National security reform is, I guess, one of the leitmotifs of this blog and both Charlie and I have written about this in its U.S and British forms.
Now, the U.S Project on National Security Reform (full disclosure: I advise the project pro bono) is about to publish its first report, Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need For National Security Reform.
Based on research and analysis by more than 300 national security experts from think tanks, universities, federal agencies, law firms and corporations – it identifies the following major problems in in the national security system:
- Frequent feuding and jurisdictional disputes between cabinet secretaries and other agency heads that force the president to spend too much time settling internal fights, waste time and money on duplicative and inefficient actions, and slow down government responses to crises.
- Too much focus by the president and his top advisers on day-to-day crisis management rather than long-term planning, allowing problems to escape presidential attention until they worsen and reach the crisis level.
- An increasing number of political appointees who serve only briefly in top national security posts.
- A budget oversight process in Congress focused on individual agencies, crippling efforts to move quickly to fund emergency operations by multiple agencies.
- A Congress increasingly polarized along political party lines on vital national security issues.
PNSR member Thomas R. Pickering – who served as under secretary of state, ambassador to the United Nations and in other top posts in the State Department – has said:
Our national security system is broken and needs fixing. Agencies need to cooperate rather than compete with each other as they work to protect the United States from a broad range of new dangers never imagined when the National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law. This isn’t a Democratic or a Republican issue, but a challenge facing our country that must be met by America’s leaders on a bipartisan basis.
PNSR is scheduled to issue a final report in October recommending actions by Congress and the next president. The project is also expected to prepare draft presidential directives and a new National Security Act to replace many of the provisions of the one enacted 61 years ago. Now out of the presidential race, Senator Hillary Clinton is said to have taken a keen interest in sheparding legislation through Congress whilst both the Obama and McCain teams have had de facto representatives on the Project.
In other words: read the report available on here and watch this space…
