Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 33rd IFPA-Fletcher Conference
on
National Security Strategy and Policy

October 16-17, 2002
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Transcript Session 2: Strategic Responses to New Security Challenges

Beyond Goldwater-Nichols – Legislation
Address by the Honorable James Locher III, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, and author of Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon

Harmon: Well, the Honorable James Locher the Third has been a key public servant in the middle of some of the issues under discussion here this afternoon. And for all his work, among other awards, he holds the Defense Department’s award, the highest available to civilians for distinguished public service. For four years, starting in 1989, when Mr. Locher was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict. That office is, of course, in some ways, a creation of Congress.

And Mr. Locher came into it richly aware of the jealousies of bureaucracies and of the difficulties of reform because, after all, as you all know, he had been a professional staff member on the Senate Committee on Armed Services who helped to build the bi-lateral effort that passed Goldwater-Nichols in their Defense Reorganization Act. His most recent book is Victory on the Potomac and I can recommend it to you as an exciting story as well as a fine insider’s account of all the bureaucratic battles that went along with that kind of legislation.

James Locher is a graduate of, among other institutions, West Point and Harvard. He is a visiting fellow today at National Defense University and I was very pleased to find out this morning he had been down in Quantico at the Marine Corps War College teaching the officers there. His subject for the next 15 minutes is, “Beyond Goldwater-Nichols: Legislation in Response to National Security Requirements.” James Locher.

Locher: Thank you Chris. I’ve been asked to address the subject of the need for new legislation, national security legislation given the new environment. And I thought that I would start my presentation with a quote from George Bernard Shaw. He said, “Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.” And the reason I start with this quote is the fact that many of the ideas that I will present today and that will be presented by others in coming months, have been debated for several decades.

When I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff in the mid-1980s we were looking at the issue of bringing all instruments of U.S. national power to bear to national security challenges. We were looking at the inability of the inter-agency system to do that effectively. In the late 1980s, early 1990s, there were people who were talking about the need for Goldwater-Nichols II to fix the inter-agency environment.

And what actually has been missing is the political will to take on these difficult organizational issues, the absence of leadership attention, the absence of institutional priorities. Let me turn and talk about some of these ideas as to what could be done. With respect to the National Security Council, in my view, its membership is still defined by a post-World War II concept of national security when we were focusing on diplomacy, military and intelligence.

It has four statutory members, the President, Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and two statutory advisors, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence. Now the President can invite whoever he would like to attend the National Security Council meetings. And recently he has had to invite more members of his Cabinet.

The White House has indicated that the Secretary of the Treasury is most often invited. But in my view we need to think about this issue of, if we are going to bring all instruments of U.S. national power to bear, maybe we need to reflect that in our formal structure in the National Security Council. I placed here one of the quotes by President Bush about how we will bring all of the instruments of power to bear in the fight against terrorism.

We have been making this statement for many, many years about employing all of the instruments of U.S. national power and we don’t often remember it. And so the first thing I think I would do is I would, by statute, add three new members to the National Security Council, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security.

Now, can you accuse me of organizational tidiness by asking that we add these members to the NSC? Some of them participate. Some of them can be expected to participate much more frequently. But I think that it is important to highlight the national security responsibilities of these officials and of their departments and to begin to make those cultural changes in those departments so that they can carry out their national security responsibilities.

The second area I would like to talk about is combating terrorism. With the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and of the Homeland Security Council, we have actually bi-furcated the mission of combating terrorism. The National Security Council at one time had all of the responsibilities and we have now divided it between the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council. And on my slide here I have listed what each of those Councils have responsibility for. And I don’t think that this is a constructive way to proceed. The combating terrorism mission is difficult enough without having it divided between two high level councils of our government. There is a second problem in that as we head towards a Department of Homeland Security, we are heading towards a period where we have some unnecessary duplication between that department and the Office of Homeland Security.

And the course of action that I would recommend is, as I mentioned before, I would add the Secretary of Homeland Security to the National Security Council. And I would eliminate the Homeland Security Council and the Office of Homeland Security. I wouldn’t mind if the Office of Homeland Security stayed for a while to help the new department get established. But eventually it does need to disappear. The Secretary of Homeland Security needs to become a full-fledged member of the National Security Council and the National Security Council should take on these issues in full.

The next area I would like to turn to is to talk about this issue of inter-agency reform. And I have a quote from a joint staff memo of 1961, which talked about, “It has been extremely difficult to achieve coordinated inter-departmental planning.” So the challenge of our inability to produce unity of effort in the inter-agency environment is long-standing. I placed here some quotes from an Army TRADOC study of 1998 that talked about the diversity of the inter-agency with each agency having its own culture, hierarchy, bias, misperceptions and unique perspectives, makes unity of effort difficult.

And it also talked about the low technical and procedural inter-operability and the absence of a common vision. And that, when I was the Assistant Secretary for Special Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict and I participated in many of the inter-agency councils, it was very, very difficult to produce unity of effort in these major challenges.

The problem that we have really is an imbalance between departmental interests and national interests. And I have listed here that this parallels what the Department of Defense in the mid-1908s when we had an imbalance between the interests of the four services and the broader joint or national interest. When I was in the Department of Defense in the first Bush administration—

—End of Tape—/p>

—the standing orders for people who were going to inter-agency meetings were, “Don’t tell them anything. Don’t let them interfere with our activities. And don’t let them get any of our money.” Now the Department of Defense’s attitudes on the inter-agency have changed tremendously. As a matter of fact it is the one department that is leaning most forward to find appropriate reforms in inter-agencies.

But the basic problem that we have is the departments are there to defend their turf to a great extent. I have listed a quote here by Peter Drucker when he was talking about these kinds of organizational arrangements when he said that, “The dynamic that is created is that departments see it as their first job to defend their function or their department, to protect it against marauders(?) in other departments, and to make sure it doesn’t get pushed around.”

The problem in inter-agency is we do have different visions, different cultures, and those cultures, some of the civilian cultures are not attuned to exercises, contingency planning, rapid response teams, to policy planning. We don’t have a common doctrine. We have different terminology and often our systems are incompatible.

The problem is this is not an area that is going to be fixed by legislation. Congress will offer little in this area. First of all there are the committee jurisdictions, which will be a tremendous obstacle. But, in addition, the Congress has had a tendency to see the National Security Council and its systems to really be hands off, that they are part of the President’s domain.

And so they will not go into great prescriptions with respect to inter-agency reform. And I have suggested that the fixes will have to come from the Executive Branch and I have listed one possibility, a major undertaking chartered by the President, possibly with the Vice President serving as the chair. And I mentioned the idea that the Department of Defense in many places, the Joint Staff, the Joint Forces Command, even down to the Special Operations Command is working on this inter-agency problem with great fervor.

The last subject I’d like to talk about is the Department of Homeland Security. Out of many, one. One hundred and seventy thousand employees, 22 agencies, 17 different sets of procedures-- And in the legislation that is currently being considered by the Congress, there will be little that will help to unify this new department. For the most part, the Congress is focused on structure.

And I think it is useful to think about, those of us who do lots of organizational analysis, often use a framework called the McKinsey Seven S’s to examine the elements of organizational effectiveness. And I have listed those here, often in the priority in which we consider them. The most important element of organizational effectiveness is something called shared values and agreed vision, purpose, and principles.

The second most important is systems, those horizontal processes that pull the diverse elements of organizations together. And I think as the Congress and the new Department of Homeland Security are looking at how they are going to unify these large number of different agencies with very different perspectives, they need to look at these McKinsey Seven S’s.

And I have taken a look at this to sort of suggest that, and I have made these suggestions to the Congress to broaden their legislation to try to consider some of these ideas. In terms of shared values, it is critically important that the new Department of Homeland Security have a unifying vision, that the Secretary is able to articulate that in meaningful ways to all of the 170 thousand employees there.

It needs to develop systems that are designed to promote integration and that have emphasis on outcomes, what we are attempting to achieve in the Department. The third thing, the organization needs to develop those skills that permit it operate all the way across the Department. With respect to staff, in the Goldwater-Nichols Act, one of the most useful dimensions were the Joint Officer Management Provisions that gave priority to service and joint assignments and created incentives for people to go to such assignments and to serve independently while they were there.

The same sorts of ideas need to be examined with respect to this new department, incentives for service and other elements of the department and very vigorous education programs to help unify the department. And the last thing is in the area of style, leadership and culture. How can we produce a culture there that gives high value to unity of effort? And we need to have as part of that, leaders who will have high volume communications to the entire organization.

Those are my thoughts. I would be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you.

Questions and Answers

Clark: Jeff Clark, Center of Military History. This is a question for Mr. Billingslea, SOLIC. Sir, you spoke about rebuilding, reconstruction, the role of Special Operations in that task, it could be in Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq or Kuwait. And you mentioned Civil Affairs and they have a great capability for infrastructure, for governmental infrastructure reconstruction with help from the Corps of Engineers and maybe companies like Newton-Brown.

But what about the political reconstruction or construction? You go into a country like Iraq or post-World War II Germany and Japan. Who do you think or how-- Do you have any thoughts about how best to approach that part of kind of nation building if we want to get back into that business? That is my question. Thanks.

Harmon: Mr. Clark’s question is a very good one. However, he can’t tell probably because of where the podium sits, but the Principal Deputy of SOLIC has escaped back to the Pentagon and has to face another meeting there. It may well be, however, that three of our other panelists are interested enough in the question to want to comment on it. Yes, sir.

Locher: It has been many years since I have been the Assistant Secretary for SOLIC, so I am a little dated, but with respect to this idea of political reconstruction, when a Civil Affairs team is preparing for reconstitution of a government, the team can have expertise on political, governmental matters. As a matter of fact, when we were redoing the reconstitution in Kuwait, that was actually planned here in Washington with 54 Civil Affairs Reservists and one member from 20 Kuwaiti ministries.

So there is expertise there, political expertise in the Civil Affairs Organization, how that might be augmented by other elements of the United States government I don’t know at that present time. But this is an area where the Civil Affairs people could at least make a start.

Harmon: General Anderson, the Army is so heavily involved in Civil Affairs abroad, especially with some of the reservists work, things like that side of work. I don’t know if you wanted to add to—

Anderson: Well, you bring up a very good point. And certainly, Mr. Locher is well informed on that. I think the other dimension to this, however, is that when you are addressing that kind of a problem, that kind of an issue, this really requires an inter-agency approach. And it should not be expected that the military, in and of itself, has to develop those skills solely to be able to perform that function.

Others, such as the Department of State and other organizations within the government are well equipped to be able to do those kinds of things. And so, I think an inter-agency approach with the Civil Affairs and the other organizations equipped to do that is a good start, if you would.

Gertz: Yes, and I would also like to make the point that I think that NGOs can also play that role. There is a very good group headed by Al Santoli who used to work on the Hill and he just a formed a group that is supporting our Special Forces in the Philippines by getting medical supplies and getting them out to the people in the poor areas of the southern Philippines. And he really looks at it as the humanitarian war against terrorism because that is really going at the root causes.

And that is a program that is just beginning and I think that the military is going to look to NGOs to do that in a lot of other places, too.

__: I would add that the President’s new National Security Strategy certainly indicates the significance of the war of ideas in the current effort abroad against terrorism, that certainly reasonable structures have a great deal to do with the kind of alternative there can be both to some of the plans of terrorist but also the norms the despots try to establish before housing some of those same terrorists.

And I think that the United States may or may not have been tremendously good in the past at sort of the war of ideas and the proponency in preparation for democracy abroad. But it does seem to me to be an absolutely vital part of our national strategy. It has been, of course, a part of all past national security strategies, at least all those I have read.

And it varies on emphasis with administration to administration but each has recognized its utility and the current one, released September 17th , certainly does too.

Harmon: Good. We should go to another question. Dr. Shultz. Richard.

Shultz: This is for Bill. Your comments were interesting. I wondered if you could elaborate a bit on what had in mind when you said that SOCOM should have its own intelligence capability and what specifically, how do you see that unfolding?

Gertz: Again, it is a unit kind of a function whereby you would have a unilateral capability in places around the world that could-- I mean, it is an action-oriented organization but it would be involving the infrastructure and preparations for the deployment of forces so that we don’t have to start from ground zero to begin an operation renting warehouses, locating various things that are going to be needed for those kinds of things. I think that we need a Special Operations intelligence/covert action capability that can be doing that in a lot of places.

It is a fairly expensive thing to do. It is fairly time consuming but I think that that is the kind of thing that they need to do.

__: ...(inaudible)

Gertz: Absolutely, yes, both places where we can get to easily and especially places that we can’t get to. And, of course, that is going to involve better unit capabilities across the board to be able to do that.

Harmon: I think I saw another arm down that way. Yes, sir.

__: ...(inaudible) of Indonesia. My question is for Mr. Bill Gertz. Because we all know that in ...(inaudible) in the northern tip of Sumatra Island, there is Muslim’s ...(inaudible) movement. They want to establish 100% Muslim country. And we all know that in 1980s they got training from Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Now their strength is about 300 weapons and what is your point of view about this movement. Is it belong to ...(inaudible) terrorists or not. Thank you.

Gertz: Well, as I said, I think that the Al Qaeda strategy is to try and fold all of those kind of groups into one group that they head that has their extremist vision of Islam. I am not familiar with that particular group but I know that that is a pretty bad neighborhood as far as emerging terrorist threats. I think the Philippines is also dealing with that too.

I know that-- As I mentioned this one humanitarian program is trying to get on the Island of Suhoo(?) and try to get some help there to try to do humanitarian work and in some sense, ideological work. I didn’t mention it in my points but one of the big intelligence challenges for the war on terrorism is going to be how to deal with the ideological component. And I don’t think we are doing a very good job.

And part of the problem is that the President has said this is not a war against Islam, but from the Islamic extremists point of view, this is clearly a war against Judaism and Christianity. And we need to find some ways to deal with that, whether it is bringing together moderate Muslims, say, in Egypt and Turkey, if we can find them, and trying to deal with the issue of Islamic extremism head on.

Again, I think it is an ideological problem that would have an impact on the area that you are talking about.

Harmon: Yes, sir.

Fautua: Dave Fautua, Joint Futures Lab, U.S. Joint Forces Command. I’d like to take advantage of the panel members and ask a question of all three of you that are linked and, depending on how you answer, be interactive. First to Mr. Locher, you mentioned the Seven S’s, McKinsey’s Seven S’s, in relation to culture with the inter-agencies. And I completely agree with your. It is a very, very big problem.

I wonder if you could speak to how you would operationalize those Seven S’s within HLS but also within the context of NORTHCOM. And then, General Anderson, based on what he says, what would you do to operationalize his recommendations. And then, lastly, Mr. Gertz, given what General Anderson says, how does that at all relate to sharing information, which in itself compartmentalized and hidden behind green doors, etcetera. Is it possible to have this kind of Seven S with information and intelligence?

Locher: Well, I guess I need to start this response. With respect to the issue of culture and the inter-agency, the different departments that play a role in the national security process have, over the years, developed different cultures. Culture is not something that is easy to address straight on. It actually takes a long period of time. And as you are thinking about how can I change the culture, you often need to think about what are the nearer term things that I can do in some of the other Seven S’s that slowly begin the cultural change.

For example, in the Counter-terrorism Security Group at the NSC where I served for four years, there was little interest by many of the participating agencies to get involved in exercises. In the Department of Defense it was something that we were always used to doing. But it was alien to the civilian agencies.

And the Department of Defense actually proposed doing exercise, tabletop exercises, here in Washington with various terrorism scenarios. And in the beginning there was very weak participation by the civilian agencies. The Fifth Assistant would normally be sent to participate. But over time the value of those exercises became obvious to the participants from all of the agencies and we slowly began to change the culture there to understand how we had to be prepared for some of these national security responsibilities.

To talk about the Department of Homeland Security, in my slide I had mentioned some of the things that would be foremost in my mind if I were the Secretary of Homeland Security and thinking about how am I going to, what are those organizational levers that I have out there that I could employ across those Seven S’s that could begin to unify this department. And those are the things that I would focus on.

Anderson: Interestingly enough, Dr. Younger and I were talking about this issue over lunch, as a matter of fact. Because I think that our challenge is considerably different than the challenge that OHLS or the Department of HLS faces primarily because we are in a situation where our challenge is to create a culture. The Department of HLS is in a situation where they have to change culture that has already been created in 17, 22, or whatever the number is, different organizations.

So I do feel that is a significant difference between the two. So, we have talked about this and we do believe that it is very, very important to establish our culture at the beginning and what Commander General Ed Eberhardt has established, has been a number of different elements, if you will, of the culture.

And I would submit to you, and I know he believes the same thing, that the most important one of that is establishing relationships with those with whom we are going to work across the broad spectrum of organizations to include the inter-agency services, other DOD agencies, and that kind of a thing because there is just no way we can do it by ourselves. We recognize that. And ultimately with the Department of HLS as well—

But there are a number of other elements, as well, that constitute culture. But that, I would submit to you, is probably one of the very first and important ones for us.

Gertz: And as far as the— And what the issue here is, and I think Jim Locher put it good, the imbalance between department and national interests. That is really the problem of bureaucracy and there is no easy solution to that. To get the job done you need a bureaucracy but the problem always is that after a time, bureaucracies turn on themselves and become more interested in survival and self-preservation and that is really where we are.

In the Homeland Security Department, I would point out that the intelligence community was excluded from that. They have their own bureaucracy and they don’t want to be part of a new bureaucracy. And that is going to create problems because those agencies won’t have their own ability to get the information. They are going to have to ask other intelligence components to get that information for them. So that is one problem right there.

And I don’t really have an answer for how to fix it. But I can tell you in Washington, information is power and sharing it tends, in the bureaucratic sense, there is a resistance to do that because you would lose power and influence and budget and people and that kind of thing. It is a big cultural problem and I am not sure I know the answer on how to fix that one.

Harmon: We go now to the gentleman in the back.

Williams: Avon Williams, Department of the Army. General Anderson, in keeping with the focus on organizational architecture, I have a more parochial question. There is already a Division of Military Support for Civilian Authorities Function in DOD, which I believe the Secretary of the Army is the executive agent. And it sounds to me-- And reading the documents related to the stand up of NORTHCOM, the function, the civil support function that NORTHCOM is going to perform sounds almost identical to the DOMS function at HQDA.

And I am wondering if there is some redundancy there of if I am not understanding what the separation of functions is going to be between NORTHCOM and DOMS.

Anderson: Okay, you are absolutely right. DOMS has been for 40 or 50 years doing that particular function. My understanding is that OSD is in the process of reevaluating exactly that issue as whether or not there is a continued need for DOMS given NORTHCOM. We will see what the outcome of that is going to be. My expectation, however, is that DOMS will no longer exist.

And the functions performed by DOMS will be passed either to the Joint Staff or OSD or to Northern Command and that is how I see I think that will be settled so that we eliminate that duplication.

Harmon: I think we have time for a couple of more questions. See a hand anywhere-- Okay. Very Good. Thank you. Yes.

Joyal: Thank you. Paul Joyal, InterCon International. I was very interested in your analysis concerning the S’s, especially your stress on the second most important element being systems. So, my question, Mr. Locher is, does an opportunity now present itself actually, with the formation of the Homeland Defense Organization if you establish or organize the entity around the a system, which creates, a technological system, which creates a virtual enterprise-wide environment that stress collaboration, shared documents through proper compartmentation, etcetera, etcetera.

Do we face a real opportunity to maybe overcome some of the traditional impediments that bureaucracies develop over time especially when they develop from a paper-laden environment versus an electronic environment? What opportunities do you see existing under these conditions?

Locher: Well, I think there is a great opportunity, an opportunity that can be exploited by effective leadership. And one of the things that I have noticed in the legislation describing the structure of the Department of Homeland Security is that in most of our departments, especially in the Department of Defense, we are organized almost everywhere on a functional basis.

And in the Department of Homeland Security the Undersecretaries really have a mission focus. And so they are broader than those functional stovepipes that have a tendency to be inward looking. And so, right away, the structure lends itself to focus more on outcomes, to be thinking about looking across the department. But this will be quite a challenge. There is a lot to do. There is a lot to bring together and to unify.

But there is a great opportunity here to layout some of these new ideas, to make use of some of the new technologies, some of the new techniques, to really create an organization that can work all the way across those disparate entities and get focused on what we have to achieve.

Harmon: Another question from the floor. And if there isn’t any, then we can adjourn a moment or two early and keep on time. Despite the pressures of schedules in Washington we have managed to retain the majority of our panel for the two-hour panel and I want to ask you now to join me in thanking General Anderson, Mr. Gertz, and Mr. Locher.