America Can Do Big Things

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.