Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

The Honorable Stephen M. Duncan,
Director, Institute for Homeland Security Studies
National Defense University

Introduction By: Dr. Jacquelyn K. Davis

The Honorable Stephen M. Duncan: Good afternoon to you all. I’ll try to be a little bit provocative since it’s the first session after lunch. You're going to hear, I will warn you, some echoes from this morning, particularly echos of the remarks of Steve Flynn and some of the comments of Ed Anderson. I will preface my own remarks by saying that I'm looking at this issue entirely through the prism of the position that I occupied from 1989 to ’93, when then-Secretary of Defense Cheney asked me not only to continue my job as the ASD for Reserve Affairs but to take over a job which almost all of the people in the Pentagon were against; namely, figuring out how to use the Armed Forces to fight the international drug war. The President had been against the use of the Armed Forces; three Secretaries of Defense had been against the idea; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was against it. I’d sat in several conference meetings where everybody turned red just thinking about it.
But, in the FY ’89 DoD Authorization Act, the Congress of the United States ended the debate. The Department of Defense would be the lead federal agency for the detection and monitoring of the aerial and maritime transit of illegal drugs. I was the guy who had to figure it all out. I'm looking at the issue of homeland security from that perspective because there are many similarities between taking on this issue and the earlier drug issue.

I want to focus a little more precisely on the distinction between “homeland defense” and “homeland security” as the latter term is understood within the Pentagon. There were probably several reasons for the genesis of these two separate concepts. The reason for the distinction which is most often expressed by the Secretary of Defense is perhaps best illustrated by comments that he made in a couple of Town Hall meetings in the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003. That’s where senior officers and officials answer questions from uniformed and civilian personnel in the Pentagon. It’s televised sometimes.

In a November 2002 meeting, a questioner stood up and said, “Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask you about the military’s role in homeland security.” The Secretary of Defense declared that, “If we’re asked to do an emergency assignment, like [guarding] the airports, when there’s no other capability..., it ought to be for a short period of time. We ought to get in, do it, and get out, and get back to doing military assignments and not essentially civilian functions.”

At another meeting in March 2003, he said that “the task of defending America was best performed forward by preventing things from threatening our country. It’s understandable,” he continued, “that some people would look back and say, ‘Well, my goodness, if we have threats right here, shouldn’t we keep forces right here to protect against those threats?’ and I guess” he added, that “the answer to that is, ‘Isn't it better to deal with those threats elsewhere?’”

Of course, you heard the same kind of idea reflected this morning in Secretary McHale’s comments. You also heard this morning that at the Pentagon, which is always fertile territory for slogans and acronyms, people have fallen into the habit of referring to the policy distinction as one of fighting an “away game” or fighting the “home game”.

Now, anybody who’s had any senior responsibility in the Department of Defense can identify to a great extent with the Secretary’s view, especially at a time when the Armed Forces are already overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in many other places throughout the world which we seldom thought about during the Cold War. Less than a month ago, the Defense Science Board issued a report which concluded that the Armed Forces currently have “inadequate total numbers” of troops, particularly ground troops, to “sustain our current and projected global stabilization commitment.”

Another reason, which I think can be reasonably presumed for the distinction between “homeland defense” and “homeland security” relates to the public perception of the Armed Forces. Survey after survey and public opinion poll after public opinion poll reflect that the Armed Forces remain “the” American institution highest in the regard of the American people. What that means in the halls of Congress is that when there is a complex problem to be faced, Members of Congress often reach for the one lever of government that immediately says “Aye, Aye, Sir,” and “Can do” and which then proceeds to do “it” very effectively. That belief was very prevelant in 1989 when the Department of Defense was given the drug interdiction mission. Having said that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Armed Forces are the best institution of government for the resolution of a particular problem.

When the counterdrug mission was given to the Department of Defense in 1989, another development occurred which I think may be relevant today. That is, frankly, the fear of many federal agencies of DoD involvement. I remember coming out of a war game at the Naval War College when the then-Commandant of the Coast Guard approached me and said words to the effect of “You know, Mr. Secretary, once you have this thing up and running, there will be no Coast Guard.” When I asked why not, he replied “Well, because DoD is so big, the budget is so big, the people are so good and so aggressive.” Of course, all I could say is, “Well, trust me.” I'm not sure that he did, but I made sure that the Armed Forces worked closely with the Coast Guard.

A third reason, which I think can be presumed for the distinction in concepts was mentioned by Secretary McHale this morning -- an 1878 statute, the Posse Comitatus statute, I address the statute at length in my new book. Now, as we know, that statute generally prohibits the use of the Armed Forces to execute the law; that is to say, to perform law enforcement functions. But, as Secretary McHale pointed out, there are many statutory exceptions, including those relating to counterdrug missions and weapons of mass destruction.

By the way, it’s a statute that can be revised tomorrow morning. When someone suggests to me that a particular statute, or strategy, or policy can’t be reconsidered, my response is to conclude that they have their head in the sand. In a world that’s changing as rapidly as ours, one simply cannot say “this statute is off the table.” You may come to the same conclusion that you reached initially before the policy was established, but wouldn’t you like to revisit policy decisions from time to time to make sure that you're on the right track?

Finally, there’s probably a more practical reason for the distinction between “homeland defense” and “homeland security”. General Anderson called it the question of “who’s going to pay”; I call it “money”. It has not escaped the attention of many policy and management people in this town that the size of the DoD budget is substantially greater than the chiefs of most government agencies can even dream about. Consequently, if they can obtain DoD resources to do what they are required to be doing, they won’t hesitate to do so. And with all due respect to the states, governors aren't above that ploy either. If they can obtain federal funding, they won’t have to face hard political decisions back home. In many cases, the federal government should be the source of funding. But, in many cases Uncle Sam should not. I suggest that this is also one of the reasons for the distinction.

Now, it’s easy to sympathize with all of these reasons. I've been there. I've heard these kinds of arguments. I know the pressures that any Secretary of Defense feels. But, several conclusions in another recent report of the Defense Science Board are very disturbing. Noting that resource constraints will always and must always be considered, the Board nevertheless concluded that in the future “DoD will play a vital role in the overall Homeland Security mission;” that local first responders will be “supported by unique DoD capabilities and assets;” that neither DoD nor civilian agencies have “fully explored the potential role DoD may need to fulfill for homeland security;” and that the Department of Homeland Security -- listen to this – “has very little understanding” of the role of the U.S. Northern Command and that at least as of early spring 2003, the “top DoD leadership [had] not actively sought...partnership with civil agencies”.

I submit that whatever the merit of the reasons upon which the distinction of “homeland defense” and “homeland security” was based originally, that distinction is no longer useful, if it ever was. The new form of terrorism does not stop or start at our international borders, either at the water’s edge or at our land borders. The lines between “foreign” and “domestic”, and between “war” and “crime”, and between “military assignments” and “civilian functions” are no longer as clear as they were before September 11, 2001. We’re now engaged in a war of a very different kind; hence, the title of my book. The American homeland is now part of the battlespace. The National Strategy for Homeland Security rightly characterizes the task of securing the homeland as the most important mission -- not of the Department of Homeland Security -- but the most important mission of the United States Government, and as “a challenge of monumental scale and complexity”.

One of the things which officials at all levels of government – I mean mayors, governors, all officials at all levels of government -- need to know in their efforts to secure the homeland, is what they can and cannot expect from the Department of Defense. They may not obtain certainty, but they're entitled to at least some predictability. They need to know so they can determine what new policies to develop. State governors have already been outspoken in recent months about their concern over the issue of the use of their National Guard to fight the war on terror overseas and what they might have to do in the case of even a natural disaster, to say nothing of a catastrophic terrorist attack.

Military and Department of Homeland Security planners also remain uncertain, as General Anderson can attest, about the relationship between the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in the planning for a response to a major attack. Planners at other agencies -- I've talked to them -- remain uncertain about issues as simple as how many hospital beds DoD could make available in the event of a catastrophic attack.

In these circumstances, we can no longer afford a divided approach to terrorism which may occur “over there” and terrorism which may take place “here”. We need to start today to integrate all of our military and civilian experience, capabilities, equipment, other resources, technologies, and especially planning to meet the new threat. Now, much work has been done by DoD that is very good, both in the idea of intercepting threats away from our shores and in responding to attacks here. But much, much more is required.

I suggest that this will require an unprecedented – at least to my knowledge it’s never happened -- interagency approach to the assessment of national security and homeland security threats and vulnerabilities. The same people ought to be making the assessments so that it can all be integrated and responded to, including those threats which originate and may have an impact overseas, and those which may have an impact at home. This may require an interagency -- that is, DoD and other federal departments and agencies -- planning and budgetary process in which the Office of Management and Budget doesn’t permit the departments to compete against each other and then involve itself at the end, but rather a process in which OMB becomes involved at the very beginning so that the pros and the cons can be heard and the President can be fully informed on the resource issues.

It may also mean that in order to be fully prepared, additional military units, not the ones that are assigned this afternoon, but additional military units, and perhaps significantly greater numbers of individual military personnel will have to be assigned specific, primarily, and perhaps even exclusively -- that is, only -- homeland security missions, beforehand, not after a devastating attack occurs.

These kinds of decisions may require something which I have recommended in other quarters; it’s not for discussion here, it’s too broad. Briefly stated, I'm of the view that we need to consider a fundamental restructuring of our Armed Forces. At the minimum, we need a re-thinking of the specific missions assigned to the many elements of the Active and Reserve forces, including the National Guard.

These kinds of decisions, of course, are tough. They can’t be made in a political year, but they need to be focused on. Preparations for a possible terrorist attack, especially critically important training, need to be made now, not after an attack occurs. The Department of Homeland Security’s new National Incident Management System, which was prepared at the direction of the President, states very clearly that preparedness “is implemented through a continuous cycle of planning, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating and taking action to correct and mitigate.”

This kind of integrated effort for both the prevention of, and the response to terrorist attacks, was contemplated by Homeland Security Presidential Directive No. 5, which was issued early in 2003. Listen to the policy declaration of that Directive: “To prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks...the United States Government” -- not the Department of Homeland Security -- “shall establish a single, comprehensive approach to domestic incident management. The objective of the United States Government is to ensure that all levels of government across the Nation have the capability to work efficiently and effectively together, using a national approach to domestic incident management. In these efforts...the United States Government treats crisis management and consequence management as a single integrated function.”

Perhaps two very recent developments will illustrate, at least partly, the need for a total integration of planning. One of the developments was made public within the last 72 hours. Earlier this week, news reports indicated that after an internal Pentagon policy debate, senior U.S. military officers have rejected calls for a direct role for the U.S. Armed Forces in combating the illegal narcotics trade in Afghanistan. It’s undisputed that the opium labs in Afghanistan are funding anti-Coalition forces, including the al-Qaeda network. The senior counterdrug official at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was quoted yesterday as saying that the opium industry in Afghanistan, which generates an estimated $30 billion in revenue, is “a direct threat to the national security interests of the United States.” Nevertheless, our military leadership has decided that our Armed Forces are overburdened, and that the destruction of the labs and the related supply routes is a law enforcement mission.

Without knowing more, I'm not going to say that the decision is wrong. But it seems obvious to me that that kind of decision -- that is, a decision not to attack an important funding force for a group whose stated purpose is to kill large numbers of innocent Americans -- is a decision that should be made not in the context of the near-term impact on the Armed Forces overseas, but in the overall context of the war against international terrorism, both overseas and at home.

Another recent development suggests that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. Comments by General Pete Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are very interesting. Reflecting both upon his current job and an earlier job on the Joint Staff, he noted that the interagency process does a reasonably good job of presenting the President with options. “But,” he said, “once the President decides to do something, our government goes back into its stovepipes for execution -- the Department of State does what they do, DoD does what we do, Department of Treasury, et cetera.” In other words, the departments and agencies don’t work together in the kind of synergistic, or “joint” process imposed upon the military services by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. To solve the problem, General Pace suggested the creation of Joint Interagency Task Forces, in which the designation of the lead agency would depend upon the nature of the mission or the operation that’s assigned to a particular task force. All of the task forces would be responsible not to two separate councils, but only to the National Security Council.

In conclusion, I will simply assert that three years after the attacks of 9/11, it is not acceptable that the Department of Homeland Security has a very little understanding of the role of the U.S. Northern Command, and that there’s something less than an aggressive effort by senior DoD officials to reach out for civilian agencies that are responsible for homeland security. We need to immediately improve the integration of the efforts of the Government’s individual departments and agencies.

We ought to be asking the same question that General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, referred to recently. Speaking to a local group he posed this question: “Are we being as bold and as innovative as we need to be?” He then declared, “I don’t want to ask that question after the next 9/11. The time to ask the question is now.”

I submit that now is the time to be bold; the time to candidly and objectively reexamine the process which we employ to formulate and improve national strategy, including both the National Military Strategy and the Strategy for Homeland Security. Now is the time to improve the integration of efforts to determine the relative importance of all of our many vulnerabilities, to establish budgetary and resource priorities, and to execute policy decisions.

The stakes, as you heard this morning, are too great to do anything less. We cannot assume that our initial bureaucratic responses to the attacks of 9/11 were perfect models of government decision-making. We need to reassess them.

In her recent book on statecraft, Margaret Thatcher reminded us that “It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you don’t know. Those who think they know but are mistaken and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge.” If we are to better know what we don’t know, it’s important that we more effectively integrate all of our efforts to protect our home.

I look forward to your questions. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

SHARON HODGE: Sharon Hodge. I write for a publication called Inside the Pentagon, and my question is to the panelists with defense background. What is the probability and over what period of time might Mr. Duncan’s suggestion of complete reorganization of Armed Forces to accommodate homeland defense actually become a reality?

SECRETARY DUNCAN: I guess my view is, it’s not likely to happen in the short term within the Pentagon. I don’t mean to say this in a pejorative sense. But, when you're fighting a global war on terrorism, when you're extended the way our Armed Forces are now, when policymakers and operational people are working the hours they are now, to ask them to stand back and take a totally neutral, objective look about the future manpower needs of the Armed Forces is, I think, asking too much.

I have recommended, and I must preface this by saying that I hate government by commission; I like to hold public officials accountable, fire them or hire them, but hold them accountable. But, I think the way to approach this is to have a congressionally appointed and a presidentially-appointed national commission, not unlike the 9/11 Commission that would include people with experience; people who do not represent special interest groups, people who are capable of designing, or contributing to the design of the kind of Armed Forces we’re going to need in the future. We are fighting what everybody in this room now believes to be a different kind of war. The homeland is now the battle space, and we’re using a Cold War force structure. We’ve been tinkering around the edges with it to fight the new war. It’s common sense that we need to redesign the forces. It’s not abundantly clear to me that we have the Active and Reserve components doing what they ought to be doing and what they're best qualified to do.

A restructuring may require breaking some bottles. I remember once in a policy debate in the Pentagon, I suggested that we could contemplate a time when we would not have a carrier task force in the Mediterranean for 365 days each year. I thought the Chief of Naval Operations was going to have heart failure right in front of my eyes. Well, there are a lot of things we’re doing now that would have been considered as revolutionary, or at least very unusual, only a few years ago. We even have a Marine officer in charge of Strategic Command. A Naval officer is about to assume command of NORAD. There are a lot of things we thought were not possible 15 years ago, that might be today.

All I'm saying is that if we’re going to follow General Myers’s advice and be aggressive in our thinking and innovative, let’s have some people who have the time and ability to really reflect upon the difficult force structure issues, who can ask the hard questions, keep the special interest pleaders out, and then hold their recommendations up to the light. Obviously, Congress should be involved from the get-go, and the Secretary of Defense, and state officials. Both branches of the government would have to be involved from the beginning. But, I think we need to wipe the board clean, recognize that we’ve got a whole new security environment, and ask what do we need to do to meet the new security threat.

MAJOR CHRIS WHITMIRE: Major Chris Whitmire from the Air Force Counterproliferation Center. I’ll throw the question and the statement out to anyone who would like to jump on it. The comments on Posse Comitatus, I take it personally quite refreshing compared to earlier today, but ultimately we are bound by the law. The national strategy for homeland security does address using all of our defense mechanisms, including Department of Defense, and legal reform where needed. So ultimately the Title 32 and the Hip Pocket Title 10 self-initiated orders that I've heard of from some of my friends-- I'm a ... (inaudible) airline pilot, so I keep up with a lot of the guys who are flying the ... (inaudible) and what have you. It seems to me like a temporary band aid for now, and we really need to make that a whole better than it is.

So ultimately, I think a start would be, as wearers of the uniform we so often, especially when it comes to subordinancy to civilian control, we err tremendously to the conservative so we’re not breaking any of the rules, and we sort of culturalize, or institutionalize restraints and they sort of grow and grow, and maybe Posse Comitatus has a lot of exceptions, and that’s already been voiced; ultimately I think something that needs to be started at the mid-level ranks and what have you, just some general education to the people in leadership positions starting at the mid-levels and maybe even earlier on what the true Posse Comitatus restraints and exceptions are.

But ultimately, I think, from a proactive standpoint, because when things occur, such as 9/11, and future 9/11’s, God forbid, but inevitably we’ll probably get them, ultimately that too-hard-to-do tasking many times falls on the Department of Defense, and so that we’re not behind the 8-ball, I would really like for someone to entertain some solutions, especially legal reform, in regard to Posse Comitatus and what can allow the military to be more proactive sooner, because terrorists do strike at their time and place; it’s usually not ours.

SECRETARY DUNCAN: I am not advocating, per se, a change in the Posse Comitatus statute. But, it was suggested expressly in the President’s Strategy that the statute be revisited. So when I heard cries from the Pentagon to the effect of “oh, no,” it took me back to 1989 when I was having to figure out how to use military forces to fight the counterdrug war. Every time I came across a general officer that didn’t want to do something, he said “Posse Comitatus.” He may not have had a law degree, but “Posse Comitatus.” [Laughter]

Well, we can’t use Posse Comitatus as an obstacle to prevent us from doing what we don’t want to do. I'm not sure that the statute needs to be changed because there are so many express exceptions, but I would not wait, I think like Northern Command suggested, until something hits us in the face; I would start right now with a body of experts and say, Do we need more flexibility?

One of the problems, and I say this as a guy who practiced law for a long time, one of the problems you have when you're a policymaker in government is you’ve got a bevy of lawyers who will usually err on the conservative side. And, that’s okay. You don’t want to be violating the law. When I was doing the drug thing, I knew it could blow up in my face any day. On the other hand, too many times lawyers will advise “you can’t do it” without proceeding to step two, which should be “I know the policy objectives, so let me give you some advice about how you can lawfully accomplish that policy objective”. Instead of just saying “no, no, no,” the response should be, “not that way, but let me show you how to accomplish the objective in a proper and legal way.”

So I say we should reconsider Posse Comitatus. Maybe we don’t need to change it at all. But, it’s only a statute, and if public policy should need to change because of the way the world has changed since 9/11, the sky’s not going to fall in.