Organizations: Learning from the Military," p. 3)

Several years ago, with the help of George Washington University doctoral students Estella Gillette, David Compton, and Kip Rollins, I came up with -- perhaps -- a useful five-level way to think about the U.S. national security system.

There are five different levels embedded with the concept of a High Reliability Organization: HRIs, HRTs, HROs, HRNs, and HRSs.

HRIs. Much of the research that claims the label of High Reliability Organizations is really focusing on the creation of an organization staffed by High Reliability Individuals. For example, there are big differences between the concepts of individual mindfulness, team mindfulness, and organizational mindfulness, but researchers with a shallow background in the study of complex organizations often are unable to describe those differences.

HRTs. At the Berkeley Workshop on HROs and the Fourth International Conference on High Reliability Organizing two weeks ago here in Washington, it was very clear that there is a trend to explain the middle ground between HRIs and HROs. The spectacular success of SEAL Team Six on Sunday emphasizes the value of focusing on High Reliability Teams.

HROs. Fortunately, there were perhaps 100 government officials represented at the two HRO conferences, all of whom are presumably striving to build organizational-level "safety cultures" that are less likely to stumble into catastrophic contexts than "Low Reliability Organizations" (LROs). Three HRO presentations stood out for me: Pantex, Los Alamos (Todd Conklin), and Marine Aviation Training Group Six (Randy Cadieux). It is not enough to have HRIs and HRTs -- there are numerous additional small wins at the HRO level.

HRNs. Human beings are not evolutionarily capable -- yet -- of managing large organizations. The business strategy researchers make a sharp distinction between Business Strategy, Corporate Strategy, and Network Strategy (or firms, bureaucracies, and networks). In order to fix the U.S. national security system, we equate HROs with Business Strategy (small firms), HRNs with Corporate Strategy (large bureaucracies), and HRSs with Network Strategy (fluid, decentralized, and large networks).

HRSs. O'Connor and Kohn's use of the term "meta-HRO" to describe the U.S. military can be read in two ways under the five-level model we have built here: as a synonym for an HRN (Department of Defense) or as a synonym for an HRS (The U.S. National Security System).

First, the U.S. military as a whole can be treated as a "meta-HRO" or High Reliability Network (Cabinet-Level Department of Defense) composed of numerous High Reliability Organizations (or "Agencies"); some of the people I encounter at the National Defense University are still zealous guardians of the "old school" view that National Defense and National Security are the same thing, and the Department of Defense is the only U.S. government organization that is capable of executing complex national security missions.

Second, the U.S. national security system can be treated as a "meta-HRO" or High Reliability System (National Security System) in which the Department of Defense is only one piece of a larger High Reliability System. The High Reliability National Security System would also include the National Security Advisor, the National Security Council, the National Security Staff, the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, significant portions of the Treasury Department and Department of Justice, and the Intelligence Community.

I have a preference for a five-level model that would clearly overlay the terms nano, micro, meso, macro, and meta with HRIs, HRTs, HROs, HRNs, and HRSs -- nano-HROs are individuals (e.g. the captain who shot Bin Laden), micro-HROs are teams (e.g. the team that infiltrated the compound), meso-HROs are small organizations (e.g. the Special Operations Command), macro-HROs are large organizations (e.g. Department of Defense), and meta-HROs are systems (e.g. the National Security System).

So my bottom line is that I would like to adopt O'Connor and Kohn's interesting term "meta-HRO." ("Adopt" is a more polite term tnan expropriate, hijack, steal, or reallocate.) Calling the U.S. military a "meta-HRO" implies that there is nothing above the Department of Defense, and that's pretty much the problem -- we do not yet have a functional national security brain sitting on top of the national security stovepipes. Calling the U.S. National Security System a "meta-HRO" implies that it will be possible someday to create an effective interagency national security system. The first use of the term locks us into an unsustainably expensive status quo that is prone to large catastrophic errors (9/11, Iraqi WMD, Katrina); the second use of the term creates an imaginative new possibility that could help secure a safer future for the U.S. people.

Bin Laden and National Security Organization

2011-05-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

I spent most of my sixteen-hour work day today studying twenty journal articles on High Reliability Organizations, and incorporating the new research into a literature review document that I am trying to finish before the Legal Roundtable on Intelligence Reform on Friday morning.

But my friends were busy saying things that I believe more eloquently than I can say them.

Jim Locher spoke in Kent, Connecticut on Sunday, and was interviewed yesterday afternoon by a woman from the local newspaper up there, and she did a great job in this article capturing Locher's thoughts about the urgent need for organizational reform on one hand, and Locher's obvious pride in the Special Forces community on the other.

And the home page of the Institute for National Strategic Studies prominently discussed five recent publications by Chris Lamb and his colleagues in the Organizational Performance Team at the Center for Strategic Research. Because INSS's homepage is changed frequently, I am copying and pasting it below:

The Success of the Bin Laden Mission: Special Forces in an Interagency Collaboration Environment

May 02, 2011

Congratulations to the Administration and the special operations forces who conducted the operation!

The United States has the world’s finest special operations forces, and we offer them heartfelt congratulations for a job well done. For background on special operations forces and associated issues, see Tucker and Lamb: U.S. Special Operations Forces (Columbia University Press, 2007).

Others deserve appreciation as well.

The operation was enabled by all-source intelligence fusion from a truly collaborative effort across multiple U.S. government organizations. The Organizational Performance Team at the Center for Strategic Research has focused attention on the attributes of effective interagency national security teams since 2009. (See PRISM, Vol 2, No. 1).

Using a 40 variable analytic framework, Dr. Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing conducted two thorough case studies on effective interagency collaboration - with a special focus on intelligence sharing. One case study analyzed the success of the Joint Interagency Task Force - South (JIATF-South) which is a forthcoming publication. A second case study explained the emergence of high-performing high-value target teams in Iraq and was released on March 18, 2011 (see "Secret Weapon").

The integration of multi-agency intelligence and special operations is an organizational triumph for the U.S. national security system.
Like the 2006 elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda’s vicious leader in Iraq, a window of opportunity has opened for building on this success in Afghanistan counterinsurgency operations. Doing so will require unity of effort among the disparate U.S. organizations and coalition forces in Afghanistan and subordinating special operations to counterinsurgency strategy (see "Unity of Effort in Afghanistan").

The Bin Laden operation benefited from the interagency team approach the United States used to such good effect in JIATF-South and Iraq. The United States needs to make greater use of what General Stanley McChrystal has called “collaborative warfare.”

Another recent publication from the Organizational Performance Team at CSR explains the need to create a new strategic capability - similar to JIATF-South and the high-value target teams - at the level of strategic decision makers in Washington, D.C. (See "A Model for National Security Integration.")

In the days ahead, as the Nation celebrates this victory won by the intrepid members of the special operations forces, we should also remember the organizational reforms, both long-standing and more recent, that made the success possible.

America Can Do Big Things

2011-05-02T20:10:00.001-07:00

On 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time yesterday afternoon an elite U.S. interagency national security infiltrated a 3000-square-foot compound near Islamabad, confronted and killed Osama Bin Laden, captured a potential treasure trove of intelligence documents about Al Qaeda’s network. At 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time, President Obama announced the operation to the American people. In his short speech he expressed his confidence that Americans can do big things. Reforming a 19th Century leadership style, and a 20th Century bureaucracy into a 21st Century agile network of efficient, effective, and reliable "interagency national security teams" would be a big thing. A large number of national security reformers deserve our thanks for the events of yesterday.

(1) The 1947 Architects. It is important to remember that the National Security Act of 1947 was not passed into law in the period between 1938 and 1945, but could only be passed into law after the lessons of World War II could be digested. Omar Bradley, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and many other seasoned national security executives returned to Washington and convinced the White House and the Congress to reshape the national security institutions of the time. The Intelligence Community was founded to avoid another Pearl Harbor. The Air Force was created to take advantage of technological advances and create a powerful new service to complement the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. The Gewar Commission proposed the creation of a National Security University that could bring together diplomatic, military, homeland security, and intelligence capabilities to serve an Integrated National Security Council. As Dr. Amy Zegart and others have observed, the national security apparatus of 1947 was not perfect – it was “flawed by design” – but it served the country well and eventually led to the end of the Cold War in November 1989.

(2) The 11/9/89-9/11/01 First Movers. Historians are likely to frame the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 and the Osama Bin Laden attacks of 9/11/01 as a lost opportunity for national security reform. There were several first movers during that period, though.

(2a). The Goldwater-Nichols legislation of 1986 called for major reforms to create Combatant Commands, an integrated Special Operations Command, and incentive systems that required flag rank officers to have experience in multiple services. Jim Locher's book – Victory on the Potomac – chronicles how difficult that transformation was. Locher served with hundreds of devoted reformers as the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, where many people worked hard to start to create the capabilities that were employed yesterday.

(2b.) Lt. General Brent Scowcroft deserves thanks for his 36-year devotion to the cause of national security reform. President Gerald Ford chose Dr. Brent Scowcroft to be national security advisor for the trying period from October 1975 to January 1977. Chris Lamb and I both wrote our dissertations on the organizational and strategic lessons learned during Scowcroft’s fifteen-month tenure as national security advisor. Dr. Scowcroft had a chance to think hard about national security reform as a co-chair of the Tower Commission after the Iran-Contra events in the Reagan Administration. Brent Scowcroft had the opportunity to institutionalize his lessons learned report as President George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor from 1989-1993. The Scowcroft model of national security leadership – as continued by Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, James Jones, and Tom Donilon – has helped lead us to yesterday’s events.

(2c.) The Aspin-Brown Commission in 1996 called for the professionalization of management of the Intelligence Community, but few of their implementations were implemented at the time.

(3) The Heavy Lifters (2001-2011). The period between September 11, 2001, and May 1, 2011 will likely be seen by future historians as a dark and painful decade of wrenching change from the 20th Century bureaucracies rigidified in the National Security Act of 1947 and the 21st Century agile network of high-performing teams facilitated by the National Security Act of 2012, 2013, or 2014. Literally thousands of very smart, very dedicated, and very creative people have cut their teeth on national security reform in hundreds of studies – ranging from small masters theses at a number of national security executive education programs to three very important studies that deserve special recognition today:

(3a.) The Kean-Hamilton (or “9/11”) Commission Report in 2004 was a thorough problem analysis of the organizational problems that allowed for the nation’s largest national security failure to occur; its recommendations, however, were weak because the Commission was confined to only one segment of the national security system.

(3b.) After the “three strikes” of 9/11, Iraqi WMD, and Hurricane Katrina, several far-sighted national security executives – Peter Pace, Bob Gates, Stephen Hadley and many others – encouraged Jim Locher to do the first thorough problem analysis of the U.S. national security, Forging a New Shield, completed in November 2008. Like the Kean-Hamilton Report, Locher's report was a truly bipartisan, nonpartisan, or perhaps even “transpartisan” study, rather than merely a traditional Democrat-Republican list of largely unfounded recommendations. Unfortunately, though, the Project on National Security Reform was conducted on a shoestring budget and under tight deadlines, with a stellar group of Guiding Coalition members, but without the “marquis”-level sponsorship, organization, staffing and resources of the Goldwater-Nichols Reforms or the Kean-Hamilton Commission.

(3c.) Chris Lamb’s Organizational Performance Team at National Defense University has worked under the radar since 2008 on the topic of interagency teams to continue the research stream of national security reform. Four of the recent products from our team’s work help explain yesterday’s success. First, Chris Lamb and I conducted a thorough literature review of the best practices of high-performing cross-functional teams outside of the national security system, and published a 40-variable analytical framework based on that literature review. Second, Chris Lamb and Evan Munsing used the 40-variable analytical framework to study the Joint Interagency Task Force – South in order to learn how that exemplary organization uses interagency teams to produce positive outcomes for the country. Third, Lamb and Munsing used the analytical framework to interview veterans of the interagency high-value target teams created by national heroes David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, and Ryan Crocker in Iraq in 2007-2009. Lamb and Munsing found that the interagency teams were both high effective and difficult to understand – a point that General McChrystal also makes in his April 2011 Foreign Policy article on these teams. They found that the interagency teams were an organizational secret weapon that dramatically improved the outcome of the war in Iraq, and eventually facilitated the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. Finally, Chris Lamb and Ed Marks recently published an influential thought paper on how the Congress might be able to give the President new authorities that would allow him to build a vertical network of effective interagency national security teams.

The Interagency National Security Act of 2012, 2013, or 2014. The mountain of newspaper articles, radio programs, television special reports, blogs, podcasts, and tweets generated today will take years for people to digest. What is my bottom line 24 hours after the President's announcement? It is to ask why it is taking us so long to fix the broken national security system, and why don't Americans seem to care about this issue.

(1) If we had reorganized the U.S. national security system in the 1989-2001 period, Osama Bin Laden's attack might not have been successful. (2) If we had used the 9/11 national security failure as an impetus to reform the system in the 2001-2003 period, we might not have made the mistake we made of invading Iraq on the basis of untrue assumptions. (3) If we had used the Iraqi WMD national security failure as impetus to reform the system in the 2003-2005 period, we might not have had to endure as much of Hurricane Katrina's unnecessary damage to our country. (4) If we had used the Katrina national security failure as impetus to reform the system in the 2005-2009 period, we might not have had the Fort Hood massacre in November 2009. (5) If we had used the Fort Hood shooting as impetus to reform the national security system in the 2009-2011 period, we might already have been able to cut the budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars, while increasing the safety, security, robustness, resilience, and reliability of the U.S. national security system.

Osama Bin Laden should not have been able to inflict the damage he inflicted on the United States, but because the American people were not literate about how fundamentally flawed their national security apparatus has become, he was able to cause us great pain for many years. Now that he has been eliminated from the world, perhaps there will be a slowly-dawning realization that the national security path we are on is unsustainable, and it is time for a serious national discussion about the creation of an effective interagency national security system.

The Tuscaloosa Tornadoes of April 27, 2011

2011-04-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

This morning America awoke to find that they had lost over 200 of their neighbors to a savage set of tornadoes, many of which touched down near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. When the body count is complete it might approach the largest loss of life from tornadoes in the United States – the “Super Outbreak” storms in 1974 in which at least 148 tornadoes touched down in 13 U.S. states and one Canadian province, killing 315 people (Choudhoury and Christophe, 2008). National Security Advisor Tom Donilon has probably already decided to route the response to the Department of Homeland Security, and Secretary Napolitano has probably decided to route responsibility for the multi-state natural disaster to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is an “integrated crisis management unit” (Topper and Carley, 1999) created by President Carter in 1979 to attempt to reduce the social costs of natural events such as earthquakes, cyclones, typhoons, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, ice storms, snowstorms, tsunamis, mudslides, landslides, wildfires, and volcanoes.

Tornadoes are mysterious and powerful natural hazards that can make life extremely complicated for a diverse series of public and private organizations. First, public officials often create contingency plans for the possibility of tornadoes. (Intriguingly, a Texas official involved in the Columbia recovery process in February 2003 was quoted in a follow-up study as saying, “The whole time we were drafting our plans, we're thinking tornadoes … Never in our wildest dreams did we envision something like a space shuttle crashing in our county” (Donahue and O’Keefe, 2007)). Second, emergency workers must be embedded in resilient community, organizational, social, and family systems before and after a natural disaster in order to be able to have the physical and psychological strength to endure challenging sights, sounds, and memories (Kowalski and Vaught, 2001). Third, hospitals in tornado zones must be designed to shelter their patients from unpredictable tornadoes, remain as operational as possible through a tornado (e.g. electrical systems), and quickly reset to be able to treat victims of tornadoes (Autrey, 2010). Fourth, business organizations often invest in varying levels of crisis communication capabilities that can be used before, during, and after natural, technical, man-made and terrorist disasters (Miller and Horsley, 2009).

Weather events by themselves are not hazards, disasters, or crises –- if there were no humans there would be no natural hazards capable of escalating into natural disasters. Furthermore, HRO researchers do not presuppose that a natural event, hazard, or disaster automatically becomes a crisis – which Ian Mitroff, Patrick Lagadec and others are defining as the loss of core assumptions, Karl Weick has referred to as a “cosmology episode,” and which I refer to as “senselosing.” A collection of twenty readings on crisis management (Boin, 2008) would help National Security Staff members, Department of Homeland Security professionals, and FEMA employees attempting to understand how the Tuscaloosa Tornadoes can be used as an interagency organizational learning opportunity.

Our national security system should use earthquakes (Comfort 1994), hurricanes (Hutchins, Annulis, and Gaudet, 2008), and yesterday’s Tuscaloosa Tornadoes as opportunities to practice interagency collaboration and interagency resilience and reliability in the Eisenhower Building and throughout the national security system (Lalonde, 2007).

Wicked Smart MacChrystal Article on Networks

2011-02-21T19:56:00.000-08:00

In late February 2002, SAIC convened a workshop in Mclean Virginia to discuss how to dismantle the Al Qaeda network. Howard Aldrich, Kathleen Carley, Richard Harrison, and I (the organization scholars) tried -- and failed -- to explain that to defeat a network you needed to be a network. Message received, finally (perhaps).

Here's the breakthrough insight from General MacChrystal in Iraq.

It's embedded in a larger and fascinating article in Foreign Policy.

Hodge's Armed Humanitarians

2011-02-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

Nathan Hodge's new book, Armed Humanitarians, reviews what is largely already known about the Human Terrain System -- the deaths of Bhatia, Suveges, and Loyd; the Fondacaro creation narrative; and the spat between Montgomery McFate and the anthropological community.

http://www.amazon.com/Armed-Humanitarians-Rise-Nation-Builders/dp/160819017X

Egypt, Interagency Teams, and the Intelligence Community

2011-02-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

An unidentified author at Project on National Security Reform posted an interesting critique of the current U.S. national security system – as it relates to the National Security Staff’s missteps in handling the evolving Egypt event. The blog concludes with (1) an odd call for some sort of foresight shop (the data in the blog suggest that there is not adequate bandwidth for present-based thinking; why divert scarce resources from present-based thinking to future-based thinking?), (2) a very smart recommendation for more interagency teams (huzzah!), and (3) an odd call for some sort of budget team capable of knitting together strategy and capabilities (the data in the blog suggest the problem is yet-another failure of imagination at the top of the current system, not the lack of cool new technical capabilities in a future system). So I'm not yet convinced on anonymous PNSR’s points 1 and 3, but he or she earns a big attaboy for their point 2, quoted below:

Use empowered teams – mini-NSCs of area and functional experts with real decision-making authority devoted to a single issue 24/7, rather than layers of overworked and unfocused committees full of generalists that slow down decisions. Holbrooke led a team like this in the Kosovo War. He tried with Afghanistan, but the policy structure constrained him. Such teams would ensure the U.S. government speaks with one voice and acts with a clear goal.

Here are the reasons this is a helpful recommendation: (1) it replaces the incredibly bureaucratic model of “committees” with the more agile organizational concept of “teams”; (2) it recognizes the point made soon after Holbrooke’s death by David Rohde on the radio show The World that Holbrooke had succeeded in The Balkans and largely failed in Afghanistan – not because the problem was more complex, but because the U.S. national security system had become more intractable from its rapid growth after 9/11; and (3) it emphasizes that the current system is characterized by numerous voices (Frank Wisner much?) instead of trusting the National Security Staff expert on Egypt (Dan Shapiro?) to be the administration’s single voice on Egypt.

The PNSR blog reminded me of an April 6, 2010 presentation by then-DNI Denny Blair in which he also saw high value in the creation of interagency teams:

Here’s my bottom line assessment up front of where we are. This current level of leaders in the Intelligence Community is very skilled in their individual fields of expertise. They show some flexibility in adapting the individual strengths of their agencies to meet new challenges in innovative ways. However, they are often stopped short of the best solution for the country by the boundaries of institutional prerogatives and by traditions.

Already in my year on the job, I’ve seen multiple examples of attacks on problems by throwing together interagency teams – and teams led by officials at those levels that I’m talking about go off, pool their knowledge, starting with a charge and a great deal of initial enthusiasm coming up with a solution.

But I find that when we review those after six months, seven months, we find that they’ve only gone a certain direction. That extra set of hard steps need to be taken that really involve breaking some institutional glass and doing things in a new way; they’ve not been able to reach. It’s partly a question of authorities, but it’s also partly a question of the training, the background, the selection of these leaders.

Now, interestingly, I find that the intelligence officials who are the most committed and imaginative, least parochial, who are really doing amazing things, are most often the more junior officers out in the field – especially in war zones. And I’ll talk a little bit about that later. Out there I see imagination, innovation, selflessness, mission dedication and amazing things that are being done.

So my vision is that we will have achieved success in this important area when senior intelligence officials work instinctively as a team to address important resource, policy, operational support issues – when they’re willing to bend their home agency institutional interests to the greater good. Rather than thinking of themselves only as members of a particular agency, they’ll naturally think of themselves as part of a larger Intelligence Community.

So it’s good that the IC is creating interagency teams, it’s sad that they are not yet moving to the point of “breaking institutional glass and doing things in a new way,” and it’s exciting that the junior officers out in the field “are the most committed and imaginative,” the “least parochial,” and are “doing amazing things.”

In summary, we have the White House (PNSR) looking down at the system and realizing that it needs better interagency teams, and we have the Intelligence Community (Blair) looking up at the system and realizing that it needs better interagency teams – now all we have to do is convince the other 3.8 million people in the middle of the stovepiped system to facilitate – rather than kill – the migration away from the 19th Century “committee” model to a 21st Century “cross-functional team” model.

Until we do so, we’re going to have more missteps such as we’ve seen in the last two weeks in regards to Egypt.

New GAO Report on Interagency Education Programs

2010-11-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

A new Government Accountability Office report from November 15, 2010, presents data on 225 programs that attempt to build an interagency culture within the U.S. national security system: http://www.gao.gov/Products/GAO-11-108

The study begins with a not-terribly-urgent paragraph commenting on how the U.S. national security system is, instead of "broken," in need of improvement:

With threats to the U.S. as diverse as terrorism, cyber attacks, drug trafficking, infectious diseases, energy security, and the adverse effects of climate change, the national security landscape has recently evolved in complexity and scope. As we have reported, because no single federal agency has the ability to address these threats alone, agencies must work together in a whole-of-government approach to protect our nation and its interests. Our previous work has shown that there are a number of barriers to agencies’ collaboration in addressing these threats.

Surprisingly, though, GAO makes no recommendations in this report. What would be a sensible recommendation to draw from the report?

How about this? -- Use social psychological research to recognize that if most of the students in an educational program come from one Cabinet department, the program is most likely to be an exercise in evangelization and conformity to that department's organizational culture, not a laboratory in which a truly interagency national security culture can be created.

Programs in which half the participants are from one Cabinet departments and half the participants are from other Cabinet departments are more likely to yield creative interagency solutions; programs in which a large majority of the participants are from one Cabinet department are likely to yield replication of outdated and parochial worldviews.

The GAO report presents data on 13 Joint Professional Military Education programs, all of which are somewhat open to outsiders. Does that make the programs interagency? Well, some are more interagency than others, as a reanalysis of the GAO data below shows. The numerator is the number of DOD employees in the program; the denominator is the total number of participants in the program. (See pp. 23-24 of the GAO report.)

"Token" Interagency (90-100%)

Army Command and Staff General College (1290/1430 = 90.21%)
NDU, Joint and Combined Warfighting School at Joint Forces Staff College (910/1010 = 90.10%)
NDU, Capstone (180/200 = 90.00%)

"Barely" Interagency (80-90%)

Naval War College, College of Naval Command and Staff (280/320 = 87.50%)
Air University, Air Command and Staff College (430/510 = 84.31%)
Army War College (280/340 = 82.35%)
Marine Corps Command and Staff College (160/200 = 80.00%)

"Somewhat" Interagency (70-80%)

Air University, Air War College (190/240 = 79.17%)
NDU, Industrial College of the Armed Forces (250/320 = 78.13%)
Naval War College, College of Naval Warfare (200/260 = 76.92%)
NDU, Joint Advanced Warfighting School at Joint Forces Staff College (30/40 = 75.00%
NDU, National War College (160/220 = 72.73%)

"Partial" Interagency (60-70%)

Marine Corps War College (20/30 = 66.67%)

"Significantly" Interagency (50-60%)

None

"Adequate" Interagency (50% and below)

None

Obviously, the thirteen JPME programs were designed to serve DOD objectives, not a national security objective of creating an effective U.S. national security culture to facilitate interagency collaboration. It will take time to migrate from one objective (serve the needs of a stovepipe) to another objective (create a laboratory environment in which a U.S. national security culture can emerge).

Recommendation: Congress should provide funding to reduce the impediments to and maximize the incentives for non-DOD participation in JPME programs in order to move the average percentage of DOD participants from 85.55% (4380/5120) in FY 2009, to 80% in FY2010, to 75% in FY2011, to 70% in FY2012, to 65% in FY2013, to 60% in FY2014, to 55% in FY2015, to 50% in FY2016.

Gets the Worm

2010-09-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting news collection operations in the national security system is the Department of Defense’s “The Early Bird,” which is available electronically at the National Defense University website for each Monday-Friday starting in about March 2001. I want to create a disciplined organizational intervention each work day based on this news source – I hope it’s not too cutesy to call my organizational nudges “Gets the Worm.” Today’s Action Item: Shift the Early Bird staff outside the Pentagon to the Eisenhower Building in order to help build a whole-of-government national security strategy culture, instead of reinforcing a stove-piped Department of Defense culture.

(Apologies to readers who do not have easy access to The Early Bird . . . . )

First, notice that Robert Gates’ trip to Iraq is the lead story (category 1), while President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office marking a “turn the page” moment (category 2) and his trip to Fort Bliss earlier in the day on August 31 to thank the troops for their sacrifices (category 3) come second. This makes sense if the Early Bird is a product of the Pentagon, but it probably has President Eisenhower rotating at a high velocity in Gettysburg as we approach the 50th Anniversary of his speech warning that the rise in power of the nation’s military-industrial-congressional complex was a grave danger.

Second, notice that only two of our nation’s three wars are listed in today’s Early Bird: Iraq (category 4) and Afghanistan (category 5). The leader of the War against Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates (WAQIA), as it is labeled in the May 2010 National Security Strategy, is probably John Brennan, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and the Deputy National Security Adviser (to General Jones). A civilian-led war being given the same status as a war led by a four-star such as Austin and Petraeus? Unthinkable in the Pentagon, perhaps a bit more thinkable in the Eisenhower Building. The sequencing of the three wars could be by priority – Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq – or by the sequence in which the U.S. focused attention on them – Al Qaeda (post 9/11/01), Afghanistan (Fall 2001-Spring 2002), Iraq (2002-2009), Afghanistan (2009-2010), Al Qaeda (someday?). A Chicago professor-performer I heard on the radio three weeks ago is labeling the current surge in Afghanistan of 30,000 troops as a “re-invasion” of Afghanistan; similarly General Petraeus has said that the Afghanistan War is not a seven-year war, but seven one-year wars – presumably he can bring coherence to the now nine-year war.

Third, if The Early Bird were run out of the Eisenhower Building instead of the Pentagon, geography would trump stovepipes; e.g. Defense Department (category 6), Army (category 7), and Navy (category 8) would come after Pakistan (category 9), Asia-Pacific (category 11), and Middle East (category 12). There is much discussion of “The Common Map” that General Jones demanded in a March 2008 national security strategy speech in Munich, Germany. The Early Bird for September 1 only has five geographic components: Iraq (4), Afghanistan (5), Pakistan (9), Asia-Pacific (11), and Middle East (12). It should have at least one story from each of the Combatant Commands – so stories from EUCOM, SOUTHCOM, and AFRICOM would help increase our geographic sophistication; but then again, I believe that the common map should be composed of nine combatant commands, each of which would have four shifting theater commands, so 5 geographic categories is only about a 14% satisfactory Early Bird. We cannot increase the quality of the U.S. national security culture if we continue to use a knowledge structure that presumes that stories about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are more important than stories about Somalia, North Korea, Iran, and Ukraine/Georgia (none of which are mentioned in today’s Early Bird).

Fourth, there is more evidence in The Early Bird of the subjugation of national interests to Department of Defense interests – one story about national security law related to a Canadian detainee at Guantanamo (category 10) and a second story about legal issues related to a Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo (category 13). President Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel housed approximately 22 attorneys working on national security issues a year ago; moving those attorneys onto the National Security Staff would be a wise, but unexpected, move by Congress. Reporting stories on national security legal issues above the level of Cabinet secretaries would show that we are a nation that respects the rule of law; continuing to treat legal issues as if they were a small unit within the Department of Defense shows that we value stovepipes (in which Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice each have their own legal opinions) over intelligence consistency at the top of the strategy.

Fifth, there is one story about “Business” (category 14) which is a polite way of referring to the defense contractors that have infiltrated Department of Defense strategy-making, strategy management, and strategy-implementation processes. Let the Wall Street Journal cover business’s interests; The Early Bird should cover U.S. national security interests. Too many officers in the U.S. armed forces are placed in the dangerous position of being forced to view the first part of their careers in the military in order to “cash in” in the second part of their careers as defense contractors. Cincinnatus went back to his farm – modern-day Cincinnatuses stay in Washington and work for Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, BAE Systems, and Northrup-Grumman. In my own recent experience, a retired Major General working as a contractor sent shivers down the spine of an active-duty Colonel working within the current system on a very minor point. Is there really such a thing as a retired general? If The Early Bird were to eliminate news articles on business, contractors, and the industrial base, it might help sanitize the culture of U.S. national security strategy from potential corrupting influences.

Finally, and inexplicably, there are five articles reprinted in the Early Bird under the category of “Opinion” (category 15). Is the nation’s national security strategy being designed by Thomas Friedman and the editors of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today? If these columnists and editors are the nation’s top national security strategists, perhaps General Jones should be given the budget to hire them and put them to work in the Eisenhower Building. The Early Bird does not, yet, have a sports section, or movie reviews, so I see no compelling reasons for it to have an editorial page. Focus the nation’s strategy-makers, strategy-managers, and strategy-implementers on facts, not opinions – delete the section.

In sum, today’s Early Bird, like the Early Birds before it, injects a Department of Defense bias into the nation’s national security strategy system – it subjugates national interests to DoD interests, it does not provide sufficient granularity to American understanding of geography, it too-routinely introduces defense contracting stories, and it overemphasizes the opinions of columnists and editors. Why? Because it is a Department of Defense project, rather than a National Security Staff project. Elevating the Early Bird to a National Security Staff project could help knit the nation’s national security system together around a coherent, consistent, and efficient culture, instead of the balkanized, feuding, and wasteful bureaucratic stovepipes we currently face. But, as we have seen repeatedly, this is not likely to happen. Congress is not likely to create a brain for the U.S. national security system, but is more likely to replicate the current arrangement in which powerful stovepiped Congressional committees compete to allocate resources to their powerful stovepiped Cabinet departments --creating not only national security gridlock, but national security mental retardation.

Solution to the "Two Wars" Strategy Problem

2010-08-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

The National Security Staff must make a decision today on what to do with the phrase "two wars."

In my opinion, the new national security strategy can be characterized as a shift from "containment" (1942-1980) to "entanglement" (1980-2028). A recent John Arquila article in Prism helps explain this transition away from "force-on-force" conflict to "network-embedded-with-network" conflict. Similarly, Elaine Bunn at National Defense University has advocated "tailored" nuclear strategies -- theater by theater. Today's Early Bird has three articles on Yemen, which is not one of the "two wars." We need to continue to migrate away from the "one big war" model of Bush-Cheney-Rice, through the "two manageable wars" model of Obama-Biden-Jones, toward a tailored portfolio of decreasingly-toxic entanglements throughout the world.

So a step toward that strategy is to admit to ourselves -- finally -- that we are actually fighting three wars at the moment: the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates (worldwide), the War in Iraq (against Sunni and Shia extremist insurgents), and the War in Afghanistan-Pakistan (against the Taliban).

Bottom Line: Instead of changing the rhetoric from "two wars" to "one war" (a false indicator of success), the President should change from "two wars" to "three wars" (an accurate portrayal of the current situation). This would necessitate a major foreign policy speech to explain that fighting one endless war against vague "Islamic Jihad" is less intelligent than fighting three bounded wars against specific targets with specific objectives and specific end-states.

the Value of "Security Sector Reform" in the United States?

2010-08-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

The Golden Rule, despite cynical attempts to bastardize it, remains "Do Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do unto You." A smart corollary might be "Do Unto Yourself as You Would Have Others Do to Themselves." So, if the United States wants 402 nations around the world to upgrade, professionalize, and tighten their national security systems, perhaps it makes sense for us to work on our horribly broken national security system simultaneously.

On Sunday, at a relaxing brunch with colleagues, I learned about the "The Initiative for Inclusive Security." Today I received a hard copy of their report, Inclusive Security, Sustainable Peace: A Toolkit for Advocacy and Action. In the report, which focuses attention on increasing the involvement of women in national security processes around the world, there are four large chapters: (1) Conflict Prevention, Resolution and Reconstruction; (2) Security Issues; (3) Justice, Governance, and Civil Society; (4) Protecting Vulnerable Groups. Within the chapter on security issues there are three sections: (1) Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration; (2) Small Arms, Light Weapons, and Landmines; and (3) Security Sector Reform. I, obviously, want to focus attention on Security Sector Reform.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Camille Pampell Conaway introduce the topic of Security Sector Reform:

"In many conflict-affected countries the security sector--the military, police, secret services and intelligence--often have powers above the law. Sometimes, instead of serving the population, they are used by the state to oppress any form of opposition and increase the militarisation of society. In some places, powerful militaries have destabilised civilian governments. In others, the security sector receives a disproportionate amount of the national budget, in effect, redirecting resources from development to military expenditure. In the reconstruction and transformation of any post war country, security sector reform (SSR) is key."

Let's assume for a moment that any rational SSR expert from outside the United States would choose the third option -- too damn expensive. Where does the impetus come to increase the efficiency of bloated, ineffective, and inefficient national security systems in the U.S. and other countries?

"The national government is the primary actor responsible for the implementation of SSR. Due to the nature of countries in transition from war to peasce, or dictatorship to democracy, the military has often been a primary actor in government--receiving a large piece of the overall budget, playing a major role in decision-making in all aspects of governance and maintaining physical control over large areas of the country. It is highly likely in such circumstances that resistance to reform will be strong. Considerable time and resources, along with pressure from donors and civil society, are usually necessary for reforms to take root."

In an ideal world, the Institute for Inclusive Security can create a worldwide groundswell of smart and empowered women pushing SSR in every country; in the real world, though, the rigid status quo is firmly locked in place -- in the United States, and perhaps every other country as well. If the United States wants to be a credible voice for SSR around the world, its national government -- specifically, the National Security Staff -- will have to find a way to create, staff, and use SSR experts on the U.S. system.

Action Item: The White House should ask the Foreign Relations to allocate $100,000 to the National Security Staff for staff support for an Organization & Management cell to create a permanent indigenous capability for Security Sector Reform that can then be highlighted as a model that other nations could consider as a template.

Joint Center for Operational Analysis After Action Review on Haiti

2010-08-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

Dr. Karl Weick often talks about the tendency of individuals, teams, departments, organizations, and networks to revert to well-learned behaviors when they experience stress.

Over many years, the Southern Command of the U.S. military had worked hard to build an effective interagency organization -- largely influenced by the interagency successes of the Joint Interagency Task Force--South.

However, under the overwhelming stress of the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010, and under the leadership of a new commander, SOUTHCOM snapped back into a familiar Department of Defense organizational structure.

The Joint Center for Operational Analysis, part of the Joint Forces Command, recently released a helpful "after-action review" of the performance of the Joint Task Force - Haiti: "USSOUTHCOM and JTF-Haiti… Some Challenges and Considerations in Forming a Joint Task Force."

In the report, Brigadier General David Garza, in comments on the report from July 2, 2010, makes the following statement about the decision to revert to a well-learned Department of Defense organizational structure, instead of continuing to use SOUTHCOM's more-interagency-focused structure in place before the earthquake.

“The in-stride decision by General Fraser to re-align to a J-Code Structure was
a pivotal decision for US SOUTHCOM. This decision allowed us to quickly organize
around a well understood organizational methodology designed for coordinated
planning across essential planning functions necessary for any event on the
spectrum of conflict. This alignment gave us the ability to speak a common
language, quickly facilitate the infusion of the staff augments, employ OPTs
[operational planning teams] efficiently, communicate better internally and with
external stakeholders like the JS, Components, JTFs, JTF-H, other partner
nations, agencies, and the IA. It also had the effect of invigorating the work
force and it gave us better teamwork in support of this crisis. The model we
were under did not survive the crucible of the crisis.”

Three quick points on General Garza's observation:

(1) The White House designated U.S. AID as the Lead Federal Agency for the crisis, yet the organizational charts in the JCOA report portray two separate power bases -- SOUTHCOM and "the UN Cluster," with MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Haiti) in between, and a dotted-line relationship between MINUSTAH and Joint Task Force -Haiti. Nothing in the JCOA document demonstrates that the military at any point believed themselves to be under the leadership of US AID in their response to the Haitian earthquake. If the original SOUTHCOM structure had been maintained, instead of rejected, there might have been a way for US AID to lead the military components of the operation more effectively.

(2) The key word in Garza's quotation is "us" -- "allowed us to quickly organize," "gave us the ability to speak a common language," and "gave us better teamwork." Perpetuating a DoD organization, vocabulary, and methodology might have helped "us" (DoD), but it might have blocked the ability of outsiders (the rest of us) to tie in to the DoD's secret structure, language, and systems in order to produce a "whole-of-government" response, rather than just a DoD response.

(3) One of the words that Dr. Chris Lamb has started to use to describe effective interagency national security teams is that they are "fragile." This case study gives an example of that phenomenon; an interagency system built up over many years of hard work in JIATF-South was swept away "in-stride" by a new commander and his staff who were much more familiar with a traditional DoD system.

Action Item: Congress should allocate $100,000 for staff support to an Interagency Policy Committee at the National Security Staff to study the impasse between the Department of Defense's Combatant Command system and the State Departments Chief of Mission system. This research could investigate the wisdom of creating truly interagency "theater teams" in the unorganized spaces between countries (e.g. country teams) and continents (e.g. combatant commands). Afghanistan/Pakistan is an urgent test case; four segments of the African continent are more "off-the-front-page" test cases.

Douglas J. Schaffer on the Need for NatSecMgt Reform

2010-08-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

The May 2010 National Security Strategy reminded me of the Henry David Thoreau quotation, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." A change in strategy (from World War III -- containment -- to World War IV -- entanglement) will require a change in structure (from World War III -- predictable rigid bureaucracies -- to World War IV -- agile collaborative networks).

Douglas J. Schaffer makes a similar point in his recent essay, "The (New?) National Security Strategy." Although, as the title signals, his primary observation is that there is a fair amount of continuity between the National Security Strategies of 2002, 2006, and 2010, a secondary observation is that the new strategy demands structural change that can create effective interagency collaboration. Here are the key sentences on this topic from the conclusion to Schaffer's essay:

The United States has also put far more emphasis on supporting institutions,
stating the “military cannot shoulder all of this burden [of nationbuilding]”
and calling for more nonmilitary governmental commitment to alleviate the
conditions that grow terrorists. How, exactly, these goals will be met
given the erratic and constrained domestic eco-political environment is
unknown. The goals of the administration require a level of resources,
organization and cooperation previously unknown. Reform, restructure and
reevaluation of existing practices and entities are a must.

Schaffer is correct: the 2010 National Security Strategy cannot be implemented without improving the current National Security Structure.

However, who in the current Congress of the United States of America is smart enough and brave enough to fund national security reform? Carl Levin? Ike Skelton? Buck McKeon? Vic Snyder? Mac Thornberry? Nobody? Let's start real small then . . . (Isn't it a shame that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics are highly motivated to lobby Congress to spend billions on better hardware, but nobody is highly motivated to lobby Congress to spend a few million on better organization?)

Action Item: Congress should authorize an additional $100,000 of funding for staff support for an Interagency Policy Committee to be led by a member of Ambassador Mary Yates' strategy cell within General Jones' National Security Staff. The NSS-IPC would be tasked to translate the May 2010 National Security Strategy into a May 2011 National Security Structure that will be implemented in the FY 2012 Budget.

Starving the National Security Staff for resources while hoping for effective national security strategic leadership is a recipe that has not served the U.S. well in the past. Jared Diamond's Collapse tells the story of five societies that self-destructed because they were unwilling to change their behaviors; the U.S. Congress's myopic inability to fund systemic national security reform is a modern-day example of Diamond's thesis.

So, on one hand we have the idealistic Thoreau as the angel on our right shoulder encouraging a bold May 2010 National Security Strategy, and the cynical Diamond as the devil on our left shoulder telling us that the May 2010 NSS can never happen because members of Congress gets are not "incentivized" to make intelligent altruistic resource allocations.

My Aspen Institute Speech, Sort Of

2010-06-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

The Aspen conference on National Security starts tonight at 6:00 p.m. -- http://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/2010/06/28/aspen-security-forum/agenda -- if I were speaking, I'd be talking about last week's "Deer in the Headlight" firing of Stanley McChrystal and what the ugly case study tells us about the dysfunctions of the current national security system: (1) overreliance on the cult of the presidency, (2) underfunding of corporate headquarters, (3) the Combatant Command system isn't helping, (4) you can't train people in stovepipes and throw magic fairy dust on them to make them interagency-kosher, (5) where was the National Security Council, which was designed to avoid mistakes like this by creating brakes on presidential groupthink?, and (6) a phone call to Colin Powell outweighs advice from a sitting Secretary of Defense? As always, a broken system gives us bad decisions, but this one might cost 1000 American lives as the McChrystal system is unraveled and re-knit into the Petraeus system, and as people go radio-silent. So it's probably a good thing I'm not in Aspen :)

The Error Was Made in Washington, not Kabul

2010-06-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire; Stanley McChrystal's career was killed by friendly fire -- but the fire was not from the Rolling Stone, but -- probably -- from a basement office in the West Wing of the White House. Which office? Probably the one shared by Denis McDonough and John Brennan.

Sure and steady national security executives -- Bob Gates, Gen. Jim Jones, John Kerry, John McCain, Denny Blair, Joe Biden, and even Hillary Clinton -- would have ignored The Rolling Stone article. Michael Hastings is not now, and never will be, a Tom Ricks, Walter Pincus, David Sanger, or David Ignatius, which is to say, a grown-up. He is part of the new media -- angry, opinionated, hurt by his 2007 loss, convinced that he knows best, friends with Rachel Maddow, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post. The article was -- as a Foreign Policy analysis explains -- three very different articles: a well-researched history of McChrystal's rise, a well-reported account of McChrystal in action, and then a liquor-infused, volcano-enabled frat-boy party with McChrystal's staff in Paris. Sure and steady national security executives would have blown this article off -- it was entertaining but meaningless.

But I suspect that the article drove Denis McDonough nuts, and perhaps Rahm Emmanuel too, and then maybe Robert Gibbs got infected, and then perhaps all three of them went hopping mad in to see their No Drama boss, and then apparently even the famously cool president got annoyed. So the gasoline was thrown onto the story -- I'm speculating here -- not by the steady and sure national security executives, but by the young political types who are worried about the President's image.

Fort Hood, Flight 253, Jordanian Double Agent, and Haiti

2010-01-14T05:09:00.000-08:00

Clip of the Day, from Institute for National Strategic Studies' "Global Strategic Assessment" Conference in April 2009 -- INSS Proceedings:

National Security Reform. Three interrelated factors are driving national security reform efforts. One is an inability to integrate all elements of power in a new securityenvironment that requires a more complex response. Specific obstacles to this more integrated approach are an embedded emphasis on hierarchy and functional expertise and the lack of an overarching coordinating structure to oversee this integration. Another factor is constraints on resourcing. Currently, all resources are controlled by the departments and agencies that are reinforced by the committeesystem in Congress. This makes it difficult to put resources behind national priorities. The final factor is centralization. It is hard to control national security efforts even through delegation to national security officials. Inevitably, when a crisis occurs, control is pulled back to the National Security Council since the White House, via the President, is the only place that can dictate an interagency process. The problem with this approach is that the number and complexity of the problems in today’s security environment are too much to handle with a centralized approach, which actually becomes a bottleneck.

Did This Really Happen?

2009-12-19T23:30:00.000-08:00

[May 3, 2011: Bethesda, Maryland]

I would really like to know why a giant monkey wrench was thrown into the emerging national security reform engine in the Fall of 2009. Is it possible that funding for the repair of the national security system was -- as Josh Rogin reported in The Cable on December 19, 2009 -- the casualty of a personality spat between Congressional staffers?

Jim Locher's book Victory on the Potomac might someday have a sequel. One chapter that will be important is an honest explanation of why his $4 million research project was killed -- apparently for no good reason. When there is another 9/11 event in the U.S., Josh Rogin's reporting will become part of the explanation for why we don't yet have a new national security act.

An Emerging U.S. National Security Strategy (Eisenhardt, 1988)

2009-12-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

Driving to PNSR Headquarters this morning, I was in good hands as Thomas Ricks skillfully engaged a CSPAN interviewer and audience in a thoughtful elaboration on the President's forthcoming Afghanistan strategy. I value regional strategists who understand the cultural subtleties that people like Ricks master: he listed the names of the six largest cities in Afghanistan, he gave an intelligent discussion of how Kashmir is connected through "walking back the cat" to the Taliban issue, he predicted a tough summer in Iraq and explained why, and he described his observations of the U.S. border in El Paso.

We need more people who can explain to us how all the jigsaw pieces fit together; we need about 1000 of them to be working in the Eisenhower Building. Why? One of the findings from Dr. Kathleen M. Eisenhardt's 1988 study of effective strategic decision-making in high-velocity environments is that when a top management team sees decisions as part of a whole, in which all the pieces are linked together, they make better and faster decisions, using more information and generating more options.

Driving home from PNSR headquarters this evening, I listened carefully for evidence that the president's national security team has built a coherent national security strategy that can pull all the different pieces together. CSPAN's host incorrectly described the speech as the president's Afghanistan War strategy -- a nation cannot stack up strategies like a cord of wood, it must have a single national security strategy that can hold numerous regional strategies/policies together -- if it is to be able to make fast and intelligent strategic decisions. President Obama did not present a "war strategy" -- he presented a facet of the evolving U.S. national security strategy.

Other commentators will bring a Department of Defense bias to the speech, but I want to highlight four points that convince me that this was a national security speech, not a war speech.

First, many people might now be asking "what the hell does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with Afghanistan?" I will have to check the transcript, but I believe the President said that part of the Afghanistan strategy is to strengthen the DHS, because we cannot guarantee that terrorists will not get out of safe havens and strike the U.S. territories. That's very interagency of him; treating DHS, Defense, and State as the key guarantors of national security, and blending their skills like we did with Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines with Goldwater-Nichols, is a smart move.

Second, the president called for more and better diplomacy, and the second plank of his speech was a discussion of a civilian surge. Gates, Petraeus, and MacChrystal have all said that we cannot kill or capture our way out of Afghanistan. A civilian surge will require the breaking of all kinds of human resource china, in terms of training, float, evaluations, reward systems, and interagency team operations. Can anybody give me a list of ten Assistants to the Secretary for National Security Affairs for the ten Cabinet departments outside of Treasury, State, Defense, Security, and Justice? Can't break human resource china without that list of names.

Third, the president wisely put the counterproliferation issue into a speech about Afghanistan, and let's hope that he puts it in every national security speech he gives from now on. I think I heard the words "loose nukes" in the speech, and I assume that he was talking about other countries when he said that safety comes not from having nuclear weapons, but from not having them. Hopefully, taxpayer money given to Pakistan is not being used for their nuclear programs; how, though, can funds be firewalled within a government -- this color money is for fighting terrorists, this color money is for securing your nuclear weapons? But the good news is that the President raised counterproliferation in a speech on a regional policy, elevating the speech to a statement of an emerging national security strategy.

Fourth, the president spent some time on the importance of an effective intelligence community in the U.S. national security strategy. Intelligence has been interagency since 1947; it has never been a stovepipe and can never be allowed to become one, despite its current ambitions to be treated as if it were the twin brother of the Department of State. Intelligence is the oxygen bubbler at the bottom of an aquarium that aerates the entire tank; it influences national security strategy at the top of the system by feeding high-quality information to the capillaries of the system. Another way to think about the role of intelligence in the U.S. national security system is through a children's game. The 900-pound national security gorilla is the middle finger, which seems appropriate on a variety of levels because the Department of Defense is the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known. The index finger is the Department of State, which needs to add 150,000 people to its rolls now in order to pursue the super-secret, super-smart "Nine-Venice" strategy that will allow the U.S. to outcompete China for the next millennium and beyond. The ring finger is the Department of Homeland Security and, as mentioned earlier, DHS must, from now on, get a seat at the table for all national security discussions as part of the State, Defense, Security triad. The thumb is Treasury, which like State must have significant international skills. The little finger is Justice, which has a National Security Division. So where does that leave intelligence? The blood vessels in the wrist feeding oxygen into the five stovepipes. It's probably sexier to be a finger than a wrist, but the national security system as a whole needs intelligence more than it needs a sixth finger. Anyway, the point for tonight is that it was good that the President recognized the importance of intelligence in the speech on Afghanistan.

Ambassador Mary Yates is leading a new five-person "strategy cell" in the NSC staff; from the speech tonight, it appears that they are doing their job well -- they were able to insert DHS, State, counterproliferation, and intelligence into a speech given at West Point. (Unfortunately, though, the West Point musicians did not get the memo, and did not play the anthems of DHS and State along with the anthems for Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force.) Apparently the written National Security Strategy has been kicked down the road until after the Quadrennial Defense Review is completed, but it looks like the pieces of a "shared-in-their-heads" interagency national security strategy is already emerging from the Obama White House.

Dr. Eisenhardt would probably say that this bodes well for the future ability of the United States to make effective strategic decisions in a high-velocity environment.

High Reliability Strategic Network Management

2009-11-23T21:09:00.000-08:00

HIGH RELIABILITY STRATEGIC NETWORK MANAGEMENT

Karlene Roberts and Ian I. Mitroff are the editors of a new series published by Stanford, “High Reliability and Crisis Management.” The first book in what promises to be a solid series is Emery Roe and Paul Schulman’s study from 2001-2008 of the California electrical system: High Reliability Management: Operating on the Edge (Stanford Business Books, 2008). The book is a step forward from traditional high reliability research – which often focuses on leadership, structure, culture, decision-making, or learning – because it points out the importance of strategic management processes in network environments by a cadre of “reliability professionals.”

The study is valuable because of its recognition that “critical infrastructure” merits more research attention. The authors are very clear in identifying five critical infrastructures:

“’Critical infrastructures’” are core technical capabilities along with the organizations that provide them, that enable the provision of a wide variety of social activities, goods, and services. Infrastructures in the domains of electricity, water resources, communication, transportation, and financial services are by their very nature multipurpose.” (p. 6).

Until we have rigorous studies of the four other infrastructures, this study of an electrical grid can serve as a proxy for all five critical infrastructures.

One small critique I have of the study is that it recycles the ridiculously useless contrast between NAT and HRO that seeped into the water supply in Berkeley 20 years ago and just won’t go away. NAT (Normal Accident Theory) is presumably a field of research that can be summarized as “stuff happens.” HRO (High Reliability Organizations) is presumably a field of research that can be summarized as “stuff could happen, if we’re not really, really careful.” NAT and HRO have always been, are now, and will always be – both of them -- HRO. It would be nice if there were a retirement community to which outdated straw men and straw women could be sent when they have outlived their usefulness; NAT was never a serious field of research (has anybody ever published an article siding with NAT and ridiculing the HRO position?) so this overworked straw man deserves his nice condo by the beach.

I like the authors’ careful delineation of four increasingly dangerous conditions of high reliability management: just-in-case (low system volatility, high network options variety), just-in-time (high volatility, high options), just-this-way (low volatility, low options), and just-for-now (high volatility, low options). This perspective highlights the importance of human beings as the important resource for dampening the catastrophic potential of high-risk systems, the complex/chaotic nature of networks, and the variability in the degree to which an environment is “safe” or “dangerous.”

Finally, the book corresponds well with Section 1054 of the National Defense Authorization Act: “To study the career management and development of interagency national security professionals.” The authors show that the cognitive complexity of “reliability” professionals is an important investment to make in order to prevent large-scale, catastrophic system failures. In a nice bit of reflexivity, the authors’ book will be helpful in educating interagency national security “reliability professionals” for years to come.

Virginia Tech Shooting

2009-11-22T17:21:00.000-08:00

Lucinda Roy's No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech is a valuable addition to the emerging literature on High Reliability Leadership, Organizations, and Strategies (HRLOS). In the same way that Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire combined Maclean's personal experience with the Mann Gulch forest fire and Maclean's talents as an English professor at the University of Chicago, Lucinda Roy's No Right to Remain Silent combines her twenty-year career at Virginia Tech with the literary skills of a published novelist and chair of the Virginia Tech English Department. Even more valuable to her account, though, is the extra layer of insight created because Roy met numerous times with Seung-Hui Cho in Fall Semester 2005 in an independent study course -- the express purpose of which was to convince Cho to seek counseling. (In April 2009, Dr. Roy and other guests appeared on the Diane Rehm show.)

One familiar theme that jumps to the surface is the familiar story of "connect the dots," a phrase that was used in the 9/11 investigation, the Virginia Tech investigation, and -- last week -- in the Major Hasan hearings conducted by Senators Lieberman and Collins.

A second theme that the Roy book pivots on is the concept of organizational silence. In a 2000 special issue on organizational change processes, NYU researchers Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken opened a new field of research on organizational silence. An excellent George Washington University doctoral student named Pat Press resonated to the article when he read it in summer of 2005, and built up expertise on the topic before the shooting occurred on April 16, 2007. I use the word "pivot" because silence is part of the narrative before the shooting (health privacy laws and educational privacy laws restricted Virginia Tech's ability to "connect the dots") and after the shooting (the lawyers and the administration at Virginia Tech fell into a a "batten the hatches" mindset to protect themselves and the school).

A third theme is one that my French colleagues Bernard Forgues and Herve Laroche have studied, with their co-authors: the organizational dynamics that occur after a catastrophe. First, Laroche carefully studied the French "tainted-blood" AIDS scandal, looking at the causes and investigation of the catastrophe. Second, Forgues and a coauthor presented an intriguing paper on the organizational dynamics before and after the sinking of The Herald of Free Enterprise. Third, Herve Laroche and a coauthor presented a paper in May 2007, that has since been published as a journal article, on the investigations of the French Heat Wave.

I confess that I only read the first third of Roy's book today; I hope it's acceptable blog-writing protocol to leave a trail of bread crumbs for my doctoral students to pick up on . . . . Roy divides the book into three pieces: Part I is "Horror Story," Part II is "Backstory," and Part III is "Dialogue."

Chapter 1 ("April") describes Roy's personal experiences of the day of the shooting, including helpful paragraphs on other campus shootings, an interesting allusion to campus shooters as F5 tornadoes, and a compact description of the shootings -- with care taken to name each of the five classes that Cho visited and revisited in his eleven-minute shooting spree from 9:40 to 9:51 a.m., firing 174 rounds from two semi-automatic pistols, killing 30 people in addition to the two he had killed two hours earlier in a dorm room, and wounding 24 others.

Chapter 2 ("A Boy Named Loser") is a careful account of the Fall 2005 interactions that Roy had with Seung-hui Cho, whom she knew as "Seung" and whom the world came to refer to as "Cho" after the shooting. An alert instructor flagged Seung in October 2005 as a "troubled student" and referred him to Roy, who was finishing up a term as the chair of the English Department. The image of Roy and Seung working together to write a poem named "Seung," and the description by Roy of Seung's novel fragment -- punctuated by two revealing poems -- suggest more than just another cautionary "connect the dots" parable. This is a smart person trying hard to get inside a very complex dot, and believing that she had succeeded in getting that complex dot into counseling.

Chapter 3 ("Connect the Dots") fills in what happened between Roy's last visit with Cho in December 2005 and the shooting on April 16, 2007.

Chapter 4 ("The Prey") is a short chapter on how insensitive media coverage was a corrosive influence on the Virginia Tech response to the catastrophe, with a clear community schism developing between the good people (who rallied around the university president) and bad people (who talked to the press). Alan Meyer's classic 1982 article, "Adapting to Environmental Jolts," showed that 19 Bay Area hospitals responded in almost unpredictable and different ways to a common event -- a strike by anesthesiologists. Relatedly, I learned firsthand on River Road in Maryland with my son Miles in August 2007 that a deer in the headlights is not stupidly paralyzed, but dangerously unpredictable. Roy's short chapter on the role of the media in the Virginia Tech shooting suggests that the brighter the headlights, the more dangerously unpredictable the organization might be in responding to environment jolts.

Chapter 5 ("The Panel Review") focuses attention on the two hours between the double homicide and the shooting spree, and begins to peel back the layers of complexity of the organizational response to the catastrophe. Roy was alert in Fall 2005, and she was similarly alert in Summer of 2007. She presents a wide variety of subtle details that only a twenty-year veteran of the Virginia Tech "Hokie" culture would notice. One of the foundation stones of my view of organizations is Joanne Martin's argument from the 1980s that a novice view of culture is a single "integrated" culture, a more advanced view of culture is multiple "differentiated" subcultures, and a complex-chaotic view of culture is numerous "fragmented" micro-cultures. Patrick Lagadec's helpful description of catastrophes as "brutal audits" suggests that there is perhaps no better way to understand an organizational culture than to see how it enacts, endures, and responds to a catastrophe. We need multiple additional perspectives on the aftermath of the shooting, into which Lucinda Roy's narrative can be positioned as one of many lived experiences.

National Security Failures: 9/11, Torture, and Iraq

2009-11-21T19:59:00.000-08:00

The traditional narrative behind the Project on National Security Reform links three large national security failures: the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 (2001), the flawed intelligence used to rationalize the invasion of Iraq (2003), and the perceived mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina (2005). Upon closer investigation, however, it becomes clear that there is a much longer stream of iconic national security failures: Bay of Pigs (1961), Mayaguez (1975), Three Mile Island (1979), Desert One (1980), Iran-Contra (1984), Challenger (1986), Somalia (1993), Friendly Fire over Iraq (1994), Rwanda (1995), Columbia (2003), and Fort Hood (November 5, 2009). Furthermore, the current state-of-play in national security reform does not have sufficient bandwidth to treat an Act of God as a national security failure, so there is increasing resistance to listing Katrina as a national security failure. In this short end-of-Saturday essay, I want to take a shot at retrospectively making the case that the three strikes of the 54^th Presidential Administration were not 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina – but were instead 9/11, Torture, and Iraq. Two books I browsed tonight at my local Borders inform this essay: David Cole’s The Torture Memos and Philip Sands’ The Torture Team.

David Cole convinced me that the detainees rounded up in Afghanistan starting in November 2001 stepped into a fuzzy situation. Readers of the Philip Sands book will come to know one of these detainees – Detainee 063 – very, very well; Detainee 063 was captured under ambiguous circumstances in Afghanistan in 2001. But Cole makes a good case that it was the capture of high-ranking Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in late March 2002 that senior officials in the Bush administration began the administration’s slide toward torture.

Discussions on interrogation policies seem to have percolated from November 2001 until three key memos were written dated August 1, 2002. John Yoo drafted the memos; Jay Bybee signed them – and presumably a large number of other attorneys throughout the national security system were involved in the research, discussions, and drafting of the memos. Cole does a good job of showing the flawed logics in the August 1 memos.

Cole quotes the transcript of a Red Cross interview with Abu Zubaydah in which Zubaydah describes the procedures applied to him. It is not clear to me whether the techniques were applied before or after the August 1 memos, but I choose to assume that it was after the memo was written that the interrogation techniques changed.

Sands focuses attention on a December 2, 2002, action memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld that was immediately transmitted to Guantanamo, where Detainee 063 and others were already being subjected to the enhanced interrogation regimes authorized by the Rumsfeld memo. A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence timeline in the Cole book states that the Rumsfeld guidelines were only in place six weeks, but that the Guantanamo practice migrated to Iraq after the March 2003 invasion and eventually mestastasized into the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

My bottom line: It appears that the U.S. gradually lost its way on the torture issue between November 1, 2001 and approximately August 15, 2002 – at the point at which it applied its enhanced interrogation techniques to Abu Zubaydah. The Office of Legal Counsel appears to have had an opportunity to stop the migration with its three August 1, 2002, memos – but did not. Once the acts were committed, self-justification logics kicked in that made it possible for the techniques to spread throughout Guantanamo and eventually over to Abu Ghraib. We need future research to pin down the exact day on which Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation regime crossed the line, but for now it looks to me like an August 15, 2002, national security failure.

Which FFRDC Needs Help on Modularity?

2009-11-19T21:38:00.000-08:00

The National Defense Authorization Act for 2010, signed on October 28, 2009, calls for the following study:

SEC. 341. STUDY ON ARMY MODULARITY.

(a) Study-

(1) IN GENERAL- Not later than 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall enter into a contract with a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to conduct a study on the current and planned modularity structures of the Army to determine the following:

(A) The operational capability of the Army to execute its core mission to contribute land power to joint operations.

(B) The ability to manage flexibility and versatility of Army forces across the range of military operations.

(C) The tactical, operational, and strategic risk associated with the heavy and light modular combat brigades and functional brigades.

(D) The required and planned end strength for the Army.

(2) FACTORS TO CONSIDER- The study required under subsection (a) shall take into consideration the following factors:

(A) The Army's historical experience with separate brigade structures.

(B) The original Army analysis, including explicit or implicit assumptions, upon which the brigade combat team, functional brigade, and higher headquarters' designs were based.

(C) Subsequent analysis that confirmed or modified the original designs.

(D) Lessons learned from Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom that confirmed or modified the original designs.

(E) Improvements in brigade and headquarters designs the Army has made or is implementing.

(3) ACCESS TO INFORMATION- The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army shall ensure that the FFRDC conducting the study has access to all necessary data, records, analysis, personnel, and other resources necessary to complete the study.

(b) Report- Not later than December 31, 2010, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report containing the results of the study conducted under subsection (a), together with comments by the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Secretary of Defense.

Unanswered questions:

(1) Which FFRDC has been designated as the research unit for this project? MITRE? RAND?

(2) Will real experts on organizational modularity be drawn into the discussion, or will the FFRDC people just make stuff up? (Herbert Simon's students are all familiar with the topic of "decomposability"; the Army Research Institute funded a $1.5 million study of organizational design issues, including modularity, with George Huber and Bill Glick in the late 1980s, published as a book in 1993; Karl Weick and I published an article on loosely coupled systems in 1990; Rebecca Henderson and Kim Clark have an excellent article on modularity in 1990; Kim Clark and Carliss Baldwin's book, Modularity Rules, extends the topic; Ron Sanchez has published an extraordinary series of journal articles and book chapters expanding the research area; and Melissa Schilling at NYU has done an excellent job connecting modularity and innovation processes; Christopher Lamb at National Defense University is building a research program on the insertion of modular interagency teams into the national security system.)

(3) The FFRDC will rapidly see that there is a strong connection between Army modularity and interagency collaboration -- a phenomenon known as "recombinant innovation" in the strategic management world. This will lead the FFRDC to pop out of the Army stovepipe into Joint Collaboration, and even further out of the Department of Defense stovepipe into complex contingency operations requiring interagency cross-functional team capabilities. When this happens, the FFRDC will find that they have bitten off more than they can chew -- and landed squarely in the woefully underfunded briar patch of national security reform (see www.pnsr.org).

(4) How much money has been designated to this, essentially, national security reform task? How much of that money can be passed through to National Defense University and/or the Project on National Security Reform?

National Security Reform: An Amazon Reading List

2009-11-14T14:20:00.000-08:00

Here are 40 books that I find especially helpful for cracking the secret code of national security reform.

Amazon's "Listmania" software caps the list at 40 books, so perhaps we can collectively work to make sure that this list captures the best possible range of books for an eventual national security reform.

I left a space on the list for PNSR's Forging a New Shield. Isn't it interesting that the report has been out for almost a year and it is not yet available at Amazon?

Hasan Attended Several GWU-HPSI Events

2009-11-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

My attention is focused on an encyclopedic literature review of the research field known as "High Reliability Organizations," but life goes on outside my box -- as demonstrated by the odd fact that the Fort Hood shooter attended several George Washington University events created by the Homeland Security Policy Institute.

See the article on this by Jerome R. Corsi.

Michael Singh Comes Out for National Security Reform

2009-11-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

And so we end November 5, 2009, with some bad news, some horrific news, and some good news. Bad news is that The Onion's lead story is the following:

U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort in Afghanistan

According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan....

Horrific news is that Air Force Major Nadal Malik Hassan is reported by NPR to have killed 12 people and wounded 31 in Fort Hood, Texas.

All of this bad/horrific news makes me want to fight harder so that the High Reliability Organizations course I taught at GWU three times can be put back on the schedule for January - May 2010, perhaps under Department of Homeland Security and GW sponsorship as a joint project between Project on National Security Reform and the National Defense University. But a broken system doesn't know that it is broken, so there are never any resources to do activities that might help fix a broken system.

Good news is that Thomas Pickering's eight-page essay on The Anatomy of Plan Columbia is juxtaposed with Michael Singh's insightful essay on national security reform. Congratulations to Michael Singh for his largely accurate five-page essay in the November-December 2009 issue of The American Interest. Some quick notes:

(1) Let's hope that the letterhead for the memo -- "U.S. Department of National Security" -- with a seal of an eagle holding an old-fashioned phone in the right claw, and a steaming cup of coffee in the left claw -- never gets printed. There are already five national security departments and an intelligence community who are rigid "cylinders of excellence" -- adding another stovepipe to the mix would simply create a new fiefdom plagued by bureaucratic equities. Fortunately, though, Mr. Singh's focus is on strategic management above the Cabinet department level:

"Is there a way to reform the national security process independent of the important but long-range task of perfecting the national security apparatus's constituent parts and their means of interaction? In other words, is it possible to reform the top of the process, lodged mainly in the National Security Council, without reforming the entire interagency? The answer is "yes" ...

(2) Michael Singh deserves a Project on National Security Reform baseball cap from Jim Locher for his elegantly written first paragraph, which could have been written by Locher in 2005, Chris Lamb in 2006, myself in 2007, or one of our research fellows in 2008. Singh had a better seat at the table than we did, though, as senior director for Middle East affairs on the U.S. National Security Council, so it means more coming from an "insider" like him:

The need to reform the U.S. national security decision and implementation process is widely acknowledged in Washington. Everyone who has participated in the process at a high enough level understands that whenever a problem spills over the competency boundary of any single bureaucracy (as more and more problems seem to do these days), the policy outcome often ends up reflecting less than the sum of its governmental parts. The U.S. government struggles to integrate its assets and perspectives, frequently failing to achieve the unity of effort, let alone unity of command, needed to manage complex problems.

(3) Chris Lamb and I have gone to battle in the blogisphere three times now to knock down the "It's the President, Stupid," virus that our good colleague I. M. Destler keeps reinjecting into the discussion. I flagged it in a response to Dr. Anna Kasten Lewis's essay in History News Network about national security reform, Chris and I responded to David Rothkopf's assertion of presidential omnipotence in an essay on needed actions, and Chris and I reviewed the "long knives" attacks on Gen. Jones for not acting as a 19th Century national security adviser. But, yet, here it is again -- this time in a pretty robin's egg blue box on page 81 quoting Gen. Jones out of context as saying "Each president gets the National Security Council that he or she wants."

Acknowledging the need for process reform is one thing; actually achieving it is something else. At the heart of the challenge is a specific conundrum. As I.M. Destler observed more than a quarter century ago, the problem with the national security process, and the solution to that problem, lie with the President. From a President's style and key personnel flow a cascade of repercussions for the entire national security system.

Perhaps the smartest thing to do would be to buy a large stack of Gene Healy's The Cult of the President and send it to every knucklehead who writes an essay using the following flawed logic: (1) the U.S. national security system is badly broken, (2) the national security system is wholly dependent on the whims of each new president, (3) therefore, it is impossible for people to fix the system unless they are elected president, and (4) by the time somebody is elected president, it is too late for them to fix the system that they have inherited.

(4) Fortunately, though, Michael Singh is not a knucklehead, but pushes past the Daalder-Destler-Rothkopf "It's the President, Stupid!" position to suggest several intelligent reforms that I will have to "grade" on another day. Here is Singh's statement about the dilemma of national security reform one year after the Obama election:

Recognizing Destler's paradox, most national security reform proposals in recent decades have at once recognized the central role of the President while struggling to accommodate it. These proposals have generally sought either to guide the President's preferences or the National Security Advisor's approach to his or her duties, or to suggest structural or legislative changes to their offices that would implicitly constrain them. Since both approaches would reduce the historical flexibility inherent in the President's role, neither has gotten very far. Sweeping structural change proposed by outsiders is politically impractical because Presidents come into office with their own ideas about how to manage their duties. Changes occur when a new President himself wants them, and those that endure do so when they prove useful enough to appeal to successors.

So what does this mean for Jim Locher's Project on National Security Reform? (1) The national security system is broken; (2) People running to be president will always recognize that the system is broken and will always support national security reform; (3) People who actually become president will inevitably starve, resist, and/or kill national security reform because they do not have time simultaneously to manage a broken system and to reform a broken system.

More another day . . .

Situation Room Photo

2009-09-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture from the White House web site of a Situation Room meeting from September 29, 2009. Bill Burns is an Undersecretary of State, preparing here for a meeting abroad to discuss Iranian issues.

President Kennedy's national security adviser, MacGeorge Bundy, moved his office from the Eisenhower Building into the White House in early 1961, and laid the groundwork for what would eventually become The Situation Room.

Some questions:

(1) Does the Situation Room in the White House drag the president into crisis management mode? Is it true that President Obama was briefed 25 times in five days on the Somali pirate incident?

(2) The CSPAN Tapes of Lyndon Johnson deciding on bombing targets during the Viet Nam War imply that the temptation for micromanagement increased enormously due to communications technology embedded in the Sit Room. Is the president the nation's most highly qualified national security strategist, operations officer, and tactician?

(3) Doesn't the United States face multiple situations simultaneously now? Aren't situations occurring around the world continuously now? Could the Situation Room be transformed into a Situations Oversight Room, with secure video/audio/computing links to 50 Situation Rooms in the Eisenhower Building?

Gen. Anthony Zinni Calls for National Security Reform

2009-09-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

Is the national security system fixed yet?

Not by a long shot, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, in an articulate, passionate, and intelligent call for the application of smart organizational reforms to a badly broken system.

http://www.newamerica.net/events/2009/americas_honor_problem

Send a link to your representative in Congress, because it looks like that's where national security reform is going to get stuffed into a box until Fall 2012 or beyond.

"The System is Broken in So Many Ways (240) That It Isn't Even Funny"

2009-07-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

7/16/09, 8:15 p.m. It was a long and bone-crushing day of writing.

See DrNatSecMgt.wikispaces.com to explore a draft list of 240 problems that were identified in the Project on National Security Reform’s study, Forging a New Shield. Having those 240 analyses available on the web will allow me to hyperlink future reform documents back to the problems that they (hopefully) can solve.

On a more adolescent note -- It was energizing to see General Scowcroft last evening as he left the Guiding Coalition meeting for the Project on National Security Reform.

A brief conversation with the star character from my dissertation research in 1989-1993 (and the man who convinced me in 1997 to come back to Washington to work on national security reform) went as follows:

Orton: “Hello again, sir. Doug Orton. I interviewed you in May 2007 for my research on national security reform, and I briefed the Guiding Coalition on organization theory a year ago with Chris Lamb.”

Gen. Scowcroft: “Yes, yes. How are you? Good to see you working here.”

Doug Orton: “It’s a wonderful group of people, sir. I suspect that you had something to do in getting me this job.”

Gen. Scowcroft: “You may be right about that.”

Doug Orton: “Thank you very much, sir. Have a good evening.”

Am I a little bit amazed that I have a cool job in which I get to see Gen. Scowcroft once a year? Yes. (Don't spoil it for me.)

Expanded Roles for the CJCS and the DNI

2009-07-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

In past posts, I have tried to make the case for the creation of a cohesive NSC top management team that could make better decisions than a single Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Today I believe that it would be helpful for the country's national security strategy formation, strategy management, and strategy implementation processes to move the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence into formal positions as members of the NSC Top Management Team. Here's why:

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a statutory advisory member of the National Security Council, which means he is a military advisor directly to the president and the presidential national security team. He plays two roles in the national security system: member of the NSC and powerful coordinator of most of the employees in the Department of Defense, through the services. If we broadened the Chairman's coordinating role to include all the components of the national security system -- Marines, Army, Air Force, Navy, National Guard, Coast Guard, Secret Service, FBI, TSA, CPB, ICE, CDC, NASA, FDA, ONDCP, etc. -- he could help the NSC accomplish more sophisticated whole-of-government or interagency missions. Instead of inserting an NSC deputy between the Chairman and the APNSA, we should take advantage of all of the resources the Chairman controls and put those resources more directly into play as part of the NSC Top Management Team. The Chairman of the JCS could have two roles: NSC Deputy for Departments and Agencies (first floor of the Eisenhower Building) and Chairman of the JCS (Pentagon).

Similarly, the Director of National Intelligence is also a statutory advisory member of the NSC and could become a trusted deputy to the APNSA. Instead of creating a new deputy to interfere in the relationship between the APNSA and the DNI, it makes more sense to ask the DNI to play two roles: NSC Deputy for Intelligence (fifth floor of the Eisenhower Building) and Director of National Intelligence (Bolling AFB, Langley, Tysons Corner? -- not sure where the DNI works these days).

That leaves the need to fill three critical NSC deputy positions: NSC Deputy for Regions and Theaters (Eisenhower second floor), NSC Deputy for Presidential Priority Teams (Eisenhower third floor), and Executive Secretary (crisis management, strategic change, executive education, and human capital -- Eisenhower fourth floor).

Donilon could be the second floor deputy, McDonough could be the third floor deputy, and Brennan could be the fourth floor deputy -- that would create an all-star team of Jones, Mullen, Donilon, McDonough, Brennan, and Blair that could constitute six of the fifteen slots on the president's national security team.

The President could bring another six members to the table: Obama, Holder, Clinton, Gates, Napolitano, and Geithner. Finally, three White House staff members could fill out the table: Emmanuel, Orszag, and Gibbs.

Upgrading Mullen's position and Blair's position by asking them to play roles as Deputy APNSAs in addition to their current roles could (1) help identify billions of dollars in savings within the system, (2) tighten the link between the experts in the national security system and the politicians in the White House in order to increase the effectiveness of the national security system, and (3) create a more intelligent strategic decision-making system that would create fewer national security failures and more national security successes.

I have grown weary of hearing the phrase, "that can never happen," from people who believe themselves to be national security reformers. If our analyses say the system is broken, and we have 35 problem analyses identifying exactly how it is broken, and we can design solutions that will fix the broken system, we should not then engage in self-censorship. Self-censorship will only lead to a replication of the current broken system. The President of the United States could pick up his pen tomorrow and sign an executive order designating Mike Mullen as a Deputy APNSA and Dennis Blair as a Deputy APNSA -- but he won't do so because there is not a mechanism in place for educating him on the need to make these changes. Congress? Thinktanks? Blogisphere? PNSR? Universities? -- all seem to be happy with the status quo. Meanwhile, the more months I spend analyzing the system, the more obvious the solutions are, which makes the frustration especially hard to contain: system broken, solutions easy, nobody listening . . . . But I guess that's what blogs are for -- in cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream.

Seating Arrangements for the National Security Council

2009-07-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

While driving to Baltimore on Saturday, I tried to record a blog entry on my blackberry about the "new" national security council. What chairs should they sit in when they meet in the Cabinet Room?

(1) President Obama should sit in the President's chair in the middle of the table, with his back to the windows and facing the main entrance to the room.

(2) Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Gen. James L. Jones should sit across the table from the President; the eye contact between these two men is extremely important. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vice President occupied the chair across from the President, but I would rather have the Vice President occupy the President's chair when the President cannot be in attendance.

(3) The seat to President Obama's right should be taken by the Secretary of State.

(4) The seat to President Obama's left should be taken by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

(5) The seat to APNSA's right should be taken by the Secretary of Defense, controller of the bulk of the national security system.

(6) The seat to the left of the APNSA should be taken by the Secretary of Justice.

(7) The seat to the right of the Secretary of Defense should be taken by the Secretary of the Treasury.

(8) The seat to the right of the Secretary of State should be taken by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(9) The seat to the left of the Secretary of Homeland Security should be taken by the Director of National Intelligence.

(10) Three critical deputies for the NSC could flesh out one end of the table: one deputy for regional and theater interagency teams; one deputy for quasi-permanent presidential priority teams; and an Executive Secretary primarily responsible for crisis management cells, system reform, executive education, and human capital.

(11) Three critical members of the White House staff could flesh out the other end of the table: the Chief of Staff, the Director of OMB, and the Director of White House Communications.

This fifteen-member president's national security team should meet weekly -- and sit in these seats -- in order to establish the capacity to read nonverbal skills and work through personality issues in a non-crisis environment.

I'd be happy to walk through the rationales for this seating arrangement someday, but I don't get the feeling that sociotechnical systems theory, organizational architecture, group dynamics, high reliability theory, and organizational redesign are high on anybody's list of things to talk about these days. I feel like I'm just stocking up papers that might be revisited, or might not, after the next national security failure. But we carry on . . . .

How Many Deputy APNSAs are There, Anyway?

2009-07-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

Question of the day is how many Deputy National Security Advisers are there now?

"Old-school" model of the NSC is that there is only one deputy. And Tom Donilon keeps getting himself listed as "the" Deputy National Security Adviser, as in a story in today's Politico.

But on NPR this morning, Denis McDonough spoke as a Deputy National Security Adviser; previously he has been referred to as a director of strategic communications.

And, then, of course, there is John Brennan, who has in the past carried the title of Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security Affairs.

That is three deputies, but a case can be made for a Top Management Team at NSC composed of Jones and five deputies:

(1) Strategy Formation, Strategy Management, and Strategy Implementation -- Gen. Jones is building up this role for himself as the unquestioned leader of the National Security Council staff. Strategy cannot be outsourced to a small, irrelevant, and disconnected "strategy cell" -- Jones can best serve the President by keeping the President out of the business of micro-management. Jones must serve as a firewall separating the White House from the fire hydrant of crisis management -- Do we really want the President of the United States being briefed 25 times in five days on the Somali pirate incident?

(2) A Deputy for Department Structures and Agency Cultures/Resources -- Tom Donilon knows that the president's strategic decisions are often hobbled by the archaic budgeting systems of Washington; building on the Deputies Committee to create a more effective and fluid system of interagency strategic planning is something that Donilon is good at.

(3) A Deputy for Regional Policies and Theater Decisions -- John Brennan is a respected national security executive who could ramp up NSC expertise in regions and theaters. Pulling all the special envoys and czars away from the Oval Office and into an effective national security system would be a large accomplishment.

(4) A Deputy for Quasi-permanent Presidential Priority Interagency Teams -- There is a slot in the system for somebody who could manage Mark Leiter at NCTC, Gary Samore at WMD, and perhaps 25 other leaders of interagency policy teams in the current NSC structure.

(5) An Executive Secretary -- with Deputy status -- to Run (A) Crisis Management, (B) Executive Education, (C) Human Capital, and (D) Strategic Change. Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert with their privileged relationship to President Obama, could serve him well by tackling the Executive Secretary position together in order to buffer the President from being burned out by crisis management.

(6) A Deputy for Intelligence Community Relations -- There is a slot in the system for somebody to manage the important relationship to the Intelligence Community -- tasking the intelligence community with input (information integrity) and output (performance evaluation).

It is not the brilliance of competence of the deputies themselves that matters -- it is their ability to work together as a team, but I would sleep better if there were five deputies instead of just one.

Does General Jones Have a Future in National Security Reform?

2009-06-30T20:45:00.000-07:00

This blog entry for the Project on National Security Reform was picked up by "The Warlord Loop" -- a group of about 2000 national security scholars, national security executives, and national security professionals -- and apparently launched a wide number of interesting discussions within the current administration.

Jones is being criticized by "old school" national security people who don't understand that the system is broken and needs to be fixed.

"Does General Jones Have a Future in National Security Reform" -- Chris Lamb and Doug Orton, June 30, 2009

National Security Adviser with an E

2009-06-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

There is an odd disconnect between the language of the White House and the language of the American media.

The position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA) has often been referred to by the press as "national security adviser" or "national security advisor."

In doing research for a blog entry on the attacks on Gen. Jones, I noticed that the Washington Post and the New York Times are using the phrase "national security adviser."

The White House, however, continues to use the phrase "national security advisor."

Fundamentally, this -- for me -- is trivial because I don't want to have a "national security adviser/advisor" -- instead, I think the country needs a national security manager. And because the APNSA position was never intended, in my opinion, to be a Kissingeresque-Richelieuian genius-behind-the-throne position, I would prefer to use APNSA for as long as possible.

But, in the draft of the blog entry we used national security adviser fifteen times. Editorial decisions were made within PNSR to (1) be consistent with the usage in White House, and (2) be consistent with the usage in Forging a New Shield, so we ended up going with "national security advisor."

At some point, though, the White House will decide to update from "advisor" to "adviser" in order to stay in synch with the nation's media, most of whom are now using "adviser." That would make life easier for those of us who live in worlds in which the current ambiguity is chewing up overallocated bandwidth. Isn't this William Safire's job? Did he retire or pass away? Who is the current enforcer of common sense in American language?

The First National Security Decision Audit: Bush-Cheney

2009-05-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

The story of the week -- now that the Obama administration has survived Mexican drug cartels, the Somali pirate incident, and the H1N1 of 2009 virus -- is the tempest in a tin-pan alley that Vice President Dick Cheney has generated.

I have had a queasy feeling about the release of the torture memos from the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel because my friend from DC (1983) and UNLV (2001) Jay Bybee is listed as one of the authors of one of the memos. I remember the frustration of May 2004 when the Abu Ghraib photos were released, and do not want to relive that period.

So there appear to be at least four narratives in play simultaneously: (1) Cheney trying to wish into existence a narrative that he and Bush kept the country safe; (2) Cheney trying to protect the people who authorized, supervised, and implemented the Extreme Interrogation Techniques; (3) Cheney calling for the release of all of the memos, so the American people can see that nobody was tortured and everybody was kept safe; and (4) an odd attempt by the media to pull Nancy Pelosi into the story -- first she hadn't been briefed, then that she had been briefed but the CIA didn't say they were using waterboarding, then that she had been briefed but there was nothing she could do.

As a national security scholar, I would like to see a routinized post-mortem of presidential administrations by a non-partisan study group. In other words, I want a "Truth Commission" every four years, whether or not there have been national security failures (such as 9/11, the Iraqi WMD decisions, or the use of extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding).

I am tired of a government that outsources its brain to "thinktanks." I want my government to have a permanent, well-functioning capacity for self-analysis.

The smartest place in the government right now, for a post-mortem -- week-by-week -- of the Bush-Cheney administration, is the College of International Security Affairs at National Defense University, if they are given the funding to build a class of 30 doctoral students for September 1, 2009.

At the moment, over 1000 people are finishing their masters theses at a variety of government-run masters programs.

Plucking 30 of these people for a doctoral program at NDU's CISA -- with help from the faculty at the National Defense Intelligence College, the CIA University, the Foreign Service Institute, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, the Army War College, the National War College, and other government-funded research institutions -- would provide the intellectual firepower necessary for two post-mortems.

One post-mortem would focus on a week-to-week decision database for January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2005, using Dr. Condoleezza Rice as the central protagonist. A second post-mortem would focus on a week-to-week decision database for January 20, 2005 to January 20, 2009, using Stephen Hadley as the central protagonist.

Instead of each scholar being limited to an idiosyncratic and individualistic set of information, a collective research project could pull all available information into a detailed analysis that could incorporate existing studies with the new data that emerges daily about the Bush-Cheney administrations.

We don't need a "Truth Commission" for the torture decisions; instead we need a routinized national security decision-making audit for each administration, starting with the Bush-Cheney administration.

The finding is predictable: good people in a broken system are likely to produce bad decisions. It is more intelligent, then, to fix the system than to blame the people who were not served well by the system.

Global Roundtable on National Security Reform

2009-05-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

"Doug Orton helped script today's first global roundtable on effective national security system reform processes, assisting an excellent young scholar named Arnaud Kurze." (Facebook Status Report, 5/12/09, 7:00 a.m.)

I carved out some space in the PNSR wikispace for materials related to the first Global Roundtable on National Security Reform:

Comparisons
U.S.
France
U.K.
Germany
Australia
Singapore

Global Roundtable on National Security Reform, May 12, 2009

2009-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Arnaud Kurze wrote a paper for the Project on National Security Reform in the Summer of 2007 that compared the national security systems of Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the European Union; the paper was trimmed back significantly and included as Appendix 6 in Forging a New Shield (pp. 603-608).

Philippe Baumard taught my High Reliability Organizations doctoral seminar in February 2009 at PNSR Headquarters, and offered to arrange a meeting between PNSR leadership and French government officials. In four subsequent meetings with French officials serving in the defense, diplomatic, and intelligence community, I laid the groundwork for a May 12 summit between U.S. and French national security reformers.

PNSR leadership felt it might be helpful to expand the focus of the summit to include six countries, instead of two, so I contacted Arnaud Kurze at George Mason University, and he generously and tirelessly cooperated with us -- under the leadership of PNSR's Chief Performance Officer Leland Russell, and with the strong support of PNSR Research Associate Kelly Orsini -- to help secure several panels of participants for the one-day event held at Bingham Law Firm.

The picture above captures me in deep-note-taking mode. From left to right, our table included Bob Kravinsky, myself, Gen. Bill Navas, and Amb. Thomas Pickering. For PNSR's summary of the event please see their blog entry.

Task IV Deliverable for Congress

2009-05-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

Doug Orton wants the September Task IV deliverable for Congress to be 700 pages with 14 50-page chapters, 12 of which are populated by 20 problem-solution pairings.

David Ignatius Interview with Gen. James L. Jones

2009-04-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

Two smart people having a conversation about national security reform.

David Ignatius 4/30/09 article in the Washington Post on his interview with the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones.

Response to Rothkopf

2009-04-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

One way to bring people into the national security reform camp is to engage our colleagues in public debates when we have disagreements among ourselves. David Rothkopf had some good things and some bad things to say about the Project on National Security Reform in his 12-page article, "A Thousand Envoys Bloom," in The National Interest. Here is the link to a response that we wrote on April 29, 2009: Contra Rothkopf.

2009-04-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

Washington Post had an interesting "spring cleaning" section on Sunday, April 19, 2009, in which it asked many people to nominate things that should be thrown out.

Thomas Ricks, for whom PNSR has a high degree of respect for his books Fiasco and The Gamble, had the cojones to suggest shutting down West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy -- bravo, sir, bravo! for becoming the encyclopedia entry for thinking waaaaaay outside the box.

It gave me a chance to attack, from a different angle, one of my recurring worries -- how do we grow a national security brain in a system that has never taken the time to do so?

Frances Hardin at PNSR agreed to pick up the argument, which was published in the PNSR blog on Tuesday, April 21, 2009, as follows:

Why we may need to update West Point as part of a larger national security reform

Russia-Georgia Organization Chart Exercise

2009-03-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

There is widespread recognition -- highlighted by Dr. Andrew Krepinevich in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last week -- that the U.S. national security system is not able to generate effective strategy. Here are some ideas about how a "ten-deputy" or "collaborative backbone" NSC structure could build more effective strategy management capacities for the nation.

The loose thought experiment is the Russian-Georgian crisis last summer:

10. U.S. embassy in Georgia is composed of well-trained human capital who are able to work as an interagency country team and because of that cohesiveness are able to sense an imminent Russian invasion.

9. Knowledge management systems and intelligence organizations are well-networked and full of “imaginative” analysts who connect a variety of world-wide dots in order to create a high-performance learning organization.

8. From a key position in the organization, a Jim-Locher-like Executive Secretary guarantees an end-to-end, effective, reliable national security strategy process. When the Russian-Georgian national security event starts to erupt, it encounters a well-managed national security strategy system, not a chaotic, lurching “great-man” driven system.

7. Interagency teams focused on global tasks – e.g. counterproliferation, counternarcotics, working against human trafficking, counterterrorism, etc. – are created by the president as presidential priority teams. These start with a few test cases and then expand to perhaps 50 temporary, mission-driven interagency teams. Leadership is key here; national security executives are necessary to run these interagency teams. Perhaps several of these functional interagency teams are working on issues related to the Russian-Georgian event – e.g. an interagency team focused on missile defenses, an interagency team focused on the International Court system, etc.

6. The “special envoys” that have been created in the last six weeks are leaders of prototypical “theater-focused” interagency teams. The APNSA could quickly convene a Russian-Georgian interagency team, tapping into a group of regional specialists from across the government.

5. One way to break down rigid departmental stovepipes is to have liaisons into high-performing organizations that are subunits, divisions, centers, and agencies. Fifty OMB national security specialists could be retooled as NSC staff members, each with a liaison function into a high-performing, agile, adaptive organization such as the Marines or the Coast Guard. A Russian-Georgian “theater” interagency team could tap into resources from as many as 50 specific components of the national security system.

4. The Russian-Georgian interagency team would be sheltered within a larger regional organization. Instead of wondering whether Russia-Georgia falls between PACOM, EUCOM, and CENTCOM, it makes more sense to me to have nine international regions (loosely allied with nine domestic regions in order to create structural efficiencies and synergies), one of which might be ex-Soviet Union countries.

3. The NSC Deputies Committee is likely to be populated by members of Cabinet departments; a key task for Deputy 3 is to receive policy proposals from the Russian-Georgian interagency team, “deconflict” the proposals with other ongoing policies, and forward final decision recommendations into the Principals Committee of the NSC.

2. The Principals Committee of the NSC is the final holder of the U.S. national security strategy and is responsible for considering, questioning, modifying, and reshaping policy proposals in light of the larger U.S. national security concerns. This is where the presidential national security team makes long-term strategic decisions on behalf of the nation.

1. A single voice for the presidential national security team speaks with Congress, international media, domestic media and other stakeholders on the Russian-Georgian situation. (Note: The value-added of a national security adviser is to coordinate the formation, management, and implementation of U.S. national security strategy – not to be a spokesperson on thousands of decisions that are made each month.)

2. The Principals Committee does not do crisis management, or micro-management, or issue management. Instead, it has strategic decision portfolios for a relatively limited time, then shifts the portfolio downward to NSC Deputies Committee.

3. The NSC Deputies Committee is responsible for strategy formation, and strategy implementation (but the NSC Principals Committee is responsible for the strategy management period between those two roles). A Russia-Georgia decision by the White House presidential national security team is translated into strategy implementation recommendations.

4. Regional interagency centers, such as a Former Soviet Union region, map out additional details and resources necessary for strategy implementation.

5. Departments and agencies are pulled into strategy and policy implementation through liaisons to departments and agencies.

6. The Russia-Georgia interagency team will have been monitoring the entire process and now shifts from their policy formation role to their policy implementation role; they are empowered local actors with high situational awareness, and because they are trusted by the hierarchy above them, they are able to do their job well.

7. Non-regional interagency teams might be called on for support, or might not be directly linked to the Russia-Georgia national security event.

8. Again, a Jim-Locher-like Deputy 8 guarantees, perhaps through the interagency operations analyst function, that U.S. national security strategy is implemented intelligently.

9. Knowledge management and intelligence are not decoupled from implementation by a “wall”; implementation of a policy is likely to trigger new learning as part of the intelligence cycle.

10. Human beings are the sensors at the beginning of a strategy cycle and they are the implementers at the end of a strategy cycle; it is important that they are well-trained, well-socialized; and well-organized in their specific tasks, and in the ability to “plug-and-play” with people of different backgrounds.

I hope this helps.

GWU Doctoral Seminar on a Strategic Backbone

2009-03-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

From 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays at PNSR Headquarters, we've been struggling with a doctoral seminar on High Reliability Organizations.

Tonight we had a "murder board" for two drafts of NSC staff structure organization charts -- one based on current practice and one based on high-end organization and management theory.

The underlying theories for the "leveraged strategic network matrix" or "collaborative backbone" or "strategic backbone" structure are listed briefly below:

1: Strategic Networks: firms, bureaucracies, strategies.

2: NSC Strategy: business strategy, corporate strategy, network strategy.

3: Cabinet Departments: rational, natural, open systems.

4: Regional Policies: rational actor, bureaucratic politics, complex organizational processes.

5: Agency Cultures: integrated cultures, differentiated cultures, fragmented cultures.

6: Theater/State Decisions: macrostrategic decisions, mesostrategic decisions, microstrategic decisions.

7: Interagency Team Leadership: heroic leadership, bureaucratic leadership, strategic leadership.

8: Executive Secretary for System Reform and System Management: teleological, dialectical, evolutionary change.

9: Knowledge Management and Intelligence: single-loop learning, double-loop learning, triple-loop learning.

10. Human Capital: objective, subjective, and enactive reality.

BIA becomes Nation's 50th National Security Agency?

2009-03-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

David Jimenez posted the following observation on the IAFIE listserv on March 24, 2009:

This is the first vacancy I've seen for a 0132 occupational specialty, Intelligence Research Specialist, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs
http://jobsearch.usajobs.gov/ftva.asp?seeker=1&JobID=80096134
There is preference for qualified Native Americans, and also veterans and current federal intelligence analysts. Travel and relocation expenses will be authorized. This vacancy is open to the public.

The significance of this factoid is that one of the recommendations of the Project on National Security Reform was to broaden the definition of national security. Bureau of Indian Affairs is in the Department of the Interior -- a Cabinet Department that is not typically grouped with the "fab five" of Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice.

But after 9/11, the Department of the Interior created a division on Emergency Management.

A few possible fast small wins for the NSC staff:

(1) The Justice Department has an "elite" national security agency (FBI) embedded within it. The Treasury Department could easily regain its elite national security agency (Secret Service) with a stroke of a presidential pen. The Department of Interior could gain its elite national security agency -- FEMA -- with an expertise in natural disasters rather than terrorist acts.

(2) The Department of the Interior as a whole (perhaps 90%) could stay focused on its traditional missions, but anything related to safety and security could benefit from rubbing shoulders with a national security subculture in a "whole-of-government" approach. Appointing one ASNSA -- Assistant to the Secretary for National Security Affairs -- for each of the fifteen Cabinet Departments would help facilitate these interactions. Who at Department of Interior is the deputy to the Secretary who has the most responsibility within national security affairs?

(3) The PNSR 2008 report calls for an integrated national security budget. Will this lone intelligence officer in the Bureau of Indian Affairs show up as a line on that budget? When will that budget be released?

Impressive Interagency Effort on Mexican Drug Cartels

2009-03-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

Notice that Napolitano is a Cabinet Secretary, and she briefs with two "national security deputies" ("Assistants to the Secretary for National Security Affairs"?) from State and Justice, on a plan that also includes components of Treasury (ATF) and Defense.

Obama lays out US-Mexico border strategyBoston Globe Posted by Foon Rhee, deputy national political editor March 24, 2009 10:15 AM
The Obama administration today is laying out a sweeping plan to deal with the deteriorating security at the border with Mexico, which is being breached by drug cartel gangs bringing horrific violence to the United States.
Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, her deputy Jim Steinberg, and Deputy Attorney General David Ogden are briefing reporters this morning on what the White House calls a "comprehensive response to the situation along the border with Mexico."
"President Obama and his administration are focused on all aspects of the US relationship with Mexico because it is vital to core US national interests," the White House says in a summary of the plan. "The president is concerned by the increased level of violence, particularly in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, and the impact that it is having on the communities on both sides of the border. He believes that the United States must continue to monitor the situation and guard against spillover into the United States. And the president is firmly committed to ensuring our borders are secure and we are doing all we can to reduce illegal flows in both direction across the border."
The White House also says that Obama "admires President Calderon’s courage and determination to confront and dismantle the drug cartels and we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him in that fight. Mexico undoubtedly faces serious challenges, but it is vigorously confronting them. Mexico's drug-related violence is carried out among the warring cartels and against government forces. To the extent we have seen related violence in the United States it has been cartel-on-cartel."
Among the highlights of the plan, the administration says it will spend $700 million this year to work in collaboration with Mexico on law enforcement and courts. Also the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury are increasing personnel and efforts directed at the Southwest border. And the White House it is renewing the commitment to reduce the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.
More detail on the proposals is below:
We are investing $700 million this year in enhancing Mexican law enforcement and judicial capacity and working closely to coordinate our efforts against the cartels.
· Congress has appropriated (FY08 Supp, FY09 Omnibus) $700 million to support Mexico’s security and institution building efforts under the Merida Initiative. These funds will help to improve law enforcement, crime prevention and strengthen institution building and rule of law. That money will provide:o Increased capacity for Mexican border security efforts to help stem illegal flows in both directions across the border;o Non-intrusive inspection technology to enhance Mexican interdiction efforts;o Training for rule of law and judicial reform efforts;o Information technology to enable Mexican prosecutors, law enforcement, and immigration officials to communicate securely;o 5 helicopters to increase air mobility for the Mexican Army and Air Force, and a surveillance aircraft for the Mexican Navy.o Support and training for implementation of Mexico’s new legal system and to strengthen observance of human rights by judicial authorities and police; ando Help for Mexican prosecutors’ offices to develop an effective witness and victim protection programs.
· DoD has been and is continuing to work with its Mexican counterparts to increase information sharing, interoperability, and training and equipping of counternarcotics forces.
· The Administration is committed to working with Congress to ensure that we fully fund our commitments under the Merida Initiative.
· We are also coordinating our efforts with the Mexican government through regular high-level contact and at a working level with nine Merida Initiative working groups overseeing implementation.
We are moving to more effectively disrupt illegal flows of weapons and bulk cash to Mexico and to ensure that our border security remains resistant to the flow of drugs and violence into the United States.
· DHS is developing a plan to supplement resources on the southwest border that includes the following elements:o Doubling Border Enforcement Security Task Forces (BEST) teams that incorporate foreign, federal and state/local law enforcement and intelligence officerso Tripling DHS Intelligence Analysts working along the Southwest Bordero Increasing ICE attaché staff in Mexico in support of Mexican law enforcement effortso Doubling Violent Criminal Alien teams located in Southwest Border Field Officeso Quadrupling the number of Border Liaison Officers working with Mexican law enforcement entitieso Bolstering Secure Communities Biometric Identification capabilitieso Increasing southbound rail examinationso Enhancing the use of technology at ports of entry, including backscatter mobile x-rayo Increasing the number of canine units operating on the SW Bordero Increasing engagement with state and local Southwest border law enforcemento Making up to $59 million in current Operation Stonegarden funding available to enhance state, local and tribal law enforcement operations and assets along the bordero Increasing the use of mobile license plate readers for Southbound traffic on the SW Border
· DHS is also continuing Armas Cruzadas – A DHS/ICE-led bilateral law enforcement and intelligence-sharing operation to thwart export of arms from US into Mexico
· DOJ is confronting the criminal enterprises responsible for violence in Mexico and trafficking drugs, illegal arms and bulk cash across the Southwest border.The Mexican Cartel Strategy, led by the Deputy Attorney General, is· Working with federal prosecutor-led task forces that bring together all DOJ and DHS law enforcement components to identify, disrupt and dismantle the Mexican drug cartels through investigation, prosecution, and extradition of their key leaders and facilitators, and seizure and forfeiture of their assets;· Increasing focus on investigations and prosecutions of the southbound smuggling of guns and cash that fuel the violence and corruption;· Addressing any instances of spill-over violence into the U.S.; and· Attacking the cartels in Mexico itself, in partnership with Mexico’s PGR and SSP.
DEA is increasing its efforts:· Placing 16 new positions in its Southwest border field divisions (29% of DEA’s domestic agent positions (1,171 agents) are now allocated to the DEA’s Southwest border field divisions.· DEA is forming four additional Mobile Enforcement Teams (METs) to specifically target Mexican methamphetamine trafficking operations and associated violence, both along the border and in U.S. cities impacted by the cartels.
o ATF is increasing its efforts by:· Relocating 100 personnel to the SW border in the next 45 days, using dedicated resources from the economic stimulus, to fortify its Project Gunrunner aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico that has resulted in ATF referring more than 1,500 defendants for prosecution involving more than 12,000 weapons; and· Continuing its eTrace Initiative which works with Mexican officials to forensically track weapons used in drug cartel violence. In FY07, Mexico submitted approximately 1,112 guns for tracing that originated in TX, AZ and CA.
FBI is stepping up its efforts along the SW Border by:· Creating a Southwest Intelligence Group (SWIG), a clearinghouse of all FBI activities involving Mexico;· Increasing its focus on public corruption, kidnappings, and extortion relating to SW border issues; and· Continuing its successful implementation of the Central American Fingerprint Exchange (CAFÉ) initiative -- which was developed to collect, store, and integrate biometric data from El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and the Mexican state of Chiapas into a central database accessible to US law enforcement -- as well as the Transnational Anti-Gang initiative -- which coordinates the sharing of gang intelligence between the U.S. and El Salvador.
OJP – Office of Justice Programs – is investing $30 million in stimulus funding to assist with state and local law enforcement to combat narcotics activity along the Southern border and in High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, and
OCDETF – DOJ’s Organized Drug Enforcement Task Forces Program – is adding personnel to its strike force capacity along the Southwest border.
We are making concerted efforts to cut off funding for Mexican drug cartels.· Operation Firewall – A DHS-led comprehensive law enforcement operation targeting criminal organizations involved in the smuggling of large quantities of US currency.
· Treasury has made targeting the financial networks of Mexican drug trafficking organizations a top priority and is committed to continuing to work with the Mexican government to disrupt drug money laundering operations. This includes continuing to pursue the use of Treasury authorities including the Kingpin Designation Act.
· Treasury and other departments and agencies are collaborating closely with Mexico to analyze cross-border cash flows to try to distinguish legitimate activity from drug money laundering and other illicit transactions, as well as to support financial aspects of investigations by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement.
· Treasury continues to provide the Mexican government with training on how to conduct financial analysis and financial investigations of drug cartels activities, examination of financial institutions and certain Merida-supported IT investments.
We are renewing our commitment to reduce the demand for illegal drugs here at home.
· Approximately $5 billion have been committed in the previous year for initiatives to reduce illicit drug use within our borders.
· The Obama Administration is focusing on integrating substance abuse services into national healthcare systems with early screening, diagnosis and intervention as regular preventative medicine to reach the millions of patients who need treatment, and as a means to prevent millions more from becoming dependent.
· Expanding treatment capacity of drug courts in the United States is a priority of the Obama Administration. The FY09 Omnibus includes $63.9 million for drug courts that bring judicial, law enforcement, and treatment communities, as well as other social and public services together with the goal of breaking a non-violent offender’s drug addiction

The Krepinevich Recommendation: Bring Back OCB

2009-03-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

Dr. Krepinevich in hearings on Thursday suggested that we bring back the Eisenhower Operations Coordinating Board. The National Archives Record Center has a description of the OCB:

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ShowOrganizationsFullRecord?%24submitId=1&%24showFullAuthorityTabs.selectedPaneId=&%24showAuthorityResultsTabs.selectedPaneId=&%24resultsDetailPageModel.pageSize=1&%24resultsDetailPageModel.search=true&%24highlight=false&%24resultsPartitionPageModel.search=true&%24resultsPartitionPageModel.targetModel=true&%24resultsSummaryPageModel.pageSize=10&%24resultsSummaryPageModel.targetModel=true&%24searchId=5&%24partitionIndex=0&%24resultsDetailPageModel.currentPage=0

Hope that link works -- it's so long . . .

Quick Notes on Interagency Teams

2009-03-20T14:30:00.001-07:00

(1) Moving the focus away from the President toward the presidential national security team (or NSC) is a way to “unburden” an “overburdened” president.
(2) Creating a strengthened APNSA (such as George H.W. Bush did with Brent Scowcroft – they wrote Bush’s memoirs together) creates an interagency team.
(3) The Principals Committee of the NSC is an interagency team that holds in their heads the constantly changing U.S. national security strategy.
(4) The Deputies Committee of the NSC is an interagency team that must meet regularly on a wide variety of strategy formation and strategy implementation issues.
(5) Chris Lamb at NDU makes a strong point that lead agencies, czars and interagency policy committees will not work:
(6) A “lead agency” in which, for example, DHS is given the lead on counterterrorism efforts, swamp the team with departmental perspectives.
(7) Czars might be able to gather around them weak groups that might be less cohesive than an interagency team.
(8) An Interagency Policy Committee is more formal than an interagency team – tends toward permanence, and participants protect bureaucratic equities.
(9) The PNSR legal team did an excellent job of creating a draft charter on how an interagency team might be set up – not a lead agency, not a czar, not an IPC
(10) Departments are in some ways interagency teams because they have liaison capabilities to other departments, e.g. Defense to Homeland Security and to State.
(11) All of the Cabinet departments have geographic substructures around geography – domestic and international – regional interagency policy specialist teams occur frequently.
(12) PACOM, AFRICOM, EUCOM, SOUTHCOM, and CENTCOM are distributed interagency teams, outside of Washington.
(13) Agencies are in some ways interagency teams through their capacity to link up with multiple Cabinet departments, regional policy teams, and other agencies.
(14) “Theaters” and “Fusion Centers” often build up interagency capacities below regions, but above embassies.
(15) The prototypical interagency team for the PNSR study was the embassy country team, led by an ambassador reporting to the President.
(16) The embassy country team requires a symmetrical unit within the U.S. under DHS at the level of incident response teams in Congressional districts.
(17) The theory underlying the PNSR report is one of decentralization by pushing response capabilities to local situational awareness.
(18) But, we weren’t able to push things that far down in the system, and compromised with the concept of “presidential priority teams” in Washington.
(19) The language used in the final recommendation was to begin the process of shifting toward a hierarchy of nested interagency teams.
(20) The Obama team has already created a wide array of interagency teams.

PNSR Lovefest on Capitol Hill Today

2009-03-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Armed Services Committee held a subcommittee meeting focused on the Project on National Security Reform.

Here is the opening statement from the Chair of the Subcommittee, Dr. Snyder:

http://armedservices.house.gov/apps/list/speech/armedsvc_dem/snyderos031909.shtml
And here are links to testimony PDFs and video and audio of the hearing:

Thursday, March 19, 2009 –1:00 pm – 2212 Rayburn – Open
The Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee will meet to receive testimony on the Project on National Security Reform: Commentary and Alternative Views.
· Subcommittee Chairman Snyder’s Opening Statement
· Video Webcast
· Audiocast

Witnesses:
Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. (pdf)
President
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Dr. I. M. (Mac) Destler (pdf)
Saul I. Stern Professor, School of Public Policy
University of Maryland

Mr. Walter Oleszek (pdf)
Senior Specialist in American National Government
Congressional Research Service

We're letting the dust settle a bit before commenting, if necessary, on the formal PNSR blog.

My general sense is that the recommendations related to Congress were a case of us overstretching into an arena we could not master from a distance; Rep. Susan Davis and Rep. Geoff Davis have staff and colleagues who can shape better Congressional reforms than PNSR was able to do from a distance. Perhaps we should consider all of the PNSR Theme Team 7 recommendations as "placeholders" and use today's hearing as a prod to engage congressional institutional scholars and scholars of national security oversight in a conversation on what 10 solutions should be pursued by PNSR during the Obama administration: (1) an updated National Security Act complete document that reshapes PNSR 2008 report into specific language; (2) more attention to global organizations; (3) more attention to the mechanics of the legislative branch; (4) more attention to the mechanics of the judicial branch; and (5) more attention to strategic communications from the NSC into the international media arena and the American people.

There is a relatively urgent need to build on Dr. Destler's and Dr. Krepinevich's largely supportive testimony before the subcommittee. Destler has a lot to tell us about the recommendations on "strengthening the APNSA" and "replacing the current NSC and HSC with a strengthened NSC." Krepinevich has a lot to tell us about making strategy formation, strategy management, and strategy implementation more central to the NSC staff's day-to-day operations. Destler, Krepinevich, and I are all on the same page -- but the system rigidities are still firmly locked in place.

Let's push one small win a day -- much like the new "drip irrigation" systems.

We have some numbers on NSC budgets coming out in April: NSC is authorized for 71 employees at a cost of $9.029 million. There are huge incentives for honesty in accounting these days: the Obama administration has determined to budget the true cost to U.S. taxpayers of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on this morning's news the Obama administration has decided to stop the processes of "stop-loss" in order to account more accurately for soldiers' commitments. In this climate of honest accounting, the practice of "detailing" 155 people to the NSC staff no longer makes sense.

If 71 people cost the U.S. government $9.029 million, then the cost per employee is $127,179 per year. If we take the 155 detailees off of State, Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence, and other federal budgets and put them in a more honest accounting position in the NSC staff structure (multiplying 226 by $127,179), the Obama administration should be asking for a budget of $28.740 million. It is not an increase in the budget, it is a correction to the NSC budget to reflect real costs that have been borne by other components of the government for years.

And, to make sure the practice of "detailing" does not creep back into the NSC, a new rule could be established: only direct NSC employees are allowed to have offices in NSC headquarters. "Detailees" are free to visit for a variety of reasons, but they will not be given office space.

Adm. Blair's Threat Assessment: Implications

2009-03-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

Today the former Deputy Executive Director for the Project on National Security Reform, and current Director of National Intelligence, issued the final copy of the threat assessment he delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The report is a round-the-world tour of diverse international security challenges faced by the United States and other countries. It ends with a conclusion that refers to the importance of U.S. participation in multi-lateral organizations:

Conclusion

The international security environment is complex. No dominant adversary faces the United States that threatens our existence with military force, but the global financial crises has exacerbated what was already a growing set of political and economic uncertainties. We are nevertheless in a strong position to shape a world reflecting universal aspirations and values that have motivated Americans since 1776: human rights; the rule of law; liberal market economics and social justice. Whether we can succeed will depend on actions we take here at home—restoring strong economic growth and maintaining our scientific and technological edge and defending ourselves at reasonable cost in dollars without violating our civil liberties. It will also depend on our actions abroad, not only in how we deal with regions, regimes and crises, but also in developing new multilateral systems, formal or informal, for effective international cooperation in trade and finance, in neutralizing extremist groups using terrorism, in controlling the proliferation of WMD, developing codes of conduct for cyberspace and space, and in mitigating and slowing global climate change.

The statement about "defending ourselves at reasonable cost in dollars without violating our civil liberties" is a good reminder that the PNSR 2008 report was largely completed before the economic crisis became the nation's dominant national security event.

But for today's discussion, the concluding call for "new multilateral systems" is a suggestion that PNSR might need to establish an issue team to look more closely at international cooperative national security networks.

An early indicator that there might be a hole in the PNSR 2008 report's "solution set" is a section of the report labeled Appendix 7: Sources of Insights on Alternatives" (pp. 603-613). The first two sections of this appendix focus on "Alternatives from Other Countries" (Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and The European Union) and subsequent "Observations" (pp. 603-608).

A second indicator was the visibility given to Susan Rice in Chicago on December 1, 2008, in the roll-out of the Obama national security team. Placing the U.N. Ambassador on the stage with the Secretaries of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and the Attorney General was a strong signal that multilateral organizations would be important to the new national security team.

Today's Dennis Blair testimony is a third indicator that more attention should be paid by a PNSR issue team to the topic of international cooperation.

Analytically, this new issue team should probably fall under PNSR's "Theme Team 7" -- which is primarily concerned with relationships between the legislative and executive branch. The theoretical base for multilateral global organizations and the relationship between the executive and legislative branches is Network Strategy theory: how do organizations influence assets that they do not own or control?

Practically, though, this new issue team should probably fall into PNSR's "Theme Team 3" -- which is primarily focused on the creation of interagency teams or presidential priority teams: e.g. (1) "in neutralizing extremist groups using terrorism;" (2) "in controlling the proliferation of WMD"; and (3) "developing codes of conduct for space and cyberspace." John Brennan appears to be the eighth counterterrorism czar -- e.g. Clarke, Beers, Zarate, and Brennan; Gary Samore appears to be the first WMD counterproliferation czar; and it is not clear who will be the space czar or the cyberspace czar. Converting czars to interagency teams might open up the cognitive space to expand to create the effective multilateral organizational cooperation that Blair called for today.

2009-03-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

One of the recommendations from the Project on National Security Reform's 2008 report is the creation of a process for a Quadrennial Presidential National Security Review.

Where could this be done? There are five options:

(1) One option, perhaps the original option envisioned by the PNSR's Guiding Coalition, is for the newly elected president to convene a trusted group of perhaps 15 national security executives, professionals, and scholars to do a quick two-month National Security Review between the election in November and the inauguration in January.

(2) My preferred option is to treat the Project on National Security Reform's effort from December 2005 to November 2008 as the first Quadrennial Presidential National Security Review. It was nonpartisan, serious, and it wasn't clear until the last minute who the president would be in 2009. Under this model, the Project on National Security Reform has now rebooted and started work on a PNSR 2012 Report, to be followed by PNSR 2016, 2020, 2024, etc. Perhaps Congress could "buy out" PNSR from its current 501(c)3 status to become a routinized nonpartisan organization responsible for delivering 800-page reports every four years that can be used by new administrations.

(3) A third option is to task the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies with the Quadrennial President National Security Review. Currently -- and probably forever -- the National Defense University is portrayed as the think tank of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But if one day, a future president, or national security advisor, or secretary of defense, or chairman of the joint chiefs, and a lot of people in Congress wake up feeling especially patriotic one day, they might transfer the keys to NDU to the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and change the name of the campus to National Security University. But nothing in my experience with Washington leads me to believe that such a thing is likely to happen. Analytically, though, it is the right thing to do.

(4) Perhaps because of its distance from Washington, the Naval Postgraduate School seems to have "gone interagency" faster than NDU has. The 213 masters theses from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security are a rich treasure trove of ideas for national security reform. (I am still looking for a doctoral student to do a meta-analysis of these theses as a dissertation.) NPS could be tasked with a Presidential National Security Review.

(5) Finally, the Department of Defense's Office of Policy and Plans has a veritable army of strategists -- the number I hear is 1500 people. Douglas Feith's book, War and Decision, is the best window I have seen into that odd little corner of the taxpayer-funded universe. Just imagine what PNSR could have done with 1500 strategists with office space, office support, masters degrees, doctorates, and full-time research assistants! So now Michele Flournoy has become the new leader of this talented and well-funded organization . . .

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/09/flournoys_pentagon_policy_shop

Perhaps the Office of Policy and Plans is a good place to produce the Quadrennial Presidential National Security Review for January 2012 -- and perhaps that is a higher priority than the more stovepiped "Quadrennial Defense Review."

United Nations University

2009-03-07T13:44:00.000-08:00

There was a discussion January 13, 2009, on the United Nations University website, of the role of internal management consultants in the UN.

http://www.ony.unu.edu/

It might be possible to glean from the presentation some received wisdom about the management of cross-national organizations.

White House PSD-1 Meeting Today

2009-03-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

John Brennan, Randy Beardsworth, and Michelle Malvesti hosted a meeting of perhaps 30-35 national security executives from across the federal government at the White House from 1:00-2:00 today:

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/06/more_reviews_merging_the_homeland_security_and_national_security_councils

As more information about the meeting becomes available through open sources, I will flesh out a page on the topic at pnsr.wikispaces.com

National Security Reform: A Second Opinion

2009-03-04T16:37:00.000-08:00

Here is a March 3, 2009, blog entry on History News Network that links Gen. Jones and PNSR: blog entry

Here is the web site for Dr. Nelson: http://www.american.edu/cas/hist/faculty/nelson.htm

On Wednesday, March 4, I wrote the first draft of a History News Network short article building on Dr. Anna Kasten Nelson's posting from March 3. The article was published on March 9 as follows: http://hnn.us/articles/66054.html

After submitting the article late on Thursday night, I made a few small editorial changes to the blog entry and posted them here -- I consider this to be the "final version" of the article:

NATIONAL SECURITY REFORM: A SECOND OPINION

In her March 3 blog entry, Dr. Anna Kasten Nelson makes the helpful observation that there have been a series of efforts to reform the U.S. national security system enacted through the National Security Act of 1947.

However, Professor Nelson asserts that National Security Advisor Gen. James L. Jones, who was one of the Project on National Security Reform’s Guiding Coalition members, “clearly agrees with the report’s conclusion that the national security of the United States, that the security of the country is fundamentally at risk, because the 1947 process is obsolete.” This, though, is the starting premise for the PNSR study – not its conclusion. Few national security scholars or national security executives would argue – after the federal government’s dismal performance before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, during the war in Iraq, and after Hurricane Katrina – that the existing national security system is a high-performing organization.

Dr. Nelson worries that PNSR’s recommendations for the creation of an effective national security system might lead to a “full-blown national security state.” Isn’t it possible, though, to build a future system that is simultaneously effective and not a national security-state?

Dr. Nelson identifies five “incorrect” assumptions on which the Obama administration’s national security reform effort is built (using a Washington Post interview with Gen. Jones published on February 8, 2009, as tea leaves for what might actually be occurring). But perhaps the assumptions aren’t quite as incorrect as Dr. Nelson believes them to be:

· The “Chicken Little” Assumption. “First is the assumption that the United States is now at far greater risk from its enemies than ever before.” The PNSR report is not alarmist. Rather, the report concludes the nature of the security environment has changed from dealing with one large state actor (the Soviet Union) to a wide variety of diverse, complex, and turbulent threats. And the danger identified in the report is not external, but managerial – in which the current national security system is unworkable. I think Dr. Nelson is 40% correct here: PNSR noted a changed environment, but not a more dangerous environment.

· The “Automatically Adaptive” Assumption. “A second assumption is that because the membership of the NSC is set in statute, it remained static while the world changed around it.” Richard Best, Cody Brown, and Matt Shabat, each produced effective studies for PNSR of the subtle changes in NSC composition from one presidential administration to another. David Rothkopf’s Running the World is a good portrait of these changes, focusing primarily on personalities instead of structures. While numerous changes have taken place within the general 1947 NSC “regime,” the fundamental conditions remain in place: there is no Congressional integrative committee for complex, interagency national security problems; the NSC staff is ephemeral, small, and powerless; cabinet secretaries are motivated to represent, protect, and expand their own agency interests; and the U.S. government routinely fails at complex contingencies (e.g. preventing a 9/11 attack, merging military-civilian capabilities in Iraq, and effectively coordinating complex networks of assets in Katrina). I think Dr. Nelson is 50% correct here: PNSR noted that the 1947 regime constrained the numerous small changes that occurred within the system over the years.

· The “Same-Ol’-Same-Ol’” Assumption. Dr. Nelson drops out of her task of identifying incorrect assumptions for a moment to offer a different critique: “Third, many of the ‘new’ changes are old ones with new hats.” Dr. Nelson is correct to note that a key finding of PNSR’s report calls for effective interagency teams. All of PNSR’s recommendations are based on the assumption that it is important to shift away from an “overburdened” president to “empowered” interagency teams. For many years, numerous voices within the national security system have called for decentralized, cross-functional interagency teams. While inter-agency teams are not a new concept, PNSR’s proposals would be much more comprehensive across government agencies and operate with clearer mandates. I think Dr. Nelson is 60% correct here: PNSR tried to do “out-of-the-box” work, but might have ended up championing the concept of more effective interagency teams.

· The “Evil Genius” Assumption. Dr. Nelson goes out on a limb in her evaluation of Gen. Jones’ ambitions: “Jones evidently intends to be a policy maker as well as the coordinator who brings everyone’s view to the president, the traditional function of the national security adviser.” The PNSR report noted that some NSC advisors (Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Condoleezza Rice) defined themselves as brilliant foreign policy strategists, while others (George Bundy, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell) defined themselves as reliable national security managers. It would be out of character for a non-partisan Marine general, who was considered by both Sen. John McCain and President Barack Obama as a candidate to head the NSC staff, to suddenly transform into a Kissinger, Brzezinski, or Rice. I think Dr. Nelson is 10% correct here: it will be necessary to strengthen the role of the national security advisor and his staff, but only in order to decentralize decision-making to parts of the federal government that are closer to the issues.

· The “Great Man” Assumption. Perhaps it is good historical practice to emphasize people over institutions: “Good policy comes from the people who make it. When policies fail, it is time for new policy not for another round of reorganization.” The PNSR study encountered very early on a Washington bias for “great man” leadership – the assumption that all good outcomes result from the leader and all that is necessary to create good results is to hire good people. Most of the data in the report show this bias is incorrect: good people trapped in an ineffective system are not able to produce good outcomes. The U.S. has a long history of “liberating” people from ineffective systems: the American Revolution against the British Colonial system, World War II against the Nazi system, the Cold War against the Soviet system, and world support of Nelson Mandela against the South Africa’s apartheid system. An internal PNSR motto over the past two years was “the next president, whoever he or she may be, deserves a Ferrari of a national security system.” I think that Dr. Nelson is 20% correct here: bad leaders in a good system might not produce good results, but good leaders in a good system can produce excellent results.

We need more scholars like Dr. Nelson to focus their intellectual firepower on the topic of national security reform. She is, to average my five rough calculations, partially (36%) correct in her arguments about the incorrectness of the assumptions of the PNSR report. The greatest dangers would be for national security reform to slip away unnoticed or for it to be misinterpreted as a desire for greater centralization of power in the White House – something that is antithetical to the PNSR analysis and recommendations. Gen. Jones, perhaps unlike the 18 national security advisors who preceded him, has an extraordinary opportunity to reform the U.S. national security system. The important question is whether he will improve it or make it worse. As Dr. Nelson correctly points out, effective national security reform is not an easy task.

The Rothkopf Analytical Approach: A Taste

2009-02-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

I often recommend David Rothkopf's book, Running the World, as a "soap-opera" history of the APNSA position, because it works from a theory of ephemeral interpersonal relationships, rather than from a theory of system functions and dysfunctions.

He, is, though -- one of only a handful of people who have paid the dues to become an expert on the history of the NSC staff. Other credible members of this club are probably Amy Zegart, Bob Woodward, Ivo Daalder, and Tom Blanton. Many of us can make claims to know specific administrations: e.g. I have studied Bundy, Scowcroft, Rice, Hadley, and Jones. Few can claim to have studied all of the national security administrations since 1953.

Here is a wonderful example of Rothkopf's analytical approach -- light-hearted, detailed, slightly mocking, but not yet chock-full of solutions:

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/02/27/a_national_security_council_everyone_can_love_or_at_least_be_a_member_of

Ten Questions on 2/23/09 PSD-1 Distribution List

2009-02-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

Ten Questions on 2/23/09 PSD-1 Distribution List

The 29 recipients of the PSD-1 are listed in an order that might be seen as acknowledging the date of Cabinet-level departments’ creation, which is not a very useful organizational technique.

Instead, it might be more helpful to use a segmentation by (1) White House Leadership Team; (2) APNSA people; (3) Core National Security Departments (Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice); and (4) “Broadened” Cabinet offices (Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, etc.); and (5) supportive functions with NSC membership (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and DNI, DCIA).

(1) White House Team (7)
The Vice President
The Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff
The Counsel to the President
The Director of the Office of Management and Budget
The Assistant to the President for Economic Policy
The Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy
The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy

(2) Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (2)
The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
The Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism

(3) Core National Security Departments and Sub-Departments (6)
The Secretary of the Treasury
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
The Secretary of Homeland Security
The Attorney General
The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

(4) Broadened Scope of National Security (11)
Partly International (left of core five):
The Secretary of Commerce
The Secretary of Energy
The Secretary of Transportation
The Secretary of the Interior
The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
Primarily Domestic (right of core five):
The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
The Secretary of Education
The Secretary of Agriculture
The Secretary of Labor
The Secretary of Health & Human Services
The Secretary of Veterans Affairs

(5) Traditional Additional Members of the National Security Council (3)
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The Director of National Intelligence
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Here are ten organizational questions raised by the distribution list:

(1) Where is the Office of National Drug Control Policy? This was listed in the previous administration’s website as a Cabinet-level office. The ONDCP has many links into national security (defined broadly to include domestic security and international security). Perhaps this organization has been subsumed into the responsibilities of the The Secretary of Agriculture. This would help streamline the Cabinet.

(2) Where is the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative? Again, this was listed in the previous administration as a Cabinet-level office. Perhaps the Office of the Trade Representative has been subsumed into the Department of Commerce. This would help streamline the Cabinet.

(3) Why is the Director of the Central Intelligence elevated above the other 15 members of the intelligence community (NRO, NGA, DIA, etc.)? Is it because the other 15 departments and agencies have Cabinet-Secretary representation already? Is it because the CIA is historically a “first-among-equals” in the intelligence community? Is it because the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency will be treated as a second intelligence community member on the National Security Council? Treating the Director of the Central Agency as a deputy to the Director of National Intelligence might be helpful.

(4) Why is the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation elevated above key sub-departments in the other four core Departments in the national security system: Treasury, State, Defense, and Homeland Security? Symmetry and organizational dynamics suggest that a leader can be shored up by a strong, slightly tangential subunit, sub-department, or agency embedded within the Cabinet Department.

(5) Is there a way to embed the EPA into an ongoing department to streamline the Cabinet structure? Perhaps the EPA could be absorbed into the Department of the Interior. This might seem outside the scope of the PNSR study, but remember that a key finding of the study was an “overburdened president.” Anything that can streamline the number of direct reports to the president can help increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability of the U.S. national security system.

(6) Much of the memo makes it clear that APHSA John Brennan will be acting as a strong deputy to APNSA Gen. James L. Jones, but there is a vestigial position in place for The Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.
(7) Where is Carole Browner’s Energy and Environment Council? We have grown accustomed in press coverage of the emerging administration to the triad of Summers (short-term crisis), Jones (mid-term crisis), and Browner (long-term crisis). Instead, though, here we see the The Assistant for the President for Domestic Policy.

(8) What role will the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations play in this administration’s organizational structure? On December 1, 2008, President Obama introduced five core members of his national security team: Clinton, Gates, Napolitano, and Holder, and Susan Rice at the United Nations. Perhaps the new administration has determined that Rice’s work will be subsumed under the work of the Secretary of State.

(9) Why wasn’t the FEMA Director listed as a recipient of an important document on “Organizing for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism”? There has been a great deal of discussion about whether FEMA should be left within DHS or pulled out of DHS and re-established as a separate agency; there has been no discussion of another possible option of placing the organization as a powerful “deputy agency” within another Cabinet Department, such as the Department of the Interior.

(10) How can we explain the lack of geographic expertise in the distribution list? The Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Secretary of the Army all report to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Combatant Commanders report to the President and the Secretary of Defense and are building geographic competence at EUCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM, SOUTHCOM, AFRICOM, and NORTHCOM. Presumably Treasury, State, Homeland Security, and Justice are also structured by geography below the level of Cabinet Secretary. Because National Security is by definition a geographic task – in which threats originate somewhere (externall or internally), meander through a wide variety of geographic spaces, and land somewhere (internally or externally), it is striking that this memo has not been sent to anybody with a focused geographic area of responsibility.

Open Letter to GWU Doctoral Students Studying Leadership

2009-02-24T11:44:00.001-08:00

Dear GWU Foggy Bottom Doctoral Students,

We have seven implementation teams furiously scrambling to put out papers by April. One of the teams is charged with leadership development.

If you and your colleagues are continuing to become experts on leadership under Vijay's mentoring, perhaps on a Thursday from 4 to 6 you could send a delegation that I could introduce to Myra Shiplett -- who is the leader of our Human Capital implementation team.

The blog -- DrNatSecMgt.blogspot.com and the wiki -- pnsr.wikispaces.com -- are the best way to keep track of what I'm working on.

Here is an article by a woman that I am trying to recruit to work with you and your colleagues along these lines:
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=505971

Given a choice between seeing you and your colleagues in Ashburn or here in Ballston, I'd prefer to meet with you here in Ballston.

Doug Orton
703 387-7623

Afghanistan as a Beta-Test of Interagency Team Processes

2009-02-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

Today we used a Homeland Security Policy Institute brief on Afghanistan as a trigger to flesh out a March 1, 2009 background paper on Recommendation 3.A. -- Initiate Downward Shift toward Interagency Teams.

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/March+1,+2009

One of the puzzles of the Afghanistan team being led by Holbrooke, Riedel, Flournoy, and McKiernan (presumably) is whether Holbrooke is reporting to the Secretary of State or to the NSC. Under a generous definition of the NSC as the president's national security team, this is a false dichotomy. Under the traditional, person-centered, and stovepiped routines of the national security system, Holbrooke reports to Steinberg who reports to Clinton who reports to the President, who is advised by Jones.

Soon there will be a PNSR Issue Team addressing the puzzles of "presidential priority teams" -- the intent here is to get the puzzles on the map for more thorough exploration in the March 1, 2009, slot.

New Paper on Homeland Security Intelligence (HSINT)

2009-02-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

(2/17/09, GWU Office, Ashburn VA, 3:25-3:41 p.m.)

The Congressional Research Service has some strong scholars on national security management, and they are much better than I am at writing comprehensible short, timely papers.

One of the 16 intelligence agencies under the management of Adm. Dennis Blair is the Department of Homeland Security. DHS can be exploded into perhaps ten additional components: ICE, CBP, Secret Service, TSA, Coast Guard, etc. So are there 26 intelligence agencies or 16 agencies? Some of the agencies are producers of intelligence, some are consumers of intelligence, and some are simultaneously producers and consumers of intelligence.

The CRS paper, though, does not attack the question of "cataloguing" of national security agencies, but instead introduces a new "INT" classification, "HSINT."

How many INTs can you name? -- including the comical "RUMINT" -- Rumor Intelligence.

Does each intelligence stovepipe get to have its own "INT" -- MASINT for NGA? HUMINT for CIA? SIGINT for NSA?

Or do all of the intelligence stovepipes get access to all of the INTs, such as OSINT?

The HSINT paper ends with a footnote 63 that makes the case that the HSINT community should be a high reliability organization, so make sure you get to footnote 63 -- the bridge between HRO research and National Security Management practices is an important one to build:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL33616.pdf

Thank you, CRS, for taking an organization and management theory approach to the topic of HSINT.

The Ubiquitousness of Audacious Hopes for the Obama-Jones PDD-1

2009-02-18T13:44:00.001-08:00

The National Journal has an intriguing list of experts who comment each week on a provocative topic posted on the blog. Yesterday's topic consisted of speculation about the forthcoming Obama-Jones NSPD-1 or PDD-1. See the discussion at the following address:

http://security.nationaljournal.com/2009/02/a-more-powerful-nsc.php?rss=1

Here is my reworking of six commentators' ideas:

The Ubiquitousness of Audacious Hopes for the Obama-Jones PDD-1

Corine Hegland’s framing of Gen. Jones’ extraordinary speech in Munich on February 8, 2009 as a movement toward a “more powerful NSC” and “a stronger NSC” that “would [have] a voice in nearly everything the U.S. government does,” through its “ambitious agenda and additional White House power, “ might be a bit premature. President Obama’s national security decision directive number 1 (NSPD-1 or PDD-1) has not yet been released. Six commentators, though, have a wide range of expectations for the forthcoming NSC system, sorted below from low to high:

Ron Marks hopes for an empowered Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA) and a better balance between international security and domestic security. The President can help determine how effective the APNSA will be: “If Obama leaves open access to the Oval Office to all comers then Jones is just a paper pusher. If Obama can restrain himself and keep Jones squarely in the mix, then he has a fighting chance; the chance to set up an NSC that lays out the broad outlines for a new American foreign policy -- one of engagement versus confrontation and one with a moral character befitting the status of a world power.” Furthermore, Marks calls for the combination of domestic security and international security: “From FISA to the collection of intelligence on individuals/groups at home, and to information passed to the 17,000 state and local authorities in the United States, US national security needs comprehensive guidance that only a wholly framed and properly balanced NSC organization and strategy can bring.”

Mac Thornberry hopes for an NSC focused on strategy formation and strategy implementation: “Our government must be able to utilize the full range of instruments of national power and influence, breaking down the stovepipes which prevent us from operating as effectively as we could. The NSC is where it all comes together, but my guess is that more changes than those outlined will be required to get all of the relevant agencies working in concert.”

Hillary Mann Leverett hopes that the new NSC system will be more strategic: “I am convinced that the most fundamental deficit in the current NSC system is the inability of that system to come up with big, strategic ideas around which the President can structure his foreign policy…. Unfortunately, the current NSC system is not set up to generate long-term thinking and strategic ideas that could really drive the sub stance of policy on important issues. Addressing that deficit should be the overriding goal of NSC reform.”

James Jay Carafano hopes for a collection of “modest innovations” -- “creating a regional framework for interagency planning and action; a means to create a corps of interagency professionals; a doctrine that establishes a rationale for creating unity of effort and ensuring that a single entity has the authority and resources to accomplish the mission; and a means to fund the process so that there is reasonable assurance that the essential personnel and services will be available when they are needed.“

Chris Seiple hopes for change at three levels: a more strategic NSC, a decentralized regional structure, and a large workforce of well-trained national security professionals. First, “the NSC could then do the 'deep' battle of the J5, thinking ahead to tomorrow's issues; e.g., the bin Laden-after-next, as well as any issue that impacted our national security. Getting the NSC out of "reactive" mode to proactive and strategic would also keep our security thinking comprehensive and national by design, not singular and military by default.” Second, the NSC “is still, theoretically, the only place where all elements of national power come together. In a decentralized and multi-nodal world of state and non-state actors, however, a central committee approach will, by definition, be left behind. A new national security act would organize the world regionally under super-ambassadors whose staff included reps from all the elements of national power, and, even, some relevant non-state actors (e.g., anthropologists, humanitarian NGOs, religious/cultural experts).” Third, “a new national security act would ensure the sine qua non to actual change in our national security establishment: a "joint" education process through which a common worldview and operating picture was developed over the next generation among our interagency elites.”

Gordon Adams hopes for a complete “makeover” at two levels – NSC and departments -- “it appears that Gen. Jones is stepping up to the challenge of reinventing the NSC for the 21st Century.” Adams calls for a retooling of the White House NSC machinery: “There is a crying need for a more effective mechanism at the White House to carry out strategic planning, provide inter-agency leadership and guidance, and oversee policy execution. America’s world role is clearly severely handicapped by the absence of a well-oiled machine in the White House empowered to integrate agency responsibilities.” Furthermore, Adams wants to transform the main stovepipes of the system: DOD “badly needs to be reigned in;” State “is at the brink of major change;” DHS “comes as close to a completely dysfunctional organization as exists in government;” and ODNI “is not living up to its advocates’ expectations.”

If there is a lesson to be learned from this analysis of six commentators’ early responses to the emerging NSC PDD-1, it is probably that the system requires a portfolio of changes. Effective national security strategy formation and strategy implementation might only be achievable through the simultaneous adoption of multiple system interventions: e.g. (1) Marks’ call for an empowered APNSA, (2) Thornberry’s call for collaborative Cabinet secretaries, (3) Leverett’s call for an increased focus on strategy formation and strategy implementation; (4) Carafano’s call for regional decision nodes, interagency professional corps, and effective budget mechanisms; (5) Seiple’s call for a strategic NSC, a decentralized regional structure, and a national security workforce; and (6) Adams’ call for a retooled NSC strategy capability and sweeping Cabinet departmental reforms.

Perhaps in a few days we’ll have the PDD-1, and can then reboot this discussion based on data, rather than expectations.

Video of David Sanger on his book, The Inheritance

2009-02-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

David Sanger's book is a chapter-by-chapter account of the world situation that the Obama administration will be confronting.

http://video.aspeninstitute.org/2009/02/david-e-sanger-discusses-his-new-book.html

I am listening carefully for themes that might be relevant for national security reform:

(1) Nothing yet. Are we still in the era of expecting the APNSA to be a geography professor?

(2) Some discussion about Cheney's influence on President Bush "off-line." One idea that I am intrigued by is the pairing of a President's Cabinet (organized by function, e.g. Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland, Justice) with a Vice President's "Cabinet" (organized by region, e.g. Western European Nations, Arabic Nations, African Nations, etc.).

(3) We never made it to organization and management topics, not even after the questioning. But it does occur to me that the twelve-step top-to-bottom map we have been working on can absorb geographic regions at "Level 4" below:

1. Network Strategies(media, Congress) -- Theme Team 7
2. NSC Strategy -- Theme Team 2
3. Cabinet Department Structures -- Theme Team 1, part 1
4. Regional Policies -- Theme Team 1, part 2
5. Agencies, Subunits, Divisions, Centers -- Theme Team 4, part 1
6. Decision-making Processes -- Theme Team 4, part 2
7. Interagency Teams, Organizational Leadership -- Theme Team 3, part 1
8. Interagency Teams, Organizational Change -- Theme Team 3, part 2
9. Intelligence, Knowledge Management -- Theme Team 6, part 1
10. Intelligence, Organizational Sensemaking -- Theme Team 6, part 2
11. Human Capital, Organizational Learning -- Theme Team 5, part 1
12. Human Capital, Organizational Behavior -- Theme Team 5, part 2

Doctoral-level National Security Management Options

2009-02-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

(2/16/09, GWU Office in Ashburn, VA, 2:00-2:23 p.m.)

Henley-Putnam University, an object of relatively recent creation, has announced its first class of online doctoral students in "strategic security."

In November 2008, they issued Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Journal of Strategic Security -- with four interesting articles:

(1) An article on the new intelligence community competencies.

(2) An article on the definition and evolution of the academic discipline, "Strategic Security."

(3) An article on data visualization software from authors at Forterra.

(4) An article on Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

http://www.henley-putnam.edu/ will allow you to download the first issue without divulging too much information about yourself . . .

Let's give kudos to Henley-Putnam for recognizing that the University of Phoenix is never going to be an appropriate place to earn a doctoral degree, especially in a field as important, as demanding, and as interdisciplinary as "strategic security" or "national security management."

But, the Henley-Putnam program seems to draw on bargain-basement management theory, rather than high-end management theory -- but I don't have sufficient data to make a definitive judgment yet. I need to see a few people on their faculty who have doctorates in organization and management theory, but I have not found them yet.

For now, I think I would put my money, instead, on the Naval Postgraduate School's doctoral programs. Marc Ventresca, Susan Hocevar, and Erik Jansen are well-trained organization and management theorists, and the presence of a physical campus in Monterey is a significant competitive advantage over the Henley-Putnam online approach.

In the future -- perhaps after Ike Skelton relaxes his grip on the National Defense University as part of the military stovepipe, and perhaps after General Frances Wilson invites Admiral Mike Mullen to appear jointly with President Obama, Gen. James L. Jones and Adm. Dennis Blair at the next graduation ceremony at NDU in May 2009 to declare a name change from NDU to NSU (National Security University) -- I would put my money on National Security University's yet-to-be-created doctoral program in National Security Management.

So, bottom line is University of Phoenix -- evil; Henley-Putnam -- good effort; NPS -- solid academic environment; NDU -- could be better than NPS in the long run.

The Elephant and the Python

2009-02-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

(2/15/09, GWU Office, Ashburn VA, 9:29-9:43 p.m.)

If you're a fan of The Little Prince, you know that pythons can swallow elephants.

The PNSR 2008 report is an elephant that will be digested slowly and carefully by the national security python over the next four years. Three statutory members of the National Security Council -- the APNSA, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director of National Intelligence -- will be critical decision-makers on the reform of the national security system.

At the head of the python is Gen. James L. Jones, who bears primary responsibility for the creation of a effective presidential interagency national security teams that can soften the five core stovepipes of the national security system: Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice.

At the middle of the python is Adm. Mike Mullen, who has extraordinary resources available to him -- e.g. the nation's premier academic institution for research, analysis, scholarship, and education at Fort McNair -- and could champion a wide variety of interagency programs.

At the tail of the python is Adm. Dennis Blair -- who leads a 16-unitintelligence organization that feeds perhaps 100 agencies and subunits of the overall national security system. And the tail of the python has access to a coherent and creative scholarly community that is emerging under the label of "intelligence studies." In honor of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association, here is an e-mail from Stephen Marrin with three helpful links into their conference in New York this week:

"As a reminder, the ISA conference will be in NYC from 15-18 February. ISA has an Intelligence Studies Section (ISS), and the content of the ISA/ISS sponsored panels as well as other intelligence related panels are copied below FYI...

The website for ISA/ISS is here: http://iss.loyola.edu/

The website for the ISA's 2009 conference is here: http://www.isanet.org/newyork2009/

And the full, 187-page ISA conference program can be found here: http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/newyork09/program.pdf

Please let me know if you have any questions....

Regards,
Stephen Marrin"

Note to ISS: The U.S. intelligence organization must not be allowed to become a sixth stovepipe, but can instead play an important role in converting the existing stovepipes into an agile, flexible, adaptive, and high-reliability national security network.

The Intelligencer

2009-02-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies vol. 16 num. 2 Fall 2008

Prologue: Shock Therapy for a New Administration
Gene Poteat

Content
Elizabeth Bancroft

The Lessons of SHAMROCK
M.E. ‘Spike’ Bowman

Global Trend 2025- A Transformed World Executive Summary
C. Thomas Fingar

How Likely is a Nuclear Terrorist Attack on the United States? A Discussion
Michael Levi and Graham Allison

Protecting the United States from Terrorism and Crime- I Begins with Intelligence
Robert S. Mueller, III

Cyber Security- An Economic and National Security Crisis
Melissa E. Hathaway

Samuel Adams and the Covert Action Campaign that Led to the American Revolution
Kenneth A. Daigler

Whispers of War- The British World War II Rumor Campaign
Lee Richards

Donald Downs- OSS Open-Source Pioneer, CIA Neighbor, and Bookseller to the IC
James Burridge

Distorting History
Don Bohning

Philatelic Intelligence
Mark B. Sommer

Of This and That
Dwayne S. Anderson

The H-1B VISA Scam- Gaming the Skilled Worker System, Risking U.S. Security
Neal Grunstra

Intelligence and Dictatorships- IIHA Conference Report- Hamburg, Germany
Richard McGaha

Terrorism in Chechnya An Assessment of Recent Works
Dmitry V. Shlapentokh

The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf
Hayden B. Peake

Espionage, Terrorism, Oil, Propaganda and the Horrors of War- Intelligence Literature Reviews
Joseph C. Goulden

Maritime Security- Privacy and Terrorism
Gene Poteat

An Emerging Trend in Spy Fiction- Retired James Bond Become Ian Flemings
Mark T. Hooker

Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War
Robert W. Pringle

In Brief
Elizabeth Bancroft

Last Minute Arrivals
Publication Watchdog

American Intelligence Journal

2009-02-13T12:59:00.000-08:00

American Intelligence Journal Summer 2008
(summaries and commentaries welcome)

Motivate, Enable, Mentor
A. Denis Clift

Domestic Intelligence: Functions and Forms
Paul Milton Hobart

Air-Intelligence Operations and Training: The Decisive Edge for Effective Airpower Employment
Col. D. Scott George, USAF and Lt. Col. Robert Ehlers, USAF

Fighting Blue: Why First Class Threat Emulation is Critical to Joint Experimentation and Combat Development
Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.) and Col. Darrell L. Combs, USMC (Ret.)

Applying Critical Thinking to Intelligence Analysis
James Hess and Dr. Curtis Friedel

Greece’s Intelligence Community Reforms and New Challenges
John Nomikos

Transforming USMC Intelligence to Address Irregular Warfare
Maj. Matthew Reiley, USMC

Fusion: A Behavioral Approach to Counterinsurgency
Maj. Rob Sentse and Jeroen Jansen

The Organization of Counterintelligence within the DoD: Synergies with Law Enforcement Agencies
Maj. Scott Kieffer, USAF Intelligence

Leadership Personified: The Passing of an Army Legend
Col. William C. Spracher, USA (Ret.)

Lt. Col. Ulrich Liss: A Highly Successful Analyst
Dr. Kenneth Campbell

Intelligence Failures and Decent Intervals
MG Paul J. Lebras, USAF (Ret.)

Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War
Col. William C. Spracher, USA (Ret.)

Recent Publications from the NDIC Press
Col. William C. Spracher, USA (Ret.)

Jim Locher Testimony before Senate Government Affairs Committee

2009-02-12T15:18:00.000-08:00

Here is the text of Jim Locher's statement earlier today:

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/February+12%2C+2009

We need more scholarship on the question of international security, domestic security, and national security.

Institute for World Politics

2009-02-11T17:07:00.000-08:00

We are falling deep into the rabbit hole as we discover school after school after school -- "off the grid" -- that are delivering graduate-level degrees in national security management.

What does it say about a country when it has two sets of books: a public/private network of universities (e.g. Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, American University) and a governmental/for-profit network of colleges and programs (National Defense University, Naval War College, Army War College, Henley-Putnam, and Institute of World Politics)? Is this bifurcation between "real" universities and "secret" universities healthy?

Maybe I'll know more after attending the February 18, 2009, open house.

www.iwp.edu

Analysis of General Jones Munich Speech

2009-02-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

Gen. Jones in Munich makes an unequivocal statement that the NSC will be changing to adapt to the new environment.

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/February+8%2C+2009

See the end of the document to track the relationship between Jones' speech and the 38 recommendations from the Project on National Security Reform.

New Blurb for George Washington University Doctoral Candidates

2009-02-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

Dr. James Douglas Orton

James Douglas Orton (Ph.D., University of Michigan) has been part of the “ELDP Family” since 1994, when he was first offered a full-time position at ELDP, but had to turn it down for family reasons. From 1994-2006, Doug made 60 trips to GWU as a guest speaker, researcher, and adjunct associate professor. Simultaneously, he taught doctoral seminars and MBA courses at HEC Paris (1994-2000), MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Fall 1998), University of Nevada Las Vegas (1999-2003), UC-Irvine (2003-2004), and Michigan Technological University (2004-2006). In 2006, Doug’s dreams finally came true when he signed a three-year part-time contract to teach at ELDP. Doug now supervises six doctoral student dissertations at ELDP, and has been a committee member or reader for an additional eight dissertations.

Doug contributes to GWU his connections to a rich, talented, international network of high-end organization and management theory scholars. His graduate work in the 1980s at Brigham Young University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Michigan allowed him to become an expert on organizational sensemaking processes, strategy formation processes, and loosely coupled systems. His early years at Boston College, MIT, and HEC Paris gave him experience teaching doctoral seminars in organization theory and strategic management. With mentoring from Dave Schwandt and Andrea Casey, and with the help of ELDP Cohorts 5 to 20 from 1994-2009, Doug has started to migrate away from an instructor of ivory-tower Ph.D. seminars toward more of a hands-in-the-dirt scholar-practitioner – best represented by his recent participation from July 2007 to December 2008 as a research fellow for the Project on National Security Reform (www.pnsr.org).

In the last four years, Doug has helped position George Washington University as one of the country’s top four doctoral programs in high-reliability organizations (HROs) (with Berkeley, Michigan, and MIT). The Ashburn campus -- because of its proximity to Washington, its engineering roots, the presence of the National Transportation Safety Board Training Center, the presence of the Office of Homeland Security’s grants and training division, the presence of the IJIS Institute, and the 20-year track record of the Executive Leadership Doctoral Program -- could quickly become an international center of excellence in safety and security leadership. Doug is actively recruiting doctoral students from Cohort 19 who are interested in organizational sensemaking processes, strategy formation processes, loosely coupled systems, high reliability organizations, and national security management.

PNSR Recommendation "1.A." -- Broaden the Scope of National Security

2009-02-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

(2/3/09, George Washington University, Ashburn, VA, 4:20-4:42 p.m.)

An August 2008 Stanford Business School working paper just arrived in my in-box, and I clipped a picture from it to encourage my national security friends to work more closely with my organizational strategy friends.

To see the picture, you'll have to go to the corresponding date in the Wikispace:

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/February+2,+2009

and after you get there, you'll need to click on this file to see the graphics:

So now that you’re here . . .

Appendix 1 is a clipping of the title page from the Grove and Burgelman paper.

Appendix 2 is the display that caught my attention and respect in the Grove and Burgelman paper. It appears to be a graphic from the Energy Information Association in 2007.

The Obama Administration has four crushingly difficult tasks going on at the same time:

(1) the National Security Council under James L. Jones is going to have to reconfigure the broken national security system while getting two wars under control;

(2) Secretary Daschle is a “health reform czar” with White House support and a medical system lurching toward a variety of cliffs (obesity, uninsured, baby boomer retirements, Social Security insolvency, Medicaid underfunding);

(3) Lawrence Summers and the National Economic Council are staring into the gaping maw of a financial crisis, and most of the tools have already been used;

(4) Carol Browner and the new Environment and Energy Council are getting news every day that the climate change tipping point is closer than expected.

Recommendation “1.A.” of the Project on National Security Reform’s 2008 report calls for a broadening of the scope of national security, and explicitly references topics relevant to the three “other” White House Councils: “sources of strength” ties the NSC to the NEC; “disruptions caused by climate change” ties the NSC to the EEC; and “health” ties the NSC to Daschle’s interagency efforts on health reform.

The Grove and Burgelman paper, coming across my desk at the end of the 2009 Davos meetings, is an indicator that my brothers and sisters in the Strategic Management Society world – such as Grove and Burgelman – are able to add value to the questions of national security strategy. See below for the two graphics:

Naval Postgraduate School Presentation Abstract

2009-01-29T22:53:00.000-08:00

(1/29/09, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 11:00-11:22 p.m.)

"An Organization and Management Theory Analysis of the U.S. National Security System: A Foundational Document for Doctoral Education in National Security Management"
James Douglas Orton
The George Washington University

Abstract
The current U.S. national security system, created by the National Security Act of 1947, is widely described by seasoned national security professionals as "broken." In December 2005, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace asked James G. Locher to build a national security reform team that could produce the first comprehensive analysis -- informed by cutting-edge organization and management theory -- of the entire U.S. national security system. From October 2007 to April 2008, Dr. Christopher Lamb, Dr. James Douglas Orton, and Mr. Rei Tang built an integrative model from eight significant evidence-based research areas in organization and management theory: leadership, strategy, structure, culture, learning, decision-making, sensemaking, and change. The document was used as a theoretical foundation by 300 participants on the Project on National Security Reform to produce an 800-page report to President Bush and President-elect Obama on November 26, 2008 (www.psnr.org). Four of the members of the Guiding Coalition for the Project on National Security Reform have now moved into key positions in the Obama administration: Gen. James L. Jones is the new national security advisor, James Steinberg is deputy secretary of state, Michele Flournoy is Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans, and Adm. Dennis Blair testified today as the nominee to become the Director of National Intelligence. The Project on National Security Reform has now moved into an implementation phase, with seven "theme teams" that are adding refinement and granularity to the 38 recommendations proposed in PNSR 2008. One of the teams has the responsibility to implement six recommendations related to national security human capital. One of those six recommendations calls for the creation of a cadre of national security executives; the Naval Postgraduate School could provide significant thought leadership on how to build the nation's first Executive Leadership Doctoral Program in National Security Management.

Biographical Sketch
James Douglas Orton (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is an expert on loosely coupled systems, high reliability organizations, and national security management. He did his graduate studies in organization and management theory at Brigham Young University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Michigan. His 1993 dissertation was a study of the 1976 reorganization of U.S. intelligence. He taught organizational strategy, organization theory, organizational change, and strategic intelligence at HEC Paris from 1994-2000, where he worked with graduate students from 93 different countries. In the United States, he has taught MBA and Executive Education courses at MIT, Boston College, MIchigan Technological University, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, UC-Irvine, and George Washington University.

Some Notes.
During the presentation, I came back to the phrase "high-end organization and management theory" repeatedly. Ted Lewis, Director of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, asked me to link my GWU ELDP work with my PNSR work within the context of potential doctoral studies at CHDS. Eric Jansen asked what my definition of HEOMT was, and I passed out the February 2009 Harvard Business Review, with a post-it attached to page 91 -- Gary Hamel's article on 25 "moon shot" management concepts. Susan Hocevar had some interesting questions on resource allocation processes as a core rigidity in the system that militates against interagency teams. Afterwards, two doctoral students from National Security Affairs introduced themselves, to my great delight -- these were the first doctoral students I had met within a federally funded graduate school: JMIC, Army War College, Naval War College, and National War College do not have doctoral students.

And a graduate student from Moldavia asked if I had anything to say about insitutional theory -- I said that one of the world's smartest institutional theorists -- Marc Ventresca -- is now on the faculty at NPS. I gave the Moldavian student my card and asked him to stay in touch because comparative national security management studies is a project that Philippe Baumard and I talked about a few weeks ago: a Romanian scholar introduced himself last August in Anaheim, two researchers from Cologne are studying the United Nations' reform efforts, and Jean-Marie Bonthous published an interesting article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence in 1994 on the topic. (And today I wore my Swedish Defense College tie from last May's trip to Stockholm today as an homage to the concept of comparative national security management studies.)

All of this Naval Postgraduate School cabernet has pulled me off today's task, though. I was supposed to be focused on PNSR 2008's Recommendation 4.D. -- the establishment of an Executive Secretary position within the NSC who would focus on system reform. One of the questions at NPS got me talking about this. We talked about how the Aspin-Brown 1996, Kean-Hamilton 2004, and Silberman-Robb 2005 reports were responses to crises, while the Hart-Rudman 2001 report was not. I argued that Microsoft or General Electric would not allow an outside commission to study their mistakes or study their reform; self-evaluation should be a function of the organization's top management team. In other words, the NSC needs an IG function, a long-term reform function, and a system management function -- the redefined Executive Secretary position could be a Trojan Horse to help insert those functions into the NSC staff for the first time. Maybe there's a way to pull on the expertise of the "greybeards" and "bluehairs" of the national security system -- former APNSAs Powell, Carlucci, Scowcroft, Lake, Berger, Rice, Hadley; former SecDefs, SecStates, SecDHSs; and firebrands Richard Clarke, Rand Beers, David Ignatius, and many others -- through a President's National Security Council Advisory Board.

Another option might be to establish several deputies at NSC, one of which is off-site in a long-term skunkworks, preparing a Presidential National Security Review for the next administration. Would it be rude to think of a "varsity" NSC staff at the White House and a "junior varsity" NSC staff offsite looking down the road to the next administration?

PNSR 2008 Recommendation "2.C." -- Strategy Processes

2009-01-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

(1/28/09, Naval Postgraduate School, 5:56-6:36 p.m.)

The day began at 5 a.m. with a CSPAN radio rebroadcast of Secretary Gates' testimony before the Armed Services Committee -- Levin, McCain, Gates. A leisurely flight across the country allowed me to spend time focusing attention on the Washington Post and New York Times coverage of the Gates hearing, the emerging strategy for Afghanistan, and some analyses of what Mitchell will be doing in the reignited Gaza-Israel shooting war. Gates bluntly pointed out that with two wars and a financial crisis, the spigot is going to be shut off on military spending.

So how can the country make good strategy in times of scarce resources? There are two competing models. One model, visible in PNSR's Recommendation 2.C. -- National Security Planning Guidance Document -- is the top-down model of strategy implementation traditionally favored by the Department of Defense: (1) the incoming administration conducts a rapid National Security Review, then (2) creates the annual National Security Strategy Document, which gets translated into (3) a National Security Planning Guidance Document, that (4) can help build out a National Security Resources Document, which (5) will help the organization know what to do in the future.

A second model emerged in a May 2008 meeting of 35 strategy experts convened at Harvard Business School: 10 of whom are heroes of mine -- e.g. Henry Mintzberg, Yves Doz, Eric Abrahamson, Jeff Pfeffer, Gary Hamel, and Hal Varian. Hamel wrote up the group's 25 "Moon Shot" ideas for the improvement of management practice; the article is published in the February 2009 Harvard Business Review. Several of the 25 recommendations call for the end of a rigid, top-down, document-driven approach to strategy. I think it would be a mistake for the Obama national security team to adopt a Department of Defense model of top-down strategy implementation.

Instead, each of the Interagency National Security Teams, led by National Security Executives, should have ownership of a specific national security issue. These teams should be expected to develop total global situational awareness on their national security issues, and know when to punch requests for "top cover" up to the presidential national security team. The interagency national security team working on the new Afghanistan strategy has more total global situational awareness about Afghanistan than (1) CENTCOM Gen. David Petraeus, (2) SecDef Robert M. Gates, (3) APNSA Gen. James L. Jones, and (4) President Barack Obama. (However, Gen. Petraeus has better situational awareness of how Afghanistan is connected to Iraq and Gaza and Iran; and Gen. Jones has better situational awarenss of how CENTCOM is connected to North Korea and counterproliferation; and President Obama has better situational awareness of how national security is related to economic recovery.)

The triggering document for strategy management by the presidential national security team should come from interagency national security teams with high situational awareness. The NSC Deputies Committee should fold these INST documents into "bigger-picture" documents such as the National Security Review, the National Security Strategy, the National Security Planning Guidance Document, and the National Security Resources Document. After the Deputies have processed the decision request from the INST with a view toward strategy formation, the decision package should go to the presidential national security team for a final decision. Coming out of the presidential national security team, the NSC Deputies Committee has another chance to consider strategy implementation processes before moving the INST-driven decision package back to the INST.

In other words, the value-added of the presidential national security team is not as a source of formal strategy documents, disconnected from specific problems, but as a high-end strategic decision-making arena providing support to hundreds of empowered interagency teams. I would shift emphasis away from top-down documents toward rapid emergent-strategic-deliberate decision processes triggered by interagency teams and returned to interagency teams. Moving the primary burden away from the White House and toward empowered interagency teams, and moving away from paper documents toward digital decision signatures will increase the number, quality, speed, and effectiveness of presidential national security decisions.

And now the day ends with a walk to the beach of Monterey, where I'm hoping I can either bump into Clint Eastwood or find a seafood taco restaurant, or both.

PNSR 2008 Recommendation "2.B." -- Presidential National Security Review

2009-01-27T17:18:00.000-08:00

(1/28/09, Naval Postgraduate School, 5:16 - 5:52 p.m.)

One of the problems identified in the PNSR 2008 report was the national security system's weakness at self-evaluation. New administrations are immediately beset with full inboxes of national security events, and because the NSC staff is small, ephemeral, and relatively powerless in the face of large, well-funded, functional stovepipes, there is little bandwidth at the top of the organization for thorough system evaluation.

A solution proposed by the Guiding Coalition of the Project on National Security Reform is the institutionalization of a "National Security Review" at the beginning of each presidential administration. Some points for consideration:

(1) The Project on National Security Reform can be seen as a test run of the "Presidential National Security Review." Gary Hamel's February 2009 Harvard Business Review helps explain why it is important to use high-end organization and management theory in national security reviews. In Dr. Vijay Krishna's doctoral seminar on Leadership today, I presented a theoretical substructure that helps clarify the PNSR 2008 report:

Strategy Implementation Processes: Strategy Content, Strategy Context, Strategy Process
Organizational Structure Processes: Rational Systems, Natural Systems, Open Systems
Organizational Culture Processes: Integrated Cultures, Differentiated Cultures, Fragmented Cultures
Organizational Change Processes: Teleological Models, Dialectical Models, Evolutionary Models
Organizational Leadership Processes: Heroic Leadership, Bureaucratic Leadership, Strategic Leadership
Organizational Behavior Processes: Objective Realities, Subjective Realities, Enactive Realities
Organizational Learning Processes: Chaos/Complexity Learning, Complicated Learning, Simple Learning
Organizational Sensemaking Processes: Enactment Sensemaking, Selection Sensemaking, Retention Sensemaking
Knowledge Management Processes: Systemic Foolishness, Organizational Exploration, and Calculated Exploitation
Organizational Decision-making Processes: Complex Organizational Processes, Interpretive/Bureaucratic Politics, Rational Actors
Organizational Policy-making Processes: Emergent Policies, Bottom-up/Top-down Policies, Deliberate Policies
Strategy Formation Processes: Microstrategic Thinking, Mesostrategic Thinking, Macrostrategic Thinking

(2) There are perhaps 100 people who are qualified to be the next Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from January 2013 to January 2017: e.g. Rand Beers, Meghan O'Sullivan, Samantha Power, Leon Fuerth, James Steinberg, Michele Flournoy, Dennis Blair, Thomas Donilon, Dennis McDonough, etc. Some will be recuperating from service in the Bush administration, some will be rowing hard in the Obama administration, and some are not yet on the radar screen. A legislatively mandated Presidential National Security Review could be a safe haven for these 100 potential APNSAs to thrash out the next national security administration.

(3) A Presidential National Security Review environment could serve as a pre-positioned analytical unit that could help explain the next national security failure. Aspin-Brown (1996) was a response to the Aldrich Ames fiasco, Kean-Hamilton (2004) was a response to the 9/11 catastrophe, and Silberman-Robb (2005) was a response to the Iraq WMD failures. A different model was the Hart-Rudman (2001) three-year study of homeland security, which predicted in January 2001 a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland. The Hart-Rudman analysis served the country well after September 11, 2001 -- the group had disbanded, but the recommendations from the study were still fresh and on the shelf. Setting up a constantly-in-session Presidential National Security Review project -- outside of the administration in power at the moment -- could provide pre-positioned expertise on why the next catastrophe happened.

NSPD-1 Strategy Management

2009-01-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

(1/27/09, GWU, 11:31 - a.m.)

The Project on National Security Reform rolled out a sequence of recommendations in its November 2008 report, Forging a New Shield: see www.pnsr.org

Over the next 12 weeks, I will present some notes on this blog that link each of the 38 recommendations to problem analyses from the PNSR 2008 report. Today we start with a linkage between a problem (the lack of a coherent U.S. national security strategy) and a solution (task the NSC with high-end strategy management).

The implementation device that has become a routine for incoming administrations is the issuance of a National Security Presidential Directive 1. Gen. James L. Jones was asked to be the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs on October 22, 2008. Presumably one of the first things he would have done would be to have a group of his trusted deputies craft a document on how the NSC staff would function. Let's call that NSPD-1, and let's assume that there is an organizational chart attached to it. Let's hope that the following rules are embedded in the document:

(1) There is only one U.S. national security strategy; the previous practice of accumulating a portfolio of competing and inconsistent "national security strategies" should end on 1/20/09.

(2) The U.S. national security strategy resides in the heads of the president's national security team; it cannot be a document such as the National Security Strategy Document required by the Goldwater-Nichols Reform.

(3) The President has moved quickly on a related recommendation of the PNSR 2008 -- broaden the scope of national security -- by expanding national security strategy from military (DOD-driven) to "whole-of-government" (NSC-driven) strategy formation and strategy implementation processes; instead of having 1500 Policy and Plans strategists in the Department of Defense, perhaps it makes sense to ramp up from 225 NSC strategists to 1000 NSC strategists.

(4) The presidential national security team should not be burdened with strategy formation and strategy implementation but should focus instead on "strategy management" -- the constant updating of a complex shared cognitive map of U.S. national security strategy. The NSC Deputies Committee has the large blocks of time necessary to translate incoming events into strategy formation documents for the president's national security team to sharpen; the NSC Deputies Committee similarly has the large blocks of time necessary to translate the president's national security team's strategic decisions into strategy implementation documents.

(5) U.S. national security strategy is not a uni-directional top-down dictatorial process emanating solely from the mind of the president. Instead, it is a simultaneously bottom-up (emergent) and top-down (deliberate) organizational strategy process. Each day there will be thousands of inputs into the system that can be selected, processed, combined with other inputs, and moved into the control of interagency national security teams. For U.S. national security strategy to be responsive to daily events outside the United States, the system must break the Napoleonic view of strategy as coming out of the brain of the person at the top of the hierarchy, and replace it with a more modern view of agile, flexible, adaptable, rapid, and effective organizational strategy-making processes.

Twenty Interagency National Security Teams (Strategy)

2009-01-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

(1/25/09, Ashburn, VA GWU Office, 1:40-2:35 p.m.)

CSPAN played the Inauguration Ceremonies from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. today, and I was struck by how rapidly the national security system could be reformed within the context of the inaugural speech.

The 2880 National Security Executives can be broken up into 12 groups of 240. For the first four months of a presidential administration, twenty Strategy teams can be activated in an efficient, effective, and reliable mode of operation. Linking these teams to hours of the day might help:

0700: Team 1 (INST0001-0012): President's Personal Team: Chief of Staff, Political Adviser Valerie Jarrett, Communications Director Robert Gibbs, Presidential Personal Assistant Reggie Love, NEC Director Lawrence Summers, NSC Director James Jones, Energy and Environment Director Carol Browner, First Lady Michelle Obama, Office of Legal Counsel Greg Craig.

0800: Team 2 (INST0013-0024): Cabinet (most of it, anyway): Vice President; Interior, Energy, DHHS, Transportation, Commerce; HUD, Interior, Education, Labor, Veteran's Affairs; Cabinet Secretary.

0900: Team 3 (INST0025-0036): NEC: Director Lawrence Summers, Director of OMB Peter Orszag; Deputy Secretary of Treasury;

1000: Team 4 (INST0037-0048): "Largely International" Cabinet Team: Carol Browner, Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Director of Environment Protection Agency, Deputy Secretary of Energy, Deputy Secretary of Transportion, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, and Deputy Secretary of Justice.

1100: Team 5 (INST0049-0060): "Largely Domestic" Cabinet Team: Domestic Policy Adviser Valerie Jarrett, Deputy Secretary of HUD, Deputy Secretary of Interior (FEMA?), Deputy Secretary of Education (P-12), Deputy Secretary of Labor, Deputy Secretary of Veteran's Affairs (13-14), Deputy Secretary of Education (Colleges), Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Deputy Secretary of Education (Universities), Deputy Secretary of Transportation, Deputy Secretary of Veteran's Affairs (Retirement); NSC Deputy John Brennan.

1200: Team 6 (INST0061-0072): National Security Council/Principal's Committee: APNSA Gen. James L. Jones, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General; Secretary of Energy; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Director of National Intelligence; Deputy APNSA Thomas Donilon; Vice President's National Security Adviser Martin Molinko (?); NSC Deputy John Brennan.

1300: Team 7 (INST0073-0084): Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen; Marines, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Air Force, Coast Guard; Reserves; Marine Intel, Navy Intel, Army Intel, Air Force Intel, Coast Guard Intel.

1400: Team 8 (INST0085-0096): Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair; CIA Leon Panetta; NSA; NRO; NGA; INR at State; DHS Intel; DOJ Intel; DEA Intel; Energy Intel; Defense Intelligence Agency (liaison to service intel units); Coordinator of Numerous Other Intel Units within Federal Government.

1500: Team 9 (INST0097-0108): National Security Deputies Committee

1600: Team 10 (INST0109-0120: Counterproliferation or other presidential mission group

1700: Team 11 (INST0121-0132): NCTC or other presidential mission group

1800: Regrouping of National Security Council/Deputies Committee for documentation of decision support.

1900: Regrouping of National Security Council/Principals Committee for Decision Digital Signatures (if necessary)

2000: Regrouping of Cabinet for Decision Digital Signatures (if necessary)

2100: Regrouping of President's Team for Decision Digital Signatures (if necessary)

2200: Team 12 (INST0132-0144): Arabic and/or Islamic and/or Muslim Allies Working Group

2300: Team 13 (INST0145-0156): Southern Asian Allies Working Group

0000: Team 14 (INST0157-0168): Asian Allies Working Group

0100: Team 15 (INST0168-0180): African Allies Working Group

0200: Team 16 (INST0181-0192): Ex-Soviet-Union Allies Working Group

0300: Team 17 (INST0193-0204): Eastern European Allies Working Group

0400: Team 18 (INST0205-0216): Latin American Allies Working Group

0500: Team 19 (INST0217-0228): European Allies Working Group

0600: Team 20 (INST0229-0240): English-speaking Allies Working Group

First, notice that by carefully rolling out this sequence of 20 interagency national security teams one week at a time from January 1 to April 30, 2009, could create a significant jump forward toward effective national security strategic decision-making processes.

Second, notice that the Cabinet Room could be used as the nation's core strategic decision-making environment for twenty or more hours per day -- instead of a secretive, frightening, ominous "Situation Room" used in periods of crisis, the national security system could routinize and miniaturize and destress the constant stream of national security events into a system that anticipates and quickly adapts to incoming events.

Finally, notice that the night shift pulls the finalization of the President's Decision Brief away from Langley or ODNI into the White House, and allows a slow-motion runthrough with interagency experts each night -- moving from allies we know relatively little about to allies with whom we have longer histories.

Replayed Geithner Confirmation Hearings

2009-01-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

(1/24/09, Ashburn, VA, George Washington University office, 4:23 to 5:04 p.m.)

This morning CSPAN radio replayed the Geithner nomination hearings from Wednesday January 21, 2009. Here are some notes relevant to national security reform:

Efficiency, Effectiveness, Reliability. The references to Mr. Geithner's errors in filing opened several doors to the question of taxation and the IRS. The PNSR 2008 report called for three types of performance: effectiveness, efficiency, and behavior. It might help to revisit these three criteria and relabel them as follows: "efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability." Organizational strategy experts outside the U.S. government identified two generic strategies in 1980: cost leadership and product differentiation. Recently we are seeing the rise of a third generic organizational strategy -- "high reliability" (from evidence-based organization and management theory built on studies of wildland firefighting, chemical accidents, naval accidents, airline accidents, and space shuttle accidents). Putting "efficiency" first in the sequence would be a recognition that the new administration understands cost leadership strategy; putting "effectiveness" second in the sequence would be a recognition that the U.S. national security system will continue to be mission-focused; and putting "reliability" third in the sequence would be a recognition that the national security system is committed to reshaping itself in order to make fewer mistakes of the magnitude of failing to prevent 9/11, misreading the WMD situation in Iraq, and mismanaging the response to Katrina. Geithner's IRS will be important in generating the "table stakes" that can allow for an efficient national security system -- the first criterion for success.

The Most Presidential Cabinet Secretary. In comparison to the relatively bounded functional tasks of Defense, State, and Homeland, Secretary Geithner will find his presence required on all four of the president's councils: national security council, national economic council, environment and energy council, and the domestic policy council. A simple organizational move would be to identify four deputies who can become experts in the deliberations of each of these councils, and use Secretary Geithner as an integrator of these agendas, much like the President and Vice President and Rahm Emmanuel and Robert Gibbs and the Director of OMB will be doing. It is not likely that any other Cabinet Secretary will have that much real estate to cover, so Geithner could play a significant role as a miniature president.

A Modest Funding Proposal. Isn't an intelligent organizational structure for the U.S. government a smarter way out of the current financial crisis than an $825 billion stimulus package? Washington suffers from a legalistic "delete-replace" mindset of organizational structure, but Herbert Simon, Jim March, and Karl Weick, and Weick's European brothers Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, have all shown the value of a steady sequence of small wins in the reform of complex organizations. One small win might be to allocate $18 million to the Project on National Security Reform as part of the stimulus package so that PNSR can hire the twelve full-time organization theory Ph.D.'s and thirty-six part-time research fellows necessary to refine, propose, and successfully implement the reform findings from the PNSR 2008 report. PNSR strikes me as the most "shovel-ready" and "high-yield" social science project the U.S. government has available to it.

One of the PNSR's recommendations is "Transform the Department of State," but that is a "stovepipe recommendation" that could be expanded to include all five Cabinet Departments that form the core national security team: Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice. Geithner's confirmation hearings give us a window into how one of the five departments might transform itself to a more collaborative member of the four presidential councils.

Activating a Sequence of Interagency National Security Teams

2009-01-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

(1/23/09, Office 391J, 44983 Knoll Square Drive, GWU International Research Campus, Ashburn, VA, 20147, 11:21-11:55 a.m.)

NPR's media coverage this morning can be pulled together in a way that advances national security reform around the following theme: teams can change the world more quickly than individuals can change the world -- especially if the team is able to make a sequence of microstrategic decisions.

Did you notice that January 20, 2009, had the beginnings of a news story on closing the Guantanamo prison, and then a draft E.O. circulated on Wednesday, and then was signed on Thursday, and received relatively detailed coverage this morning by Jackie Northam? So mark 1/20/09 as Guantano Prison Interagency National Security Team -- we need to drill way down in the organizational hieararchy to find a number for that team and the National Security Executive who "owns" that team: it's beneath the PNST, it's beneath the Cabinet, it's beneath the NSC/DC, it's beneath 18 world/domestic regions, but it must be at the level of theaters-agencies-states: who is that person and who is on his or her team?

Then did you notice that January 21, 2009, was a formal NSC meeting that included Gen. Petraeus in person as the leader of the Defense Department's CENTCOM, and was to have included two of his commanders: Ray Odierno for Iraq and David McKiernan for Afghanistan. But then the NSC was opened up to an outsider (wow!), the Iraqi ambassador. Ryan Crocker must have participated as well. So notice how extraordinary this was. General Jones (1) decoupled the two wars that the previous administration kept coupled (through Meghan O'Sullivan and Gen. Douglas Lute -- who was probably at the NSC meeting) by focusing on Iraq and bumping McKiernan off the agenda; (2) bypassed the Cabinet members to drill down to a region (Clinton, Geithner, Holder were not confirmed yet; Gates was there; not clear that Napolitano was invited); (3) bypassed the regional experts Petraeus for Defense (although he was there in person) and regional experts for State, Treasury, Justice, Homeland to get directly to the theater team; and (4) opened up the meeting to the on-the-ground situational awareness holders Crocker, Odierno, and the Iraqi Ambassador.

Same pattern continued on Jan. 22, 2009. News coverage was murky this morning on whether the President had appointed Mitchell and Holbrooke, or whether the Secretary of State had appointed Mitchell and Holbrooke; audio clip from Sec. Clinton went with the line, "The President and I have appointed Mitchell and Holbrooke." But -- wouldn't it be more accurate and more powerful to say that the President's National Security Team (PNST) had appointed Mitchell and Holbrooke? Let's quickly agree among ourselves for today that the new PNST consists of these 12 people: Obama, Biden, Gates, Clinton, Napolitano, Geithner, Holder, Chu, [Director of OMB], Mullen, Blair, and Jones. And, let's peg the larger story -- Mitchell -- to Jan. 22 and the smaller story -- Holbrooke -- to Jan. 23.

So am I starting to be persuasive to you guys on this? Teams are more powerful than individuals, sequence is more powerful than "all at once," and pushing ownership down to lower levels of the hierarchy is a better way to get things done than "heroic" great man presidential models of leadership.

Reorienting toward National Security Strategy Recommendations

2009-01-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

(1/22/09, PNSR Headquarters, Arlington, VA, 8:15)

NPR coverage from 5:00-8:10 steered me in a new direction for today:

"Judicial National Security Team" -- First, there were discussions about the possible establishment of a "national security court" to create secure expertise within the judicial system for topic ranging from military tribunals, coercive interrogation, warrantless surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and a wide variety of other topics that test the boundaries of the current legal system.

"Congressional National Security Team" -- Second, there were many references to the important role that Congress played yesterday with Clinton and Geithner, and will play today with Blair. A large amount of institutional memory resides on Capitol Hill, e.g. Inouye and Dole appeared at the beginning of the nomination hearings for Shinseki last week. Congress mandates reports on national security topics in times of stability and in response to catastrophes, and somehow this is all knit together -- is it knit together intelligently or haphazardly? One of the PNSR 2008 recommendations suggested the possibility of a Select National Security Committee -- more work needs to be done to flesh out this recommendation.

"Presidential National Security Team" -- Third, for months I've been sensing the decline of the overly bureaucratic and formal 1947 regimes -- the National Security Council -- and the rise of a more fluid, inclusive, more basketball-friendly "national security team." The NSC is dead, long live the NST!? It strikes me as linguistically convenient to say that the "president's national security team" is a lower-case term, but the "Presidential National Security Team" should be capitalized. The lawyers among us will want to write the PNST into law; the journalists among us will want it to be an informal term. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs is the formal title; the national security adviser is the informal title. Memo to Bob Gibbs: you could strike a blow for national security reform by continuing to use the term "president's national security team" and avoiding the stilted, dull, outdated, overly formal term "National Security Council." How do you get Council members to be collegial? You can't. The job of a Council member is protect his or her bureaucratic interests; the job of a team member is to solve a complex problem through collaboration.

"U.S. National Security Team" Washington seems to be full of interstitial institutions that hold the U.S. national security system together. There seem to be no shortage of Fred Kagans, Samantha Powers, Rand Beers, Richard Clarkes, Richard Perles, Brent Scowcrofts, Henry Kissingers, etc. who hold things together. "Containment" was a strategy that perhaps 8 presidential administrations were able to agree on over a long time period, so there must be a collective "Commander-in-Chief" that has some influence over the current "Commander-in-Chief," right? And if we believe that the United States is an open system, some of the people influencing U.S. National Security strategies are allies, neutrals, and enemies in a complex network. How does all this complexity get processed?

Numbering the 2880 Obama National Security Executives

2009-01-21T03:34:00.000-08:00

(1/21/09, PNSR Headquarters, Arlington, VA, 6:30 a.m.)

Gene Healey's book, The Cult of the Presidency, implies an urgent need to stand up a hierarchy of nested interagency national security teams (INSTs) led by 2880 certified national security executives (NSEs).

This morning's BBC coverage from 4:20-5:00 and NPR coverage from 5:00-6:20 suggest that it will be possible to place NSE names in play quickly.

INST0001: Barack H. Obama, President
INST0002: Joseph R. Biden, Vice President
INST0003: James L. Jones, APNSA
INST0004: Timothy Geithner, Treasury
INST0005: Hillary Clinton, State
INST0006: Robert Gates, Defense
INST0007: Jean Napolitano, Homeland
INST0008: Eric Holder, Justice
INST0009: Mike Mullen, Chairman of JCS
INST0010: Dennis Blair, ODNI
INST0011: NSC Deputy, NSC "International"
INST0012: John Brennan, NSC "Domestic"
INST0013: ASNSA, Interior/EPA
INST0014: ASNSA, DHHS
INST0015: ASNSA, Energy
INST0016: ASNSA, Transportation
INST0017: ASNSA, Commerce/USTR
INST0018: ASNSA, Treasury
INST0019: James Steinberg, State
INST0020: Michele Flournoy, Defense
INST0021: ASNSA, Homeland
INST0022: ASNSA, Justice
INST0023: ASNSA, HUD
INST0024: ASNSA, Agriculture/ONDCP
INST0025: ASNSA, Education
INST0026: ASNSA, Labor
INST0027: ASNSA, Veterans
INST0028: Russian Region Team Leader
INST0029: Asian Region Team Leader
INST0030: Southern Asia Region Team Leader
INST0031: Eastern Europe Region Team Leader
INST0032: English Region Team Leader
INST0033: Latin America Region Team Leader
INST0034: European Region Team Leader
INST0035: David Petraeus, CENTCOM
INST0036: African Region Team Leader
INST0037: Pacific Northwest Team Leader
INST0038: Central Pacific Team Leader
INST0039: Southwest Team Leader
INST0040: Great Lakes Team Leader
INST0041: Midwest Team Leader
INST0042: Gulf Coast Team Leader
INST0043: New England Team Leader
INST0044: Mid-Atlantic Team Leader
INST0045: Southeast Team Leader
INST0046: Douglas Lute, Iraq/Afghanistan
INST0047: David McKiernan, Afghanistan
INST0048: Theater Leader, Gaza Events

And that's where we run out of bandwidth in the fourth week of January 2009, using a rule of thumb that each of 240 weeks of a presidential administration allows us to "activate" 12 NSEs.

Obviously, though, the leaders of interagency teams are being rolled out quickly to populate the NSC organizational chart.

Below the level of Departments and Regions we hit space for approximately 50 "theaters" (North Korea's Saturday announcement implies the need to get a theater leader for North Korea on the chart as soon as possible); 50 "agencies" (e.g. Leon Panetta as CIA Director, fifteen other intelligence agencies, and five military service leaders); and 50 "states" (e.g. fusion center leaders, FEMA, ICE, and Coast Guard assets around the country).

It is not until below the structural level of Theaters, Agencies, and States that we actually get to the level of interagency teams. The ambassador to Afghanistan is the prototypical interagency national security team leader under "Theater"; the director of the NCTC is a prototypical interagency national security team leader under "Agency"; and a FEMA field commander in New Orleans after a hurricane is a prototypical leader under "State." These approximately 2000 national security executives need INST numbers that will be stable for the next four years, and they need those numbers in order to have presidential national security team decisions made on their behalf when necessary. A rule of thumb for NSC staffing decisions might be that every person on the NSC staff has specific responsibility and authority to support one or more of the 2880 national security executives activated for the current presidential administration.

And You Shall Have My Axe, Sir

2009-01-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

I am quickly clocking in at 9:35 a.m. here in Ballston after listening to NPR Inauguration Coverage since 7:00 a.m.

My dual identity of doctoral-level college professor and national security organization theorist crowds out discretionary choices, such as standing on the mall with 1.2 million other people -- and anyway they announced at 9:15 a.m. that the mall is closed (which explains why I'm wearing a red flannel shirt and hiking boots to work today).

Yesterday was a 15-hour marathon writing day in which I bumped the General Jones biography up to 50 pages of text -- with three memos to PNSR Executive Director James G. Locher: (1) a memo proposing a streamlined "PDRATI" NSC staff structure for the "strengthened APNSA" recommendation; (2) a memo proposing an overlapping world map and U.S. map for the "common map" recommendation; and (3) a memo proposing an increased focus on curbing waste in military expenditures in order to adapt to a Sen. McCain concern discussed in a Nov. 16, 2008 Chicago meeting, for the "six-year budget projection" recommendation.

Today is likely to start with more Jones biography work, then morph into a finalized problem-solution pairing education roadmap due today to Kate Yates, and I might spend some additional time learning to use the Leland Russell-driven "Collaboration Center."

Organization Theory Seminar at GWU

2009-01-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the morning at GWU's Executive Leadership Doctoral Program.

With Cohort 20, I was able to talk about organization theory, building on Gareth Morgan's "Organizations and Organisms" chapter.

Comments welcome from the 25 doctoral students who were there.

Week 3: INST0025 to INST0036

2009-01-16T23:59:00.000-08:00

(1/24/09, Office 391J, 44983 Knoll Square Drive, Ashburn, VA 20147, 3:30 4:06 p.m.)

As we continue to build the network of interagency national security team, we are keying off the President's National Security Team, the next edition of the NSC, which exploits the 2 million person employees in the Department of Defense as the central pole of a very tall but skinny tent. On one side is the "largely domestic" side of the Cabinet -- led by Secretary of Homeland Janet Napolitano. On the other side is the "largely international" side of the Cabinet -- led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

INST0025: Carol Browner, Energy and Environment Coordinator
INST0026: Secretary of the Interior. If climate change is now coded as a significant national security threat, it might make sense to assign the portfolio to a cabinet secretary.
INST0027: Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Rationalizing/streamlining the Cabinet implies the need to move this position into a strong deputy position to a Cabinet Secretary (much like the FBI exists as an entity within the Department of Justice)
INST0028: Secretary of Energy. David Chu. The world's energy systems and energy sciences cannot be bound within one country. Because the Secretary of Energy is a statutory member of the NSC, it will be necessary to decide which group is most important for him to attend as a primary member -- it looks like this group is the best slot, and he should be written out of the president's core national security team --Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland, Justice -- to become a core player in the Energy and Security team.
INST0029: Deputy Secretary of Energy (Domestic Issues). Notice that no cabinet secretary will use the term "homeland" to identify one of their deputies.
INST0030: Department of Health & Human Services. Tom Daschle. The SARS outbreak, the tuberculosis scare, and the anthrax attacks all help demonstrate that the health of Americans is dependent on the health of the world as a whole.
INST0031: Deputy Secretary of Health & Human Services. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention played a key role in unraveling the puzzle of the West Nile Virus in 2000, suggesting the importance of a coordinated approach to worldwide virus development, virus moving, and virus stopping.
INST0032: Secretary of Transportation.
INST0033: Deputy Secretary of Transportation.
INST0034: Secretary of Commerce.
INST0035: United States Trade Representative. Treating the Office of the USTR as a subunit of the Department of Commerce might help make the presidential national security more streamlined and coherent.
INST0036: NSC Deputy with a portfolio for "largely international" Cabinet Departments. Thomas Donilon.

(The third week of January 2005, 1/16/09 to 1/22/09, included a flight from DC to Houghton, MI on 1/16/09, and courses in strategy at MTU undergraduate and graduate programs.)

Sullenberger Demonstrates Value of HRO Research

2009-01-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

On the evening drive home from Arlington to Ashburn, NPR coverage of the Hudson River landing of a USAirways flight caught me by surprise.

How many Captain Sully Sullenbergers are there in the world?

Was that the man who attended the High Reliability Organizations in Deauville, France in May 2007 with Philippe Baumard, Karlene Roberts, Bill Starbuck, Sim Sitkin, Daved Van Stralen and me?

Is his business card taped to the back of my door at the GWU office in Ashburn?

And the answer is . . .

http://hro-fires.com/hro2007/speakers.html (scroll down to Sullenberger when you get there)

Yes!

Well done, HRO brother!

7.A. Establish Select Committee

2009-01-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

One of the recurring problems in the PNSR 2008 report is labeled --

"No routine oversight of interagency issues, operations, or requirements."

In organization theory terms, a root cause of the difficulties in cross-departmental coordination is that Congress is stovepiped, which leads the stovepipes in the national security system to "become isomorphic with institutional bureaucratic myths" in their environment.

We identified four "sub-problems" that will need to be addressed in an eventual solution set:

(1) No committee has jurisdiction over the national security system.

(2) No congressional jurisdiction over national security system management.

(3) Jurisdictional legacies reinforce narrow oversight focus.

(4) Protection of "turf" and power.

One "issue team" from PNSR's 2009 system is in the process of redoing this specific analysis in order to create "granularity" and "refinement" of Recommendation 7.A. -- "Establish Select Committees on National Security in the Senate and House of Representatives."

A sketchbook/closet/discussion space for scholarly input on this puzzle has been established at the following space:

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/January+6%2C+2009

Naval Postgraduate School CHDS Paper

2009-01-05T23:59:00.000-08:00

(1/20/09, PNSR Headquarters, Arlington, VA, 7:33 p.m.)

The analytical methodology that Jim Locher developed for the Goldwater-Nichols reform in the 1980s, and that Locher and Chris Lamb modified for the Project on National Security Reform in 2006-2008, is a top-to-bottom organization and management theory analysis of the entire national security system. Because of my unusual status as neither scholarly fish nor practitioner fowl, I have been able to toggle back and forth between theory and practice since leaving my full-time academic job in 2006. The result is an elegant merging of national security management theory and national security management practice -- which I have been asked to present in Monterey, California, on January 29, 2009.

Here is a link to the paper on my wikispace. Comments are always welcome.

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/January+5,+2009

Proposed Strategy Map for National Security Reform

2009-01-04T09:42:00.000-08:00

Here is a briefing from June 2009 on twelve theoretical areas that must be mastered by the Project on National Security Reform in order to make a difference during the Obama Administration.

High Reliability Leadership Readings

2009-01-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

9/4/08: HIGH RELIABILITY NATIONAL SECURITY EXECUTIVES: White House Cases. Running the World, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, CMC-Allison, CMC-Soviets/Cubans, CMC-Tapes, CMC-Accidents, Rice-Campaign, Rice-9/11, Rice-Afghanistan, Rice-Iraq-Planning, Rice-Iraq-Execution, Hadley-Iraq-Aghanistant, PNSR -- See http://www.pnsr.org/web/module/press/pressID/105/interior.asp (CH19). Required Readings: Graham T. Allison and Philip R. Zelikow. 1999. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chapters 2, 6, and 4 (Allison & Zelikow, 1999); Case Studies, Recommended Readings, Lecture Notes, and White House Syllabus: 9/4/08: HIGH RELIABILITY NATIONAL SECURITY EXECUTIVES. Project on National Security Reform (July 28, 2008). Guest Speaker: General Bill Navas, National Security Professional Development Integration Office. White House Cases. Overview of National Security Management Cases (1947-2008): Rothkopf, D. J. 2005. Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. New York: Public Affairs. (Rothkopf, 2005)9/18/08: STRUCTURE: Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 was a catastrophic intelligence/military/diplomatic operation; Gen. Maxwell Taylor’s analysis of the Bay of Pigs has been largely declassified.9/25/08: OVERSIGHT/GOVERNANCE/NETWORKS: CMC-Allison. Allison, G. T. 1969. Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. The American Political Science Review, 63(3): 689-718 (Allison, 1969); Donaldson, R. 2000. Thirteen Days. USA: New Line Cinema. (Donaldson, 2000); Anderson, P. A. 1983. Decision making by objection and the Cuban missile crisis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 201-222. (Anderson, 1983); Bendor, J., & Hammond, T. H. 1992. Rethinking Allison's models. American Political Science Review, 86: 301-322. (Bendor & Hammond, 1992)10/2/08: RESOURCE ALLOCATION DECISION PROCESSES: CMC-Soviets/Cubans. Central Intelligence Agency (Ed.). 1994. The secret Cuban Missile Crisis documents. Washington, DC: Brassey's. (Agency, 1994); Fursenko, A., & Naftali, T. 1997. 'One hell of a gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964. New York: W. W. Norton. (Fursenko & Naftali, 1997).10/9/08: POLICY, STRATEGY, PLANNING, EXECUTION. CMC-Tapes. May, E. R., & Zelikow, P. D. (Eds.). 1997. The Kennedy tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (May & Zelikow, 1997)10/16/08: ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES. CMC-Accidents. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been studied thoroughly, most recently by Michael Dobbs in One Minute Until Midnight.10/23/08: ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE PROCESSES: Rice-Campaign. Draper, R. 2007. Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. New York: Free Press. (Draper, 2007);10/30/08: KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES: Rice-9/11. 9/11 Commission Report.11/6/08: ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING PROCESSES: Rice-Afghanistan. Bush at War. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Woodward, 2002)11/13/08 ORGANIZATIONAL SENSEMAKING PROCESSES: Rice-Iraq-Planning. Woodward, B. 2004. Plan of Attack. New York: Simon & Schuster (Woodward, 2004); Feith, Douglas. 2008. War & Decision; Tenet, G. 2007. At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. (Tenet, 2007); McLelland, Scott. 2008. What Happened.11/20/08 HUMAN CAPITAL PROCESSES: Rice-Iraq-Execution. Woodward, B. 2006. State of Denial. New York: Simon & Schuster (Woodward, 2006); Woodward, B. 2002. Ricks, T. E. 2006. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: The Penguin Press. (Ricks, 2006);12/4/08 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE PROCESSES: Hadley-Iraq-Aghanistan. Risen, J. 2006. State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. New York: Free Press. (Risen, 2006);12/11/08 ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP PROCESSES. PNSR Preliminary Report, July 28, 2008. Project on National Security Reform (July 28, 2008). Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need for National Security Reform. www.pnsr.org

PNSR Wikispace Reopened to the Public

2009-01-03T07:13:00.000-08:00

(1/20/09, Arlington, VA, PNSR HQ, 10:17 a.m.)

The books we have been reading on wikinomics, the wisdom of crowds, open innovation, and swarming all suggest that Washington's old ways of business -- secrecy, power, paperwork, bureaucracies -- are destined to crumble under the wave of millennials, like my three sons, who grew up digital.

Unfortunately, transparency might still be a little bit dangerous, so I am required to use a layered approach.

(1) DrNatSecMgt is all of me, although tip-of-the-iceberg, Facebook-Twitter-Blackberry, not filtered much because only my friends care, and even then they won't really care until after I'm famous and/or dead. It is a time clock to show what time I arrived at work, and there are only going to be 1462 or fewer days of the Gen. James L. Jones national security administration days counted out on this calendar.

(2) My wikispace is plausibly-deniably-loosely linked to Project on National Security Reform. I will try to end each DrNatSecMgt post with a link to a specific page in pnsr.wikispaces.com -- today's link is to the home page. In a few minutes I will reset the wikispace so that it is visible (again) to the entire planet (and aliens with internet access).

(3) PNSR's collaboration center is password protected and currently highly dependent on our "speed" guru, Leland Russell, but as it evolves it will become a tool for external collaboration by PNSR partners. Much of what I do on the collaboration space will be invisible to my academic community; I apologize for that secrecy in advance.

(4) A fourth level of documents currently reside on the PNSR "shared drive" -- in theory these documents are visible to my PNSR colleagues (although I see no evidence that anybody has time to look at others' documents).

(5) A fifth level of documents are papers that I have sent as attachments to colleagues through either my gmail account or my pnsr account -- moving these onto the PNSR shared drive into "Problem-Solution Folders" might be a good way to spend a weekend.

(6) My hero Chris Lamb at National Defense University has a mountain of electronic PNSR drafts that I was mildly influential with from October 2007-November 2008. That is a lot of knowledge capital to leave out of the system; I still have an office at NDU but can't imagine how I could spend time mining those files.

(7) My least accessible documents are scattered about on my GWU laptop, my PNSR laptop, and my NDU laptop -- again, migrating those into folders based on PNSR's 38 recommendations on the PNSR shared drive would be an effective contribution to the national security reform project.

So, main point is that a good day is one in which I can put a link between the DrNatSecMgt blog to the PNSR wikispace to get help from national security scholars around the world. Today's a good day -- come get on board at pnsr.wikispaces.com -- now reopened to the public.

(And for those of you insisting that I get a social life, on Saturday 1/3/09 I drove Patrick to the airport for his flight back to Las Vegas. I went to Chipotle in the early afternoon, and got a call from a beautiful, complex, willowy blonde friend who wanted to watch the Chargers game. Unwisely, I convinced her to come with me to a church singles conference dinner, which did not go well -- I believe the word "buzzkill" was employed -- but 5'6" Latrelle(?) Sproles rushing for 328 yards and winning the game in overtime made the day a good one overall.)

Five Hundred GWU Doctoral Students

2009-01-02T23:59:00.000-08:00

(1/18/09, Ashburn, VA) The Executive Leadership Doctoral Program at George Washington University has been an intellectual home for me since I left Ann Arbor, Michigan, in August 1990.

I think of myself as a fifth-generation organization theorist bringing a Herbert Simon legacy into the heart of the U.S. national security system, by building on the shoulders of four giants:

Herbert Simon (1947-1962)
James G. March (1962-1979)
Karl E. Weick (1979-1990)
David R. Schwandt (1990-2009)
James Douglas Orton (2009-?)

A strong case can be made for the proposition that we learn more from our students than from our mentors. In this blog posting I want to make sure that the nearly 500 people who have passed through the doors of the George Washington University Executive Leadership Doctoral Program are visible.

(Congratulations, by the way, to Bob Brescia, who defended his dissertation on January 12, 2009.)

Here's a wikispace that I use to keep track of these 500 GWU doctoral students:

http://eldpdissertationproposals.wikispaces.com/

As the Project on National Security Reform moves into an education phase and an implementation phase, these 500 scholar-practitioners provide an exellent pool of subject matter experts.

Spring 2009 Doctoral Seminar: High Reliablity Leadership, Organizations, and Strategies

2009-01-01T23:59:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2009 (Arlington, VA, 1/15/09, 7:40 a.m.)

Here is the link to our outline for the Spring 2009 Doctoral Seminar: http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/January+1%2C+2009.

I am excited about January-April 2009 -- the first 20 weeks of the Obama administration provide me an opportunity to lead a double life.

By day, I am a lowly underdog college professor in the last semester of a three-year contract as a part-time faculty member at the George Washington University's Executive Leadership Doctoral Program. At night, though, I am DrNatSecMgt, now working in PNSR's miniature cubicle farm at 4075 W. Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia.

The first 52 postings in my blog were written during the Stephen Hadley national security administration; I hope that I am able to deliver 1462 short dispatches from the James L. Jones national security administration -- if my readers will tolerate a bit of backdating from time to time, which I promise to clearly mark as such with a byline, as I have done above.

An analysis that kept me busy during the month of December 2008 was a Factiva search on the term "James L. Jones." The project is similar to the study that I did of the Condoleezza Rice national security administration (presented at Stanford in May 2004), and to the study that I did of the Stephen Hadley national security administration (presented at the International Conference on High Reliability Organizations in Deauville France in May 2007). The document sorts details about Jones' career into approximately 20 categories and is posted on my wikispace at pnsr.wikispaces.com.

Week 1 of the Jones administration occurred from Thursday January 1 to Saturday January 3 -- my sixteen-year-old son Patrick and I spent those days at Chipotle, Borders, Regal Cinema, and a Friday-night church dance for divorced Mormons at Centreville, Virginia (but let's not dwell on that). The theme was not focused on President-elect Obama, but on the 64-year-old former Commandant of the Marine Corps, James L. Jones, whose worldview will be critical to the reform of the U.S. national security system.

Happy New Year!

Recommendation 5.E. Executive Education

2008-12-21T17:37:00.000-08:00

The Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds continues to impress me as a rapid method for "flipping" the current stovepiped and incomprehensible national security community into a coherent, high-reliability national security system.

By carving out the week of December 21-27, 2008 for Recommendation 5.E., and by pulling my three Texas A&M friends into Paulette Robinson's (IRMC at NDU) Education Group on the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds (with MITRE's Leo Holly), maybe we can help Myra Shiplett and General Bill Navas build some high-end expertise on national security management education.

Collection of Other National Security Reports

2008-12-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

(1/26/09, National Defense University, 2:09 p.m.)

December 19, 2008Dear colleagues:We need to organize all of the reports that are coming out.

(1) December 8, 2008, a group focused on Darfur issued a report calling for a high-level forum in the White House for discussions of mass violence.http://www.savedarfur.org/newsroom/clips/report_gives_obama_advice_on_handling_genocide_threats/

(2) December 2, 2008, was the official release date of the WMD report, which is in Borders in paperback already, and we need to crosswalk our recommendations to their recommendations.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090802644.html

(3) Last night on the radio there was a discussion of the CSIS Cyberterrorism report, and the program (hosted by Warren Olney) concluded with a debate on the importance or non-importance of a cybersecurity czar in the White House.

(4) The January 2008 release of an Afghanistan report chaired by General James L. Jones might be reaching back a bit, but David Abshire was on the commission and there may be some staff members listed in the report who might show up in different roles in the new National Security Committee.

(5) The INSS Conference in October was an opportunity for a wide variety of people to call attention to their reports. e.g. Gordon Adams had a report with specific numbers of people for the State Department.

(6) Brookings' "Memorandum to the Next National Security Advisor"Organization Name: Brookings (Ivo Daalder; Mac Destler)Name of Report: Memorandum to the Next National Security AdvisorSynopsis: What You Need to Know About Your Job.Date of Release: Winter 2009

(7) Center fo a New American Security's "Governance in a Time of Political Transition"Organization Name: Center for a New American SecurityName of Report: Governance in a Time of Political Transition

Synopsis: This project is designed to provide policymakers with a clear-eyed assessment of why administrations often fail at the outset of taking power, particularly in national security and foreign policy, and to suggest alternative points of view.

Let's use this as a test of our rapid response swarming capability -- as championed by Leland Russell and Brian Helmer. All of us should learn how to upload Word Files to this page, type edits onto this page, create links between this page and other websites, etc.

Doug (10:00 a.m.)

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/December+19%2C+2008

Test of PNSR Research Fellow Swarming Capability

2008-12-20T11:04:00.000-08:00

(1/26/09, National Defense University, 2:05 p.m.)

December 20, 2008

Good day research fellows of PNSR. Today we'll be testing our rapid swarm capability with a relatively easy task -- Problem 16.

The blog entry that I owe Francis in a few hours calls for nine international regions.

One assignment will be to cut and copy all the text from the 750-page report that relate to Problem 16 onto this page, with final page numbers so that researchers looking at our work later can see what we were thinking.

A second task will be to create an Excel Worksheet that is broken into nine boxes -- three-by-three -- with 50 rows in each box. The rows will need to be populated with a variety of data:
(1) State
(2) Congressional District number
(3) Elected Congressional Representative for the district
(4) One high-value university located in or perhaps near the Congressional District
(5) "Matched" Country
(6) Population of the matched country
(7) If the population of the country is over 10 million people, it might be possible for the country to be "matched" by more than one Congressional district.

A third task will be to capture the current Defense Department map of the world and try to convert it into nine clusters:
(1) "Ex-Soviet Bloc Nations" will become Russia and former Soviet bloc countries -- we need to get about 820 million people into this cluster
(2) "Asian Nations" will become Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Viet Nam, maybe Thailand, and China -- that's going to be 1.5 million
(3) "Southeast Asian Nations" will become Australia, New Zealand, India (maybe not Pakistan -- what do you guys think?)
(4) "North American Nations" will become Canada, and then beefed up with big chunks of Middle East perhaps.
(5) "Central American Nations" will get Mexico and Central America and Cuba and Carribean -- and then beefed up with Island Nations in Pacific
(6) "South American Nations" will need to be populated with 800 million.
(7) "European Nations" will include Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and -- controversially perhaps -- Turkey and Israel
(8) "Arabic Nations" will include Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and then sweep Westward to include Pakistan, perhaps even Indonesia
(9) "African Nations" will include the non-Arabic portions of Africa.A fourth task will be to capture the current State Department map of the world and try to convert into nine clusters.

A fifth task will be to secure intel community maps.A sixth task would be to look at university programs on language, geography, culture and see how well we can map the world at the university level.Thanks for any help you can give -- remember this is a test of our swarming capability.

http://pnsr.wikispaces.com/December+20%2C+2008

Ten Presidential Missions

2008-12-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

(1/25/09, National Defense University, 1:44-1:45 p.m.)

Here is one of the early blog entries that Frances Hardin allowed me to write for the PNSR blog:

http://www.pnsr.org/web/module/blog/md/yes/id/52/interior.asp

Eleven Hybrid Agencies

2008-12-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

(1/26/09, National Defense University, 1:49 p.m.)

One of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" briefings from the interregnum -- after release of PNSR 2008, before inauguration of new national security administration.

http://www.pnsr.org/web/module/blog/md/yes/id/51/interior.asp