Costs of War: Fixing National Security

The White House, courtesy Joseph A/flickr

The White House, Washington, DC
(cc) Joseph A/flickr

One of the most serious allegations leveled against Bush’s war on terror was that it broke Washington’s national security policymaking structures. Obama is trying to fix them, Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.

By Shaun Waterman in Washington, DC for ISN Security Watch

Last week, on the day he nominated Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and spoke out against the house arrest of Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, US President Barack Obama also unveiled a little noticed restructuring of his national security apparatus - the White House committees and staff that coordinate foreign and defense policymaking between government departments.

Since a hasty reorganization after the 9/11 terror attacks, the National Security Council (NSC) - both the cabinet-level committee and its support staff, headed by the national security advisor - has been paralleled by a Homeland Security Council, which like its national security counterpart had a dedicated staff headed by a senior advisor to the president.

As reported in an earlier Costs of War column, critics like scholar David Rothkopf, in his magisterial 2005 history of the National Security Council, Running the World, have painted a damning portrait of a broken policy process at the White House, presided over by a national security adviser - Condoleezza Rice - who "was so pre-occupied with being the president's 'body man,' at his side every minute, whispering in his ear [...] that she let the NSC become weak and, worse, the NSC process become weak."

Monday, former senior Bush-era State Department official Richard Haas, echoed that critique anew. “It didn’t work too well,” he told C-Span television with dry understatement of the policy process that led to the war in Iraq.

“The challenges of the 21st century are increasingly unconventional and transnational, and therefore demand a response that effectively integrates all aspects of American power,” Obama said in announcing the merger of the two staffs - about 240 people altogether.

“There’s more to our security than the traditional military and diplomacy piece,” said Randy Beardsworth, a Bush-era Homeland Security official who co-chaired the study group that drafted the reorganization.

Although he will no longer lead a separate staff, the homeland security and counter-terrorism advisor, as the post is now known, will continue to report directly to the president, and the Homeland Security Council, the cabinet-level body, will continue as a top policymaking body along with a series of ad hoc or longer-term interagency committees, serviced by the same integrated staff that works for its national security counterpart.

At the center of the re-organized staff are a dozen or so mid-level national security officials with what the study group’s other co-chair, Michele Malvesti, called “functionally aligned responsibilities.” The officials include coordinators for policy on counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, infrastructure resilience and global engagement as well as cybersecurity.

“These are very complicated issues, they are issues that transcend departmental authorities [...] and international borders,” said Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism Advisor John Brennan. The portfolios of these new officials are ones that “span the spectrum from the global to the local,” added Beardsworth.

But by merging the homeland security staff, the White House is also acknowledging the increasing maturity of the huge new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS was established in 2003 - merging two dozen US agencies as disparate as the Coast Guard, Secret Service and Customs - into a single 180,000-strong department; the third-largest in the federal government.

The first Homeland Security Advisor to President George W Bush - former GOP governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge - moved over to be secretary of the vast new agency - and struggled in the early years with the management challenges posed by integrating so many diverse agencies.

In those early days, many officials from different levels of government privately viewed the White House homeland security staff as trying to micromanage security incidents and threat reports and as second guessing the young department.

Malvesti said their study had directly addressed this tendency, which observers say is common among White House staffers. “In order to be successful, a national sec staff really must resist the urge to operationally manage incidents,” she said, occasioning something that sounded like a snort of derisive laughter from her audience of Beltway insiders. “Rather we must support and empower the secretary of homeland security and other cabinet officials.”

As Atlantic magazine blogger Marc Ambinder points out, the details of the reorganization are important because “in government, structure often dictates function, which, in turn, heavily influences policy.”

But the most damning critiques of the Bush national security apparatus were not directly concerned with structure. They concerned the fact that, as Rothkopf revealed, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his deputy Paul Wolfowitz disagreed with a decision, the record of it would just be re-written, or it would be ignored altogether.

"I have never seen more high-level insubordination in the US government in almost 30 years," one "very senior official" told Rothkopf.

That’s the kind of problem that no reorganization can either fix or guard against.

Shaun Waterman is a senior writer and analyst for ISN Security Watch. He is a UK journalist based in Washington, DC, covering homeland and national security.

Editor's note:

Shaun Waterman's Costs of War column appears every Tuesday.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).