I find myself in agreement with Gordon Adams on this issue. The OMB position of Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs should be elevated to the level of Deputy Director, and should be dual hatted with a Deputy NSC Advisor position. All too often, policy makers overlook the resource implications of their ideas, until it is too late. At the same time, some OMB Associate Directors (not, I emphasize Gordon Adams when he held that job) overreach and try to micro-manage the Defense and State Departments. A dual appointment would create a more balanced understanding of the resource implications of policy and at the same time, direct the appetite that some Associate Directors have for making policy into a more constructive direction that specifically bars micromanaging the Executive Departments.

Neither the NSC nor the OMB should be operational agencies. They are staff agencies. And it is always more effective and efficient to have an interlocking staff that is not at war with itself or with the line agencies in the Exeuctive Branch.

Of course, organization charts cannot overocme personality clashes, or incompetence. That reality applies, of course, to dual hatting a deputy for national security budgets.  But at least if properly constructed, they will not aggravate whatever negative personal characteristics any particular set of officeholders might inflict on  any given Adminstration.  And for that reason, the thrust of Jim Jones' efforts is very much in order.

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 In response to Gordan Adams' comment, there is nothing wrong with White House reforming how it does business. The president should organize the place to fit how he governs. My only concern is if that includes turning the Presidency into a command post where an NSC staff tries to run the day-to-day world that is a big mistake. Even the Pentagon can't do that. I'm sure General Jones appreciates that."

I'm with Gordon Adams:  resources have to be linked to strategy.  OMB and NSC need to be "tight." And the State Department, if it is to become more of an equal partner, will need to delegate to the field much more authority over resources.  Most Ambassadors don't have direct control over a lot more than the "representation" (entertainment) budgets of their embassies--most everything else is programmed from Washington.  

But the resources/strategy link has to be true also of the NSC itself, which is not going to be excused from crisis management in order to do long-term thinking.  No President wants an NSC that does not know what is happening today, no matter how much he may value the long-term.  

If the Administration does not enlarge the NSC staff, it isn't going to be able to manage all the issues Jones is talking about, much less indulge in strategic thinking. 

An arrangement of the kind described would further contribute to concentration of power and function in the executive office of the president.   By making nearly fevery function of government subject to the policy formulation and coordination of the National Security Adviser we would be making that person effectively head of the government.  In the last administration we experienced the delegation of enormous power to an officer of the executive branch who did not have any constitutional power.  Many Americans were deeply unhappy with the result.  It is surprising that the successor administration is contemplating systematization of a similar outcome.

Concentrating too much policy decision making in the White House is a really bad idea. Putting the White House in charge of running wars or disaster response is even a worse idea. The world is a large, complex place and the rule is, the larger and more complex the problem, the more the answer should be “decentralized” planning and execution. Focusing on restructuring the National Security Council to improve interagency is akin to the old joke of looking for car keys lost in the dark under a street light (because the light is better there).

Arguably, when efforts have been made to “oper­ationalize” decision-making in Washington, princi­pally by trying to coordinate ongoing interagency operations in the White House or at the NSC, they have proved unsatisfactory and Presidents have rightly backed off from the idea of trying to turn the Oval Office into an operations center.

It is at the intermediate level (between what goes on in the NSC and on the ground), the operational level, where the U.S. government under­takes major operations and campaigns, and where agencies in Washington have to develop operational plans such as coordinating recovery operations after a major hurricane. This is where interagency coop­eration is the weakest. This is a legacy of the Cold War. There was never a requirement for federal agencies to do that kind of integrated planning to contain the Soviet Union. Agencies generally agreed on the broad role each would play. There were few requirements under which they had to plan to work together in the field to accomplish a goal under uni­fied direction. Washington has never had an endur­ing formal system to do that.

If there is a problem that needs to be fixed, it is this—the ability to coordinate major interagency challenges outside of Washington, away from the offices of Cabinet secretaries and staffs, whether it is coordinating disaster relief over a three-state area after a hurricane or conducting the occupation of a foreign country. 

The real shortfall in the interagency process is the lack of adequate capacity to conduct operations outside of Washington, where the challenge is not to formu­late national policy, but to plan and execute opera­tions in a way that lets the people on the ground work well together and get the job done. There are impediments that prevent us from doing that now. They can be overcome.

In fact, they can be overcome with what are argu­ably rather 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. I think this a reasonable and achievable agenda.

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Let me add a note of concern regarding the current review of NSC structure ongoing -- the status of Homeland Security.  Currently, the Homeland Security Council is being slated for some type of combination with the National Security Council. 

The consideration of national security policy across both domestic and international lines is an important distinction vice their segregation.  The lack of this broad view,  in many ways, provided the framework for the intelligence failures of 9/11. 

However, we live in an age where old fashioned nation-state national security issues and military issues tend to still dominate the national security scene.  Homeland security -- domestic security -- is too important to be buried and efforts must be made to insure its equal status with other national security issues.

Moreover, I am increasingly concerned that we have no sensible and comprehensive naional security framework for homeland security.  What exactly are we protecting?  From whom?  And what measures are we willing to use of obtain that safety.  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. 

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Having just read Dr. Andrew Krepinevich’s insightful new book, 7 Deadly Scenarios, I am struck by the importance of two things: big picture thinking and follow-on implementation. In his recommendations at the end of the book, Krepinevich emphasizes the importance of strategic planning and points to the Eisenhower NSC for lessons. He created a Planning Board to develop policy papers to be considered by the NSC “to look ahead, not into the distant future, but beyond the vision of the operating officers caught in the smoke and crises of current battle.” Eisenhower also established an Operations Coordinating Board to report regularly on how well NSC decisions were being implemented.

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.

There are three fundamental problems with the current NSC. First, it 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).

Second, with national security accordingly decentralized to the region (and mirroring the actual national security council), 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.

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 (as has been done among the four military services since joint education was imposed on them from above by Congress in 1986--please see my 20 May 2003 article on this for further detail: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0503/052003db.htm). The only way to change behavior is through education. The only way to break down institutional stereotypes and turf wars is to educate our people in the same room as they learn to understand and confront challenges as Americans who happen to be working for DOD, DOS, the IC, etc., instead of agency reps who happen to be American.

We can create as many new structures as we want, and we can add as many special envoys and czars as we want, but we will only continue to swat, so to speak, at symptoms in Af-Pak, et al, until we address the root of the problem that is us: properly educated public servants who think past their stovepipe and meet the new challenges through the most relevant structures possible. 

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I read Jones' thoughts with a combination of hope and amusement.  On the latter point, I sincerely doubt he will be able to exercise much control over a list of participants that include: Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke.  The hope part is that somehow he can get a system in place that has enough flexibility as least to provide some framework.

NSC successes and failure are personal -- between Director and President.  The bottom line is the President and Jones' relationship with him.  As any good military man knows, you are as good as your air cover.  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.

My other real fear is that Jones is a military man of recent vintage.  He may well expect an order and process from a group of skilled Washington politicians that he "ain't gonna get."   Thus, he needs to work the major players like a politician.  NSC can hold all the interagency meetings they want to coordinate policy.  If no one wants to execute it, they can slow roll it forever and a day. 

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All the national security institutions in the U.S. government badly need a makeover. ODNI is not living up to its advocate’s expectations. State is at the brink of major change, with Secretary Clinton speaking the language of reform, and the critical appointment of a second Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources. DOD and the military services badly need to be reigned in, with the regular order of business restored and severe mission creep halted. Homeland security comes as close to a completely dysfunctional organization as exists in government; the new secretary has a real challenge.

The White House is no exception, and it appears that Gen. Jones is stepping up to the challenge of reinventing the NSC for the 21st Century. This is no longer a question of National Security Advisor “style” – central actor NSA’s (Kissinger), mediator (Scowcroft), or do nothing (Clark, Rice). 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.

This is not a question of an “operational” NSC. Nothing being discussed would put the NSC in the business of being an aid-giver, military deployer, intel or covert operator. But the changes underway will, hopefully, give the President a stronger tool for strategic planning and oversight. Whether the issue is climate change, failed states, development, or energy, weak inter-agency coordination will not produce clear policy, clear agency assignments, or effective oversight.

While the details of the design are yet to emerge, the outlines are clear – authoritative NSC leadership, longer-term strategic planning, guidance and assignments to the agencies, and follow-up as policy is implemented.

Only one important detail is unclear: a strategy is only as good as the resources dedicated to solving it. The President’s resource office – the Office of Management and Budget – should be joined at the hip to all NSC deliberations at all levels, from the Principals’ Committee right down through the working groups dealing with specific policies and issues. Only OMB has the authority and detailed program knowledge that can serve the ends of the President’s policy. It is not yet clear, however, that the new NSC being designed has done anything more than ensure that the top level of OMB is connected to the NSC Principals’ and Deputies’ committees. An effective White House reform will need to go further and deeper, if the President is to have the effective strategic planning and policy implementation tool he needs for the challenges he faces.

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Having served on the NSC staff during the first terms of both President Clinton and President George W. Bush, 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. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, conceived and implemented major and long-lasting changes in American foreign policy--but they did so almost entirely on their own, with little input or support from the broader bureaucracy. Similarly, President George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, seemed to be able to think through, from a longer-term perspective, a wide range of foreign policy issues--but, again, that seemed to be an idiosyncratic function of these two men's personalities and interactions. Unfortunately, the current NSC system is not set up to generate long-term thinking and strategic ideas that could really drive the substance of policy on important issues. Addressing that deficit should be the overriding goal of NSC reform. However, Jim Jones has not presented anything that would achieve this goal.

So far, Jones has proposed changing the "wire-and-box" diagram for the NSC to do two things: first, to align the NSC's regional directorates more closely with the regionally-defined components at other agencies, particularly the Pentagon, and second, to expand the NSC's substantive reach into new issue areas such as energy, climate change, and nation building. Unless Jones is not telling us about a critical part of his plan, all this will do is to install additional mid-level functionaries, known at the NSC as "senior directors" (that is, the officials in charge of individual directorates). Now, senior directors are, typically, busy people. They are responsible for (among other things):

--all the paper going to the President regarding their areas of responsibility (i.e., briefing papers for presidential phone calls and meetings with foreign leaders),

--coordinating staff preparations across the executive branch for interagency policy meetings in their areas of responsibility (for the Deputies' Committee, for the Principals' Committee, and for full NSC meetings chaired by the President),

--traveling with the President, National Security Adviser, and Deputy National Security Adviser and attending their meetings with foreign counterparts, both here and abroad,

--putting out numerous "fires" that--at least on some accounts--crop up on an almost daily basis, and

--having their own meetings with a wide range of U.S. and foreign interlocutors about issues in their areas of responsibility.

In what amounts, effectively, to their "spare" time, NSC senior directors are supposed to think about long-term strategy, draft basic policy documents (what were called National Security Presidential Directives, or "NSPDs", in the George W. Bush Administration), and forge interagency consensus in support of these draft documents. In realiy, this means that very little effective long-term strategic planning gets done within the NSC system. Jones' proposal to have NSC directorates better aligned with other bureaucracies or adding directorates covering newer foreign policy challenges will not address this fundamental problem.

One way to address the problem might be to create a strategic planning advisory board, attached to the NSC. This board would be, in some ways, analogous to the economic recovery advisory panel created by President Obama under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker. A strategic planning advisory board would bring together distinguished strategic thinkers from various sectors--former senior governent officials, leading academic and think tank experts, and the private sector. The board would be tasked with developing long-range strategies addressing important foreign policy problems--in effect, to do the first drafts of NSPDs on different issues. It would then be up to the NSC to develop interagency consensus on how to flesh out and implement these plans, but at least there would be a body formally charged with putting serious ideas on the table for decision-makers.

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