[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 111-27]
THE PROJECT ON NATIONAL SECURITY
REFORM: COMMENTARY AND
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
MARCH 19, 2009
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OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina ROB WITTMAN, Virginia
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
JIM COOPER, Tennessee CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS, Washington
JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado
GLENN NYE, Virginia DUNCAN HUNTER, California
CHELLIE PINGREE, Maine
Lorry Fenner, Professional Staff Member
Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Sasha Rogers, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2009
Page
Hearing:
Thursday, March 19, 2009, The Project on National Security
Reform: Commentary and Alternative Views....................... 1
Appendix:
Thursday, March 19, 2009......................................... 25
----------
THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 2009
THE PROJECT ON NATIONAL SECURITY REFORM: COMMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE
VIEWS
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee...................... 1
Wittman, Hon. Rob, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking
Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.............. 2
WITNESSES
Destler, Dr. I.M. (Mac), Saul I. Stern Professor of Civic
Engagement, Director, Program on International Security and
Economic Policy, School of Public Policy, University of
Maryland....................................................... 8
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr., President, Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments...................................... 4
Oleszek, Walter, Senior Specialist in American National
Government, Congressional Research Service..................... 11
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Destler, Dr. I.M. (Mac)...................................... 51
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr............................... 34
Oleszek, Walter.............................................. 54
Snyder, Hon. Vic............................................. 29
Wittman, Hon. Rob............................................ 32
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Dr. Snyder................................................... 71
THE PROJECT ON NATIONAL SECURITY REFORM: COMMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE
VIEWS
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, March 19, 2009.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 1:07 p.m., in
room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Dr. Snyder. The hearing will come to order. Good afternoon.
Welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight Investigations hearing
on the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), better known
as the Locher Project after its executive director. This is the
report itself. We all have come to the conclusion that because
of the density of the paper, it is the heaviest report that we
have ever encountered in some time. It is so heavy, it tends to
be dangerous when you set it down.
I wanted to hold this hearing because of this
subcommittee's continuing interest in interagency issues in
national strategy. As we heard Secretary Gates and others say
over and over again, our national strategy in the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan require, ``whole of government approaches.''
However, the question remains, how exactly do we do that? Some
people do not think we need reform of structures but simply
better leadership. Others believe we have good people who are
working hard but our current structures and processes, largely
built in 1947 to win the Cold War, do not serve us well now.
And these structures and processes certainly won't serve us
well in the future as we face more numerous and complex
challenges.
An independent review on the subject was required by the
Armed Services Committee. The two-year project we are talking
about today was funded by both government funds, including some
from the Department of Defense, and private funds. The full
study is over 700 pages long and includes a history of the
National Security Council, and about 100 case studies that seek
to identify problem areas. More than 300 people participated in
the study in one form or another, including retired General Jim
Jones, our current National Security Advisor and retired
Admiral Denny Blair, our current Director of National
Intelligence. Their report was delivered to President Bush and
the Congress in December.
The Project on National Security Reform focuses on how the
National Security Council (NSC), the departments and agencies
and the Congress contend with national security issues. We can
all probably acknowledge that there is a gap between the NSC
and the departments. We could call this gap the interagency
space where true whole of government action might best be
achieved. However, right now there is no structure at the
interagency level that assures integration of all the tools of
national power.
The authors of this report propose strengthening the
National Security Advisor, to be called the Director for
National Security, and the National Security Council, to be
called the President's Security Council, to fill the gap. This
will have certain implications for the rest of our national
security system, including the Congress. So I hope our
witnesses can help us sort out today some of these
implications. In this report, the guiding coalition of national
security professionals and thinkers have tried to make a case
for urgent and broad reforms. They argue that all their
recommendations should be taken as a whole. Some of these
include creating a new Director for National Security,
instituting a QDR-like interagency national security review,
decentralizing management of national security issues by
creating interagency teams and task forces, establishing a
President's Security Council to replace the National and
Homeland Security Councils, creating an integrated national
security budget, developing an interagency national security
professional core, and establishing House and Senate Committees
on National Security and strengthening the Foreign Relations
and Affairs Committees.
Our panel of witnesses today, to help us sort all of these
questions out in the next couple of hours, consists of Dr.
Andrew Krepinevich, President of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Analysis; Dr. Mac Destler, Director of the Program on
International Security and Economic Policy at the School of
Public Policy at the University of Maryland; and Mr. Walter
Oleszek, Senior Specialist at the Congressional Research
Service.
I also want to acknowledge we have an out-of-town guest
here today, a parliamentarian from Quebec, Claude Bachand, who
is a member of the Canadian Parliament. And he is going to be
with us for a half hour or so. So we welcome you. Let us give
him--and we will now turn to Rob Wittman, our ranking member,
for any comments he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the
Appendix on page 29.]
STATEMENT OF HON. ROB WITTMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA,
RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, members of
the panel, for being with us today. I appreciate you taking the
time to come before us and give us your thoughts on the issue
that we have before us on the Project on National Security
Reform. The subject of today's hearing is indeed a very serious
matter. Since the dawn of the 21st century, the United States
has faced an ever shifting, complex international environment.
And ideally we would have an agile national security structure
able to respond to the challenges as needed, but we do not.
After all, the military services, via the jointness dictated by
the Goldwater-Nichols legislation is able to task organize to
meet almost any mission. But the greater bureaucracy of the
executive and legislative branches of the Federal Government
have rigid, unyielding structures and processes that sometimes
struggle to organize coherent, effective responses to national
and international crises. And this weakness has been widely
recognized and studied, particularly after the intelligence
failures of September 11, 2001.
One outcome of that tragedy was the Intelligence Reform Act
of 2004 which reorganized and better integrated the
Intelligence Community. Otherwise, the executive branch and
congressional committee structures were left intact. To be
fair, designing the best system to reorganize the National
Security Council and half the cabinet departments is no easy
matter. The Project on National Security Reform has reviewed
the interagency coordination problem in a thoughtful, logical
manner that makes a series of recommendations for the
organization of both the national security apparatus and the
Congress.
While we cannot single-handedly make these changes, we do
have a responsibility to start the dialogue. Our witnesses were
not part of the Project on National Security Reform effort and
are well placed to provide an impartial view of this study.
Gentlemen, we appreciate you being here today to do that for
us. Now, I am grateful to have you here as distinguished
witnesses before us to comment on the project's work and look
forward to your testimony in shining some light on the
applicability of that project. So we appreciate that. With
that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wittman can be found in the
Appendix on page 32.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Wittman. We are also pleased to
be joined today by another Armed Services Committee member,
Adam Smith from the State of Washington. Adam is the chairman
of the Terrorism and Unconventional Threats Subcommittee of the
House Armed Services Committee. He is also on the Intel
Committee, and for most of the last decade, has been a Member
of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. So he has been
following a lot of these issues very closely. Adam, if you
would like to make an opening statement, feel free.
Mr. Smith. Certainly. Just a couple of quick comments. And
I thank Chairman Snyder for allowing me to sit in this hearing.
The report could not be more timely. I agree completely with
both statements of the Chairman and the Ranking Member on the
importance of interagency work. And we have certainly seen that
in a lot of the projects that we have undergone on national
security in the last several years. And my subcommittee is
particularly focused on that. We do a lot of counterterrorism
work with the special operations command and you see where
country by country, piece by piece you need a lot of different
sets of resources from different agencies. And there is no
formal mechanism really for pulling those together. It has been
done in an ad hoc basis.
In some cases fairly effectively. Joint Special Operations
Command (JSCO), I think, has done a very effective job of
pulling together the counterterrorism efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, working with a wide variety of different agencies.
But that was really sort of driven by the individuals who made
that decision and made it work. What we need is a more
formalized structure because the problem will not just be
peculiar to Iraq and Afghanistan. It is part of dealing with
global development issues. It is a big part of dealing with a
messaging issue. I say that as I see Mac Thornberry walk in the
room. Not to do that to you, Mac, right when you walk in the
door. He was Ranking Member on my committee for the last two
years and also on Intel's. He has been very focused on what is
our strategic communications strategy.
And at the end of the day, we have got about 35 or 40
different groups or agencies that have a piece of that. It is
not well coordinated and well focused. Nobody is in charge. I
could go on, but I won't because I want to hear your testimony.
But the bottom-line is the interagency piece is going to be
critical to our national security strategy going forward in a
number of different areas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the
opportunity to say a couple of things.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Smith. We have also been joined
by Congressman Mac Thornberry from Texas. Through the years,
Mac and I just cannot get enough of Andy Krepinevich. He has
sponsored some forums that Andy would put on about 10 years
ago. We appreciate you being here today. Mac is also a member
of the Intel committee in addition to the Armed Services
Committee. Gentlemen, what we will do is begin with your
opening statements. I am going to have Dr. Fenner put the clock
on. When you see a red light flash, you should feel free to
drive on through it if you think you have some more things you
need to say. But if you stay to about the five minutes, then we
can get to the members' questions.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Krepinevich, we will start with you.
STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH JR., PRESIDENT, CENTER
FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Dr. Krepinevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As you know, I
submitted a written statement and I will summarize my remarks.
Dr. Snyder. All written statements are a part of the
record.
Dr. Krepinevich. Again, let me add my compliments to the
efforts of the project, an impressive array of individuals, a
very comprehensive report. And as also noted, a very
substantial report in many, many ways. What I would like to do
is focus my five minutes on an issue that was raised by the
Project, which is the issue of restoring the ability of the
U.S. government to craft strategy competently, as well as to
execute it. It has been said if you don't know where you are
going, any road will take you there. And if you don't have a
clear strategy to inform the path you have chosen to achieve
your security objectives, any structure or process will do. The
need for a good strategy, our best strategists tell us, is the
greatest at any time since the early days of the Cold War. It
has been said that you need strategy and strategic thinking
most during periods of great change. And I think the Project
certainly makes the point that we are at a period of tumultuous
change, but also when resources are scarce.
As one British politician famously said about a century
ago, we are running out of money, we will have to start to
think. And while I am a big fan of structure and a big fan of
process, I am an even bigger fan of thinking. And that is what
strategy is all about. Strategy is not just how do you apply
certain means at your disposal to achieve your objectives. More
specifically, it is about the hard work of identifying,
developing and exploiting sources of advantage in ways that
give you the greatest leverage, in ways that allow you to
effectively achieve your objectives at minimal costs and
minimal risk. And that traditionally has been very difficult
work.
Failure to craft strategy well leads to a waste of
resources, as well as endangering our security and our well-
being. Now, I have identified in my testimony a number of
barriers that I think really compromise our ability as a
government to do strategy well. One is confusing strategy with
the two polar aspects of it, one being the goal and one being
the means. An example of confusing strategy with objectives is
the Clinton Administration's national security strategy in
2000, which said that a key element of its strategy was
preventing conflict. Well, that is not a strategy, that is an
objective.
When President Bush said as they stand up, we will stand
down, that is our strategy for Iraq. That is not a strategy.
That is substituting one set of means, the Iraqis, for another
set of means, the United States. That is not a strategy. So
again, just a failure to understand what strategy is, even at
the highest levels of government. A second is a failure to
understand the enemy. To a certain extent your strategy is
trying to get your rivals, your adversaries, your competitors
and even your allies to behave in certain kinds of ways. We
have to know what motivates them. And throughout the Cold War
and even into the current period, a number of statements
indicate that oftentimes we don't understand our enemy.
Consider the fact, for example, that Lyndon Johnson after
giving a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in April in
which he proposed a Tennessee Valley Authority sort of project
for the Mekong Delta, turned after the speech and said, ``Old
Ho can't turn me down now.'' Well, he wasn't dealing with a
politician from Tennessee. He was dealing with a communist
revolutionary. President Kennedy's first reaction upon finding
out that the Soviets were placing nuclear missiles in Cuba was,
``he can't do that to me.''
Well, again, a misunderstanding of the motives and the
character and the objectives of the Soviet Union at the time.
In my testimony, I lay out the debate very briefly that
occurred in the early days of the Cold War between three of the
wise men, the so-called wise men, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and
Chip Bohlen over the character of the threat posed by the
Soviet Union. That had a material effect on the kinds of
strategy, the kinds of resources, the whole approach of
government that we took to dealing with the Soviet threat.
So again, the importance of understanding the enemy. And I
think it is one thing that we can agree upon is that we really
even now don't have a good understanding of the challenges
posed by those who seek to do us ill. A third barrier is
discounting the value of strategy. Perhaps we are too busy with
the crisis du jour. Sandy Berger famously once said that he
preferred to worry about today today and tomorrow tomorrow.
Well, that may be a good way of taking care of today, but
again, you need a strategy that guides you not only through the
current period but over the long term. Another barrier is the
failure to accept that resources are limited.
I will give you a quick example here. This plays big in the
Pentagon. Again, strategy seeks to balance your objectives with
your resources. In the Pentagon, they have what are called cut
drills. The defense program is always too ambitious for the
defense resources. And rather than typically come up with a
strategy for dealing with that, the services continue to boost
their requirements, trying to create as big a gap as possible.
Why? Because the strategy is to prevail in the cut drill. You
want to be cut less than any other service. So the more needy
you look, the strategy to make yourself look needy as opposed
to the strategy to play to your advantages to cause your rival
the greatest amount of discomfort is typically given short
shrift.
Finally--and obviously--there is bureaucratic hostility.
There is the what I call--there is certainly efforts to
frustrate strategy execution, but there is also the Ben-Hur
approach to developing strategy. And there are a couple of
charts from the Pentagon that I put in my testimony. It is the
cast of thousands. It is the Quadrennial Defense Review that
has got panels and committees and groups and focus groups. And
that is the approach that is taken to crafting strategy. That
is not to say that we don't need a big government. That is not
to say that we don't need a big bureaucracy. But strategy is
hard. It is typically done by small groups of very talented,
strategic thinkers, whether you are looking at NSC 68, the
Solarium Project under Eisenhower, NSC 162/2, some of the
efforts that laid the strategic foundation that guided and
informed everything else, typically done by small groups of
people. So in my testimony, I offer a rather modest
recommendation and that is to go back and take a good hard look
at what I call the Eisenhower model. Zbigniew Brzezinski in
1997 on the 50th anniversary of the National Security Act
observed that when President Kennedy disestablished
Eisenhower's national security structure, he eliminated the
U.S. government's ability to do strategy at the highest levels.
Perhaps an overstatement, but certainly don't want to
discount the views of someone who was a National Security
Advisor during the Cold War and Brzezinski certainly was that.
Second, the importance of the active, persistent involvement of
the President. We have reports, we have documents and we need
them. President Eisenhower famously said the importance of
strategic planning is not the plan, it is the planning. The
plan is almost immediately obsolete once you put it on the
shelf. He said the world--and certainly this is something the
project highlighted--the world is changing in such a dynamic
way, that strategy is not something you do every 4 years.
Strategy is a persistent effort that requires constant
adjustment, the constant identification of new sources of
advantage that your rivals are developing and the search for
new sources of advantage in how you can apply them on your
side. And so for that reason, while some presidents--for
example, President Bill Clinton in his first term--of course, a
much less dangerous period--had less than two dozen meetings of
his National Security Council.
President Eisenhower, in his first term, had 179. And
again, it was the sense that you needed a persistent
involvement on the part of the senior leadership. In those NSC
meetings, he had his principal advisors and he had no one else.
There were no back benchers feeding information to the
Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense. He told these
people, though, ``you are too busy to think strategically at
every possible moment, to devote the kind of dedication that is
required.'' So what Eisenhower had done at the suggestion of
George Marshall was to establish something called the Planning
Board. And the Planning Board--each statutory NSC member had a
full-time person basically working on the Planning Board. In
State, it might be somebody like the Director of Policy
Planning and in Defense it might be someone like the Office of
Net Assessment Director Andrew Marshall. And these people were
responsible for doing the hard work of strategy, identifying
issues and presenting them for consideration at the NSC
meetings, doing the hard thinking of strategy.
And again, Eisenhower said that, of course, you could never
quite predict the crisis. You would confront the problem when
it would manifest itself in full form. But he said the fact
that you had these regular meetings, that you were doing this
diligent work of strategizing meant that when you finally
encountered that problem, you had been living with it. He and
his team had been living with it, they had an understanding of
what to do. Much better than they would have if they just sort
of managed the strategy from crisis to crisis.
Finally in addition to the Planning Board, there was an
Operations Coordinating Board. And this essentially was the
group of people who three months later, six months later, nine
months later, once the President made a decision would go out
to the departments, to the agencies and say the President made
a decision, what are you doing to execute it. And the failure
on the part of groups or individuals or departments and
agencies to comply should be an opportunity for staff changes,
if I could say so. But the idea was to hold the bureaucracy
accountable. Now, certainly there is the opportunity to
organize interdepartmental groups. I think that is certainly a
good idea, particularly when you look at the multidimensional
aspects of the many problems we face. But again, that is not
new.
And one of the more famous examples of such a group was the
interdepartmental Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) that
President Kennedy organized that was chaired by Maxwell Taylor
and Robert Kennedy to deal with the growing threat of wars of
national liberation. And you did have this interagency
approach. You had two people who had direct access to the
President. And still, that effort ultimately proved a failure.
And I think the reason why was not because of organizational
structure. I think, again, it is a matter of crafting good
strategy and enforcing accountability on those who are directed
to carry out the directives of the President. While this is far
from comprehensive--I only have five minutes? It is a modest
proposal. It is an area of focus. It is something that the
President can do without legislation, without any new assistant
secretaries of this or that. And it is something although
modest and certainly not as comprehensive as the Project's
report, I think has the potential to make a substantial
contribution. This concludes my remarks, Mr. Chairman. I would
be happy to respond to any questions.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Krepinevich.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be found in
the Appendix on page 34.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Destler.
STATEMENT OF DR. I.M. (MAC) DESTLER, SAUL I. STERN PROFESSOR OF
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, DIRECTOR, PROGRAM ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
AND ECONOMIC POLICY, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF
MARYLAND
Dr. Destler. Thank you very much, Chairman Snyder,
Congressman Wittman, distinguished Members of Congress, it is
an honor to be here. I am happy to--there is going to be a
little bit of tension before I finish my remarks between what I
am going to argue and what my distinguished colleague has very
expertly argued for. First of all, let me pay tribute to this
Project. There is an awful lot of good stuff in here and I say
this as someone who didn't participate in it. So I can be
objective. And it also seems to be relevant. Our new National
Security Advisor, General Jones, has declared that the Obama
National Security Council will be dramatically different from
its predecessor, with broader substantive scope. And the
President issued last month Presidential Policy Directive
Number-One mandating broad participation in national security
policymaking at the presidential principals and deputies levels
and below.
Certainly, the needs for such reform seem undeniable. The
institutions currently available to meet 21st century
challenges are in the main institutions created in the late
1940s. A very, very different world. It is hard to argue
against, to quote the report, ``a bold but carefully crafted
plan of comprehensive reform.'' And the Project on National
Security Reform has devoted enormous effort to this
undertaking. Its conclusions merit serious consideration. Yet
history offers caution. And as shown by our most recent
national effort at organizational reconstruction, the creation
of the Department of Homeland Security, bold changes do not
necessarily bring benign results.
Let me concentrate here on the two core PNSR
recommendations that my colleague here referred to. First of
all, the creation of a President's Security Council to
encompass not only the subjects currently addressed by the NSC
and the Homeland Security Council, but also with international
economic and energy policy, ``fully integrated,'' as well.
And the second central organization proposal is statutory
creation of a Director of National Security replacing
apparently the current national security assistant or Assistant
to the President for National Security Affairs, known as the
National Security Advisor, and having this official supported
by a statutory executive secretary. My credentials for arguing
this are most of my lifetime spending time at least off and on
looking at these issues and recently co-publishing a book,
which I will wave not because I want you all to run out and buy
it, of course, but because it actually is the basis for my
testimony. Because it is an analytic history of how National
Security Advisors from actually McGeorge Bundy onward have
handled the job and have related to their presidents. And it
leads me, as you will see, to some skepticism about the
Director of National Security proposal.
First of all, let me talk about the President's Security
Council. The impressive members of the guiding coalition who
signed this report have backgrounds overwhelmingly in national
security policy traditionally defined. It is, to their credit,
that they see a need for broadened jurisdiction but no one in
the group so far as I can tell has had any senior level
experience in addressing economic issues, domestic or
international. Historic NSC has proved progressively less able
to oversee economic issues effectively. Beginning with Richard
Nixon, Presidents have established parallel economic policy
coordination institutions outside of the NSC to handle them
with the National Economic Council established by Bill Clinton
and continued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the latest
manifestation.
This is no accident, because international economic issues
are not simply an extension of national security issues. They
reflect a set of challenges arising from a different set of
forces, processes and institutions. They are at least as much
linked to domestic economics as they are to political-military
issues that drive the NSC and would likely drive a President's
Security Council. They involve different forms of analysis,
different instruments of policy, different governmental
institutions as the current global economic crisis makes
abundantly clear.
Their current urgency demands that they have at least co-
equal status in the White House, advisor and counsel addressing
these issues on their own terms, not wedged within a security
perspective. Of course, Larry Summers and James Jones should
coordinate with one another. And if they haven't engaged the
capable joint deputy, Michael Froman, to be sure that
international economic policy draws on both of their
perspectives. But to go further to subordinate economic issues
within a Presidential Security Council would be, I think, to go
against both logic and experience.
I am not as familiar with energy or environmental policy,
but I suspect some of the same considerations may apply.
Perhaps President Obama is not wrong to have engaged separate
senior officials for national security environment and energy--
national security and economics and energy and the environment.
Though keeping them from working at cross purposes on issues
that overlap is a daunting task. I have a different set of
doubts about establishing a Director for National Security at
the White House. Presumably this official would replace the
National Security Advisor, although the executive summary
doesn't quite say that. The position would be established by
legislation, but no recommendation is made on whether she or he
would be subject to Senate confirmation.
Supported by a statutory executive secretary, this director
would not only be ``the principal assistant to the President on
matters related to national security,'' but he would also be
charged with administering a wide range of planning and
integrating instrument in overall strategy, planning, guidance,
a resource document, a network of interagency teams, et cetera.
The director would be asked to combine the planning tasks of
Dwight Eisenhower's Bobby Cutler who managed the system that my
colleague here has described and Kennedy's McGeorge Bundy, who
managed the day-to-day issues for the President, whence would
come the power of this individual to carry out this awesome
task. What would make the departments and agencies commit their
time and best people to this elaborate exercise, whatever its
abstract merit, the PNSR report uses words like ``empower,''
suggesting that mandating these activities is the same as
making them real and effective.
In practice, however, whatever the change in title, the
director would gain his power overwhelmingly from his
relationship with the President, just as National Security
Advisors do today. Would the President want him or her to spend
his time that way? Eisenhower didn't want Bobby Cutler to do
this. But he also had Andy Goodpaster, who handled his day-to-
day decisionmaking on crisis management often outside
Eisenhower's formal system. Kennedy didn't want it and he and
Bundy transformed the National Security Advisor job to one
supporting the President's daily national security business and
connecting his senior officials to him and to one another.
None of Kennedy's successors, including Jimmy Carter--
Zbigniew Brzezinski may now say that there should have been an
Eisenhower system, but I know of no effort that he made to
create anything like this when he was National Security
Advisor. But none of Kennedy's successors wanted an Eisenhower/
Cutler planning system, save Nixon and Kissinger who employed
an improved version for about 4 months in their Administration
before they abandoned it to carry out--to pursue the most
secretive policymaking process in history. It seems to me,
given that presidents are not really going to want this, at
least experience suggests that, this director would have a
choice. He could persist in the elaborate integration mandate
knowing that the President at best tolerated it and knowing
that one day agency officials would learn that the process was
not really driving presidential decisions or he could respond
to what the President really wanted and delegate the formal
system management to the executive secretary.
Then there would be two layers, an interagency planning
process below disconnected from the President and its principal
advisors. Let me repeat, there is much that is good in this
sophisticated report and its understanding of many of the
problems of the current system and in its focus on improving
budgeting and personnel. But I don't think the key
organizational recommendations will survive careful analysis.
And I particularly don't think they would work under this
President, who strikes me as more like John F. Kennedy than
like any other President in the postwar era, very cerebral,
very much wanting to handle things himself, impatient in terms
of formal structures. And I think the question is going to be
whether James Jones, who I think would like a more formal
structure, will be able to adapt to Barack Obama or whether he
will end up having less relevance than he should have to the
Obama decision process.
In any case, it is the President--in national security
policymaking in the end, it is to paraphrase a Clinton campaign
label, it is the President, stupid. It is he, or she one day
perhaps, who drives the system. His operating preferences and
decision style are what any White House aide must accommodate.
To encumber this aide with heavy formal responsibilities is to
increase his distance from the President, weakening their joint
capacity to achieve such national security policy coherence as
our system of government will allow. Thank you very much.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Destler.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Destler can be found in the
Appendix on page 51.]
Dr. Snyder. You all may have figured out we are having a
little clock problem. So Dr. Fenner is timing the five minutes
and you are not getting that very helpful green and yellow. You
are just getting the red flash at five minutes. That is what
happened.
Dr. Destler. I am taking advantage of it. I am sorry.
Dr. Snyder. No, you didn't. You actually both were about
the exact same time. Mr. Oleszek.
STATEMENT OF WALTER OLESZEK, SENIOR SPECIALIST IN AMERICAN
NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE
Mr. Oleszek. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking
Member, distinguished committee colleagues. Let me say that I
am here because--not that I am an expert on anything to do with
the military or national security or--only a little bit
probably on executive organization. I am here largely because
since I arrived at CRS in 1968, I have been involved in
practically every House and Senate legislative reform effort
since that time. So what I want to focus on are the
recommendations that have been put forward by the Project on
National Security Reform. And to do that, I am going to
concentrate principally on one of their major suggestions and
that is to create a Permanent Select Committee on National
Security. I will also comment on the other recommendations as
well. And so I have posed three questions that obviously I am
going to answer.
And since I made up the questions, I hope I can give you
the right answers. But anyway, the first question is: Is the
House committee structure organized in a fashion to promote
integrated, coordinated interagency national security
decisionmaking? And I suppose a short answer would be no. That
would take some additional analysis and study. But the point I
really want to emphasize is this: That the great strength of
the Congress is that it is a decentralized structure. The fact
that it functions through committees, subcommittees, informal
task forces and other entities as well. This is the division of
labor. This is the specialization system that the Congress has
provided itself.
And it is also a way for constituents and special interest
groups or anybody else to have access during the formative
stages of the lawmaking process during the committee
policymaking process. So there are tremendous advantages to
having the dispersion of policymaking power spread around if
you will. And now the question becomes if it is spread around
too much. One of the deficiencies in the legislative branch
would be the lack of what people would call integrative or
coordinative capacities and there are a few committees that are
able to do this.
One of those committees that take a big picture view if you
would--it would be the Budget Committee, for example. Or
another one might be the Rules Committee. But principally the
integrative force on Capitol Hill--are the party leaders.
Particularly in the House, it is going to be the majority
leadership, particularly the Speaker. They are the integrators
that will control the centrifugal forces out there manifested
by the committee system.
Now, the second question that I would pose is this: If the
system is not organized for integrative coordinated activity in
this realm, is a permanent select committee the proper
approach? And the answer that I would provide is maybe, perhaps
because that question is not answerable unless you know what is
the authorizing responsibility of the Select Committee. Does it
have legislative authority or not, the ability to receive and
report legislation? What is its membership, what kind of
support does it have? Now, we have had tremendously good
examples of select committees that have performed this
coordinative function, but generally there's a dilemma and I am
going to cite one or two.
But the dilemma often in terms of crafting select
committees, whether or not they have legislative jurisdiction
or not, it raises the issue of turf. As all of you are
familiar, better than I, turf is viewed as power on Capitol
Hill. And when you create a select committee with legislative
jurisdiction, then where is their mandate going to come from?
Because all of the other standing committees are going to
believe, well, that is potentially in my area, particularly
when we are talking about interagency, national security
issues. For example, just, you know, the 110th and now
recreated in the 111th. But I will use the 110th, we all recall
there is a Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global
Warming chaired by Mr. Markey. That did not sit well when Mr.
Dingell chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 110th
House. He was quoted pretty prominently and he used a phrase
that caught the eye of a lot of folks that creating this Select
Committee is useless, it is like having feathers on a fish. But
nonetheless, it went forward and there were adjustments made,
accommodations in the 110th to accommodate some of his
concerns.
Now, a couple that were with legislative jurisdiction are
recently examples that I can cite are quite successful. Quite
useful potentially and that is the ad hoc--not the ad hoc, the
Select Committee on Homeland Security in 2002 created by
Speaker Hastert. Why was it created? To create one single
mission, and that was to create a Department of Homeland
Security. And this was a pure leadership committee, the
chairman was the majority leader, Dick Armey. Dick Gephardt
named as the ranking minority member and Nancy Pelosi and every
other member on both the majority and minority side were party
leaders. Marty Frost, the Chair of the Democratic Caucus; Tom
Delay, the majority whip, right down the line. And their
mission was to deal with one issue. And the way they were a
terrific coordinative body was that all the other dozen roughly
dozen standing committees had an opportunity to look at the
segments of the Department of Homeland Security that fell
within their jurisdiction and then they were all submitted back
to the select Homeland Security Committee chaired by Chairman
Armey. And they aggregated this information and then submitted
the legislation to the floor. And obviously we have a
Department of Homeland Security.
Once the Homeland Security Department was created, and this
is not uncommon, sort of triggers a notion about what about our
own committee system on the House side, the same thing occurred
in the Senate as well. Do we need a standing committee to
handle Homeland Security issues? And again another select
committee was created in 2003 by Speaker Hastert, of course,
subject to the vote of the House of Representatives. But he
made plain in this membership of the Select Committee that--and
it was filled with lots of committee chairs who were very
protective of their turf, but he made a statement right after
he was sworn in as speaker to all the members of the House, but
this one sentence was targeted to the committee chairs you can
be sure. It went something like this, that ``your authorizing
an oversight jurisdiction will be protected.'' And by golly, it
was protected.
And when this committee was actually created, every--like
10 other standing committees, including Armed Services
Committee in terms of the legislative history, had specified
exactly what kind of control they had over Homeland Security
matters. Three things are really important in terms of creating
a select committee. One is the support of the leadership
without question. You have to have, you know, broad support
certainly of, you know, the membership and then also you have
to have the involvement of the standing committees that will be
affected by the creation of this select panel. One of the
issues that caught my eye was the jurisdictional mandate of
this committee, if it ever came into being. It is quite broad.
They give you--there are several pages, in terms of issues that
this committee ought to be considering. Their brief definition
is national security is the capacity of the United States to
defend, define and advance its position in a world that is
being continuously shaped, reshaped by the turbulent forces of
change. And then they also highlight the turbulent forces of
change affect all of the national sources of power.
And what are all these national sources of power? It is
quite broad to say the least. One of those things, sustain
stewardship of sound economic policy. Energy security.
Infrastructure, health, educational systems, et cetera. You go
on to another page. And this caught my eye in terms of a grand
strategy of how you mobilize all the sources of national power
to accomplish your national goal. And it says it comprises
these things, carefully coordinated and fully integrated use of
all political, economic, military, cultural, social, moral,
spiritual, and psychological power. That is quite a mandate.
But anyway, so those are just issues to be mindful of and I
don't think anybody knows how many interagency groups are out
there is another consideration. Are there other ways by which
this might be handled? Yeah, there are a lot of other ways. I
am not saying a select committee should not be created. All I
am saying is, hey, there has to be a lot of negotiation before
it is going to be successfully created. But there are other
methods that are in place. And one would be perhaps as a model,
the Select Oversight Panel that is composed of members of the
Intelligence Committee and the Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee. Sort of an ad hoc joining of the authorizing and
appropriating responsibility. You could have specialized
subcommittees created.
Even this committee might be reestablished in some way in
the rules and by resolution as the forum to consider
interagency national security issues. A multi-referral process
could be artfully used by the Speaker. She has a power, not
just Speaker Pelosi, but no Speaker has ever used this power
that is embedded in the rules of the House, and that is to
create an ad hoc oversight committee charged with obviously
reviewed this kind of realm. Other methods as well. Committee
composition, you had Congressman Smith, I was struck by the
fact there were only a couple of committees where you
deliberately have budget and intelligence, members drawn from
other standing committees. And maybe that is an approach that
ought to be tried on other standing committees as well. So you
get this interagency national security concept, you know, the
integration idea perhaps more prominently placed in the
policymaking process there are others that I mentioned, but
just quickly to wrap up, there is also the recommendation to
consolidate all oversight within--of the Department of Homeland
Security in the Committee on Homeland Security.
The House took a major step in that direction in the 111th
Congress when it passed House rules that granted the Committee
on Homeland Security what is called special oversight. And
special oversight is akin to the broad investigative power
granted to the Governmental Affairs Oversight Government Reform
Committee that was established by the 1946 Legislative
Reorganization Act. So they have broad authority to oversee the
Department of Homeland Security. The point is even if areas are
within the jurisdiction of other standing committees, special
oversight gives the committee the authority the right to review
agencies and programs that fall within other standing
committees.
I should also mention that you are never going to
consolidate and maybe you never should consolidate all
oversight over any activity within a single committee. I think
it is helpful to have a diversity of points of view. There is
always the concern that people raise about committees being
captured by, you know, the agencies or departments that they
are overseeing. So I think there are tremendous advantages of
having a large number of committees that oversee any particular
department, particularly one so broad as the Department of
Homeland Security. Another--they also recommended a
consolidation of appropriations for Homeland Security and one
appropriation, Homeland Security subcommittee chaired by, as we
know, David Price today. And the two issues there are again
turf. You have other appropriations committees, subcommittees
that handle it. And also the bicameral factor. They like to
have parallel subcommittee structures, House and Senate. So
that is another consideration. And lastly, empowering the
Foreign Affairs Committee. In my estimation, when I reviewed
the three that they mentioned, I don't see how it empowers the
Foreign Affairs Committee at all.
One of the recommendations is to amend the budget
allocation 302(a), so that you have an interagency national
security function I believe. Well, these budget functions are
for informational purposes only. There is no parliamentary way
to enforce them. Second, they talk about firewalls. Don't
transfer money out of international accounts or defense
accounts into domestic accounts. But again they deal with--that
is appropriation firewalls, not dealing with authorization
legislation. And then a supermajority requirement to waive the
rule that says authorizations are supposed to be enacted into
law. They mention consideration. But they have to be enacted
into law under House rules. Specify what supermajority, 60,
two-thirds, and I believe all that does is empower a minority.
It doesn't empower the Foreign Affairs Committee at all. And it
often--the Foreign Affairs Committee will go to the Rules
Committee to get a waiver of the rule against legislation on
appropriation bills because there is a variety of reasons why
you can't get a foreign aid or State Department authorization
bill enacted in a timely way. And that is I guess really all I
want to say.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Oleszek can be found in the
Appendix on page 54.]
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Wittman and I always put ourselves on the
five minute clock and so we will begin. I think we are going to
have votes sometime between 2:00 and 2:15. But I think we have
time to do at least one round of questions. Mr. Oleszek, I
think I will ask you the first question. I think you can
respond just yes or no if you like. One of the things that the
report says is that it needs to be adopted in its entirety, all
the recommendations adopted in its entirety. Do you think the
chances are pretty good of that happening?
Mr. Oleszek. I should say as a part-time academic, I am
programmed to speak in 60 minutes clip, no.
Dr. Snyder. I was actually surprised. I mean, I know people
that have worked on it, but there is almost a certain naivete
about it that says you are going to adopt everything about the
Congress, the Administration. I wasn't sure quite why they
decided to make that point. Dr. Krepinevich, I wanted you to,
if you would, tell me what you think about the changes that
have already been made in President Obama's administration with
regard to the National Security Advisor, the National Security
Council, how you see that is different from the President Bush
Administration, where you see that fitting into what you were
recommending with regard to President Eisenhower?
Dr. Krepinevich. Well, referring to what my colleague, Dr.
Destler said, I think people matter and thinking matters. And
obviously, if President Obama is not inclined to an Eisenhower-
like national security staff structure, it is going to fail.
And there is no system that if you put it into place can
survive the unwillingness of a leadership to employ that
system. There is always potential for the President to find
workarounds for a system that he or she doesn't want. Having
said that, as long as we are using the Kennedy analogy, you can
have a very bright, energetic, charismatic President, as
President Kennedy was, and as many people certainly believe
President Obama is. But I also recall that President Kennedy's
system, in part, also contributed to during the first 18 months
or so of his administration to--you know, we had a series of
crises, whether it was the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, the
Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
When you look long-term, we had the sort of stumbling along
in places like Vietnam. So there is, I think, a decision for a
President to make that if I want to be serious about strategy,
these are some of the things I have to do. And it doesn't have
to a carbon copy of the Eisenhower structure, but it does have
to be the persistent, active involvement of the President in
this kind of a process. And certainly, we don't have that right
now and I am struck by the fact that people who typically are
very bright and who are very self-disciplined, and I think
those are both qualities that the President has, are capable
of--and who can exercise self-discipline can do some remarkable
things. If you look, for example, at the history of our first
President, George Washington, particularly during the
Revolutionary War, his whole personality told him that he
should engage the British in battle after getting his clock
cleaned a few times, he exercised an incredible amount of self-
discipline and only sought battle on those most--occasions most
advantageous to him.
Again, you would hope that we wouldn't have to learn the
hard way, that this administration wouldn't have to learn the
hard way. But the structure we have set up now, it seems to me,
doesn't really bring together the kinds of talent and the
organization and the level of persistent commitment that was
characteristic of the Eisenhower Administration.
Dr. Snyder. Excuse me. What do you think, then, of the
changes that have been made thus far? There has been a couple
of directives that have come from the President about changes
to the National Security Council.
Dr. Krepinevich. I think there is an effort to look at
problems in a more comprehensive holistic way, which I think
can be a good thing. I am concerned about the fact that--I
talked to--this was in a public setting--Brent Scowcroft about
this. He was concerned about the growth in the National
Security Council staff and I share that concern. The fact that
it should not be a substitute for department and agency
performance. It should help bring issues to the attention of
the President, present them in a very logical, coherent way for
his or her decision. And it should help ensure that the
President's decisions are executed faithfully. And I am
concerned about the fact that, again, there seems to be a
certain amount of effort here to try and make up for the
deficiencies in the departments and agencies in terms of
execution and in their performance in identifying if there is
any issues to the President.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Krepinevich, where do you see the issue
that--we have been having the discussion the last couple of
years about the whole issue of interagency and interagency
reform which the Locher Report is talking about. In your
construct, where you put a priority on strategy, I thought your
discussion was very good. Where do you see--where does the--the
issue of interagency--the need for interagency reforms, the
disconnect from the difference agencies, where do you see that
fit into your construct on strategy and means and resources?
Dr. Krepinevich. One of the interesting aspects of the so-
called Planning Board on the NSC staff on the Eisenhower
administration, was again you had this persistent attention but
they also had the ability to go outside the organization and
tap into expertise. And I think here you might have the--you
have the potential for organizing certain interdepartmental
groups that focus on a particular issue as long as it is
relevant and that is sort of a group--I will give you a
historical example of one that was formed during the Kennedy,
counterinsurgency and that was designed to bring together
various elements of the government because as we know,
counterinsurgency involved not only security but reconstruction
and governance and intelligence and so on. And the effort there
was to raise that to the presidential attention.
It was worthy of presidential attention. And in that case,
you had no planning board. You had Maxwell Taylor and Bobby
Kennedy essentially reporting directly to the President on what
kind of progress they thought they were making. It was more ad
hoc. It was less rigorous than something that would be
incorporated into a planning board. But I would see that as
being something that could prove productive in this current
environment.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Destler.
Dr. Destler. Could I suggest you put on the table an
alternative model to Eisenhower's? And that is the way the
policy process was run under the first President Bush, George
H.W. Bush, which you had Brent Scowcroft as the ultimately
trusted, capable low-profile national security assistant who
essentially was the glue that held together a policy process at
the principals level, at the deputies level, and below. It was
a good, constructive, positive interagency process. It was not
an elaborate planning system. They were being hit with changes
and they had to adapt to them. But they did some very far-
sighted things, as in making the unification of Germany on
terms that were not only acceptable to Britain and France,
which was difficult enough, but actually making it acceptable
to Russia in a situation--and they did this very carefully but
through a set of informal relationships that were carefully
nurtured by Scowcroft, whose principle was you spend the first
year on the job establishing trust most of all with the
President, but with everybody else as well.
It was an informal system, but it was very effective. I
believe that is probably about the best that we can do in terms
of high-level coordination. Now, I mean there were other--you
could invent a Brent Scowcroft with even greater skills in some
areas. You could--you could tweak it in different ways. You
could say you could add maybe more budgetary analysis. But I
think basically what you need to do is look for a person who
can work with the President and develop informal networks and
they are supported also.
There is a formal structure too. My colleague mentioned all
the meetings that Eisenhower had of the National Security
Council. There is something of over 300 I think during the
eight years of the Eisenhower administration. I am not sure
there were that many in the entire 50 years or so--other
years--50--other years of the--and that suggests that most
Presidents have not found that formal deliberative process very
useful. They may be wrong. But they are the ones who make the
calls. So I think building on what the Presidents want, you
still need to try to develop something. And you still need to
try to constrain the President, but you can only do it if you
have his confidence and you serve him effectively.
Dr. Snyder. My time has expired. We will now go to members
who were here at the beginning of the hearing when the gavel
went down. And we go to Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to all of
you for being here. I marvel a little bit in the fact that in
my short time here in Congress, we seem to have really gained
at least some understanding and consciousness of the need to do
this, which quite a few years ago we didn't really have--
certainly as a committee or here. Dr. Krepinevich, you
mentioned your skepticism, I think, about the willingness of
departments and agencies to reward personnel who choose to
invest in interagency expertise. If we don't do that, where do
we look for that kind of change in management and behavior? How
do you--could you respond to that?
Dr. Krepinevich. My expertise is primarily associated with
the Defense Department. So I will give you an example about
something that I know. In the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in
1986, something called the JROC, the Joint Requirements
Oversight Council, was established in the Defense Department.
And the idea was that you would have the number-two person in
each of the four military services meet along with the Vice
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they would make decisions
that would be in the best interest of the Defense Department
and support national security. The idea was that you would
create trade space, that this body of five would identify what
the Department requirements were as opposed to their individual
service requirements. And in so doing, it would liberate
resources to be moved from one area to another.
That just hasn't happened in, what, 23 years now. You are
the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. You go back to the Army
and if you have lost or you have lost resources to the Air
Force and the Navy, you go home and you have lost the game. I
mean, you should be ashamed of yourself. We have had all
different kinds of people in the environment and they are all
good men. But they all come from institutions and they all know
where they come from.
The way to break that logjam I think is you have to have a
senior civilian leader in the form of the Secretary of Defense
who is willing to force that body to work, to say, ``Look, if
you don't come up with the answers for me, then I am going to
make decisions based on my best understanding. I have two
internal think tanks, I have the Office of Net Assessment that
does strategy for me, I have the Office of Program Analysis and
Evaluation that can do tradeoffs for me. And if the
professional military can't give me any help, if all you are
going to do is protect your rice bowls, then I am going to make
decisions based on the best information I have.'' And that, I
think, offers you the best chance of getting a healthy
competition going to where you can get senior people to live
outside their particular service or institution. That, again,
is a fairly narrow example.
Mrs. Davis. If I could just interrupt for a second. Because
in many ways, that seems premised on the belief that you have
on deep benchers on all sides, that you have got people to fill
in, to cross-train, to do a certain amount of work out of their
own specialty. And I think one of the problems that we see and
I hope that in the discussion we will look at the budgets. And
the report talks about the interactive budgets and integrated
budgets. I am sorry. I think what we find so frustrating is in
many of our discussions we know that there is such an imbalance
between the needs of State Department for example, and the
Pentagon and that you just don't have the people to play those
roles.
Dr. Krepinevich. But again let me sort of make the case for
strategy. What is our strategy for dealing with an increasingly
disordered world that is characterized by radical Muslim
fundamentalists, transnational criminal gangs, narcotics gangs.
I would submit that there are four that I have heard in my
travels around Washington. One is the ``no more Iraqs, no more
Afghanistans.'' This current experience is a one off, we are
not going to do this anymore, the military needs to get out of
this business. Just like after Vietnam we will take a 30-year
break. And I have had generals tell me that.
Second is the strategy that sort of came out of the 2006
QDR, which is the indirect approach building partner capacity.
We are not going to get directly involved anymore, we are going
do build up the militaries of other countries so they can
defend themselves. Secretary Gates in his recent Foreign
Affairs article talking about a balanced defense seemed to
indicate that it was that, plus the ability to surge if a
country that was truly vital to our security was coming
unraveled.
And then there is the fourth option that says we are going
to have a strategy where we conclude that we can't get the rest
of the world to help, we can't get our allies to help, we are
going to have to take the lead, we are going to have to police
democracy's empire, we just need to face up to that fact.
Depending upon what strategy you pursue, it has profound
implications for the military services, their size, their
orientation, who gets what. And so I guess my plea here today
is strategy really does matter, and strategy is hard to do. But
you ignore it at your peril, you ignore it at the risk of
compromising the nation's security, the survival and well-being
of its citizens.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you. I can go on, Mr. Chairman, but I
suspect my time is up, even though the lights are not on.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Fenner just was contemplating what the
content was and lost track of time.
Mr. Wittman for five minutes.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you members of the panel. I appreciate
you coming here. Some interesting dichotomy there in thoughts
about this particular study. Dr. Krepinevich, you pointed out
really focusing on crafting good strategies and you talk about
using the Eisenhower NSC model, including planning and
operation coordination boards.
Is that something that you think can be effective in the
long run from administration to administration? And the reason
I say that is if you get a new administration is that something
you would say needs to transcend administrations? And in
addition to that, what do you think on the congressional side
should happen to make decisionmaking there more effective, more
efficient?
Dr. Krepinevich. Well, let me preface by just voicing my
agreement with Dr. Destler's point that people matter here. You
can't force a particular system on a President. They will find
a way to work around it. They can have any kind of ad hoc group
they want, no matter what you call the formal group, and they
each have their own decisionmaking styles.
Having said that, my observation is if you want to craft
good strategy you need to know that it involves the persistent,
active involvement of the President of the United States, that
he does not have time to craft strategy himself, which is why
something like the Planning Board where you have in a sense an
interdepartmental group of strategists working hard trying to
identify issues, sources of advantage and so on. You have
frequent meetings of the key players, the National Security
Council. It doesn't have to be the statutory, it can be just
the relevant players for that issue. And you have to have some
way of enforcing decisions, which was the Operations
Coordinating Board. And you have to have a President who is
willing to fire people, and I think that is one of the
endearing, if I could say, aspects of Secretary Gates. He will
not put up with people who aren't doing their jobs. And again,
you have got to enforce some level of rigor, and even then it
is going to be difficult.
But that is my message to an administration that is
interested in crafting good strategy and trying to get it
executed. I think Congress has the oversight role; to what
extent is the Administration crafting strategy, does the
strategy make sense? I think there is certainly limitations on
that. Several years ago Chairman Hunter essentially tried to
take on that mission, at least in terms of the Defense
Department, and get the committee to look at various aspects of
a Quadrennial Defense Review from Congress' position as a way
of being an informed B team, if you will, or red team for what
the Pentagon was doing.
I participated in the National Defense Panel in 1997. I
think that is another way that Congress--you know, an
independent body of experts focusing, sort of strategy experts,
if you will, sort of Congress' planning board, that can at
least evaluate and assess and provide Congress with an
independent view of how good the administration strategy is,
may be another possibility.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you. Dr. Destler, in your opinion has
the National Security Advisor become a policymaker or an
implementer instead of a policy advisor to the President? And
to add to that, if the National Security Advisor conducts
national security policy, should the appointment require Senate
confirmation and allow for the person to be subject to testify
to congressional committees?
Dr. Destler. That is a very, very good and important
question, Congressman. First of all, I hate to say it depends
on which National Security Advisor, and it is too early to tell
about the present one. I would say that most recent National
Security Advisors have not been implementers, have not been
negotiators. Some, like Condoleezza Rice, have been very
prominent public spokespeople for the administration. Certainly
Henry Kissinger did everything when he worked for Nixon. He was
a negotiator. He was actually not the spokesman until very near
the end of the first term. People don't remember that because
he spoke so much after that. But nevertheless the National
Security Advisor is a very--I would argue that in principle I
do not believe the National Security Advisor should be
confirmed by the Senate, because I think that would lead to the
National Security Advisor in practice being an alternative
official public spokesman. And this would create real problems,
real tensions with the Cabinet officials, particularly the
Secretary of State but also the Secretary of Defense.
However, I would say that to the degree that the National
Security Advisor in fact becomes, say, the principal
negotiator, or becomes the most important and visibly important
policy voice, short of the President, I think Congress will
quite understandably seek to have this person confirmed because
Congress naturally wants to talk to the person, the people who
are really making the decisions.
So I would say I would combine my cautionary recommendation
about confirmation with the caution to the National Security
Advisor; don't get out too much in public, don't--you know, if
you give an address to the President make it confidential,
don't go telling the press that you are the one who really made
the decision. Play the role quietly, give credit to others, and
talk to Members of Congress, but not necessarily testify, and
be straight and helpful to Members of Congress.
Dr. Snyder. Ms. Pingree for five minutes.
Ms. Pingree. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you very much
for your presentation. As you can see by my placement in the
room, I am one of the newest members in this committee, and so
I am actually here to learn as much as to ask you questions.
But let me just ask you one thing that any one of you I am
happy to hear from on this. And I think one of you mentioned
this idea that once we run out of money then we have to think.
And given the suggestions that have been made here in what you
have already said to us and what is written in the very thick
document that you have in front of you, how do some of these
suggested changes have an impact on our refocusing of national
defense spending? I mean clearly for many of us coming in in
these difficult economic times that is one of the challenges.
And given the responsibilities we have on our plate, and also
the interest in shifting some of the way we think about our
defense priorities, how do you see some of this having an
impact on that and other suggestions you might make in that
kind of realm?
Dr. Destler. That is a wonderful question. Let me just
respond very briefly. I think Secretary Gates has been one who
has said that because the Defense Department has a bigger
budget and has certain capacities, that the Defense Department
has been asked to carry certain activities which would be
better off being carried by other parts of the government,
particularly the State Department. And certainly the whole
complicated question of postwar stabilization has been one of
those areas.
So I think one of the issues is, which is important both in
terms of congressional decisionmaking in terms of
Administration decisionmaking, Administration planning, is how
can one at least incrementally figure out a way to empower
institutions, particularly the elements of the State
Department, but other operational institutions outside the
Pentagon, so that they both can get resources from Congress on
a consistent basis for carrying out very strong civilian
operational responsibilities and also are capable of doing that
in a way that will satisfy you.
I think that is the right question, and I think it probably
it is going to have to be dealt with incrementally. Hopefully
Secretary Clinton--I believe she is thinking about this, and
hopefully will work on this issue.
Dr. Krepinevich. If I could be permitted to use my strategy
example. Suppose we pick, let us call it, the ``Gates
Strategy'' in respect to dealing with a disordered world. And
it is going to be an indirect approach, it is going to be
building partner capacity, but we reserve the right to surge
military capability into an area that is threatened. In that
case you are going to be heavily engaged in efforts in terms of
economic assistance, in terms of assisting states that are weak
states with their governance, which means you are going to have
to devote more money perhaps to the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), you are going to have to
shift funding into the State Department to train more Foreign
Service Officers and others that can come in and help nations
improve their governance.
You may reduce the size of the Army eventually because,
again, if the Army is not going to be sort of the first source
of response to these kinds of situations but they are going to
train indigenous forces, advise them, then they provide large
amounts of manpower. We provide very high quality manpower but
in very small doses. So that strategy over the longer term
could lead you to, again, increase your resources for
organizations like USAID, State Department, probably the
Intelligence Community, although shift that money within the
Intelligence Community from more national technical means of
gathering intelligence to human intelligence, and then perhaps
a reduction in the size of the Army because they wouldn't be
sort of the first and only response you would have to a crisis
situation.
And again, that is drawn upon the results of an effort to
come up, okay, what strategy makes sense. In this case, you
recall I talked about strategy involves identifying and
exploiting sources of advantage. Theoretically you would be
exploiting two sources of advantage. One is high quality
manpower in terms of advising, equipping, training, improving
governance. The other is the scale of effort, assuming we right
our economy, and so on, and strengthen the foundation. We have
the ability to provide assistance on a greater scale than just
about any other country in the world. And so for small
countries it seems like a huge amount of funding. And of course
we have a history, sometimes good, the Marshall Plan, sometimes
bad, Alliance for Progress, in terms of success here.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Thornberry for five minutes.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you
and Mr. Wittman allowing me to sit in, and I have not had a
chance to read Dr. Destler's book. I have read about it. I have
had the chance to read Dr. Krepinevich's recent book on the
importance of one of the things about it, importance of
strategic planning, which makes a very persuasive case for me.
I guess I would like to step back from the questions you
have had so far and ask: do you think we need to make
significant organizational changes? I think a lot of the
impetus for this report came from maybe two things. One is the
world is more interconnected than ever, so we cannot be
effective and have military over here and diplomacy over here
and economic assistance over here, and so forth. But secondly,
there is a feeling that the military had to do everything in
Iraq and Afghanistan, that the other departments never showed
up. And while individuals did amazing things on the ground,
that the bureaucracies were in their stovepipe worried about
turf and their budget.
So I think that is a lot of what got us here. And I
appreciate the issues you all have brought up with this
particular report, but do you think we need to have a
significant organizational change or can it be adjusted
according to a President's preferences and we can kind of get
along?
Dr. Krepinevich.
Dr. Krepinevich. Again, if I have to vote, I would vote in
favor of the argument that people matter. It matters who the
President of the United States is. It matters whether that
person is willing to devote persistent time and attention to
crafting good strategies, and quite frankly being ruthless in
implementing them in terms of dealing with recalcitrant or
reluctant elements of the bureaucracy. I think thinking
matters. I am a big fan of thinking relative to process. And
not to say that structure isn't important and process isn't
important, but again I honestly believe that there is a
shortfall in terms of strategic thinking, strategic competence.
And that is one thing I think that the project really did hit
very well.
The notion that the world is more complicated, okay, the
world is more complicated. Marshall Plan, late 1940s. I mean
that was a confluence of a number of factors. There were
economic factors, there were security factors, there were
intelligence issues that needed to be brought to bear,
diplomacy on a very high level, the Suez Crisis in 1956,
Soviets threatening to launch nuclear rockets on Paris and
London, Eisenhower using U.S. economic leverage to get the
British to pull out of Suez, and then the conflict, diplomacy
to wrap things up, trying to pull improve the U.S. position in
that part of the world.
The world has been a messy place for a very long time, and
it is typically, not typically, but often the case that there
is an interweaving. Kennedy Special Group (Counter-Insurgency).
You know, CIA, State, USAID. In a sense we have been to this
movie before. And so while I always believe that we can improve
structure and process, I think what really matters is people,
as my colleague Dr. Destler says, and thinking. Coming up with
a good strategy. I would rather have a mediocre execution of a
great strategy than a great execution of a mediocre strategy.
Dr. Destler. One of the ways you can I think think about
people, but also think about sort of structuring, at least
process, is you need to have people at various levels of the
system who know who are the relevant players in the government
on a particular issue and can have empowerment to pull them
together. It will be partly what agencies they are from and
what briefs they have, it will be partly who is good, who is
capable of moving things and getting the process to work. And I
think that probably has to be done more in an informal than a
formal way, but nevertheless it is going to have like a
Principals Committee structure in the NSC and a Deputies
Committee structure and some regional groups at a level below
that. But they sort of ought to be--and I think that is one of
the good things about this report, is they do talk about
flexible empowering of interagency groups and trying very much
to push the responsibility down in a way that people in the
agencies can not only participate and influence it, but
influence it in the name of the broader purpose, rather than
simply.
So I think one needs to look for devices like that. But I
can't think of an organizational reform that would promote, you
know in terms of a structural change, that would do anything
other than at the margins, little things like the State
Department created an Office of Reconstruction around the
middle of the Bush Administration. And I think this was a
constructive enterprise. People said, well, is the State
Department powerful enough to do this? Maybe, maybe not. Were
they able to get interagency cooperation? Well, a little bit.
So I think you need to look for ways to make those things
better. But I think some things like that probably are worth
doing and hopefully helpful.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. We have votes going on. And I think given that
we have votes and we have been here about an hour and a half, I
don't think we will keep you all sitting here.
Do you have anything further you would like to ask, Mr.
Wittman?
Mr. Wittman. No.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis. No.
Dr. Snyder. Ms. Pingree.
Ms. Pingree. No.
Dr. Snyder. Members may have questions for the record. And
let me just extend to you the offer that if you all have
anything written that you would like to have attached to this,
except this is a question for the record, to send us anything
that you would like to add on.
We appreciate your contribution today, but also all three
of your contributions through a lot of years to these kinds of
discussions, and we appreciate you.
We are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:25 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
?
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
March 19, 2009
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QUESTION SUBMITTED BY DR. SNYDER
Dr. Snyder. Do you believe that the professional military education
system does or should play a role in designing national security
strategy? Please comment.
Dr. Krepinevich. The professional military education system should
play an important--albeit indirect--role in designing our national
security strategy.
Strategy at the national level (and strategy in general) is
typically done best by small groups of individuals who are talented
strategists. This was the case with respect to the successful grand
strategy developed by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to
prosecute the Cold War. The same is true for the ``triangular''
strategy developed by the Nixon administration that led to the opening
to China in the early 1970s and produced a major shift in our
geopolitical situation. Our overall strategy for prosecuting World War
II in Europe with our British partners was crafted and directed by
President Roosevelt, General Marshall, Prime Minister Churchill and
General Alan Brooke.
Professional military education institutions support the design of
good strategy in two ways. First, our senior military schools teach
strategy. To the extent they do it well, they contribute to populating
our government, over time, with senior civilian and military leaders
who have a good appreciation for strategy. Second, to the extent that
these institutions are able to identify those individuals who are
promising strategists, it can be an important factor in their selection
for senior positions that require such a skill. (There is some recent
scholarship indicating that it is possible to identify those
individuals who have the potential to do strategy well. Interestingly,
the skill sets that the military values in selecting officers for
command at the tactical level of war, are not those that translate well
into skills needed for senior rank; i.e., for officers who must weigh
issues at the strategic level, and who are responsible for strategy
development.)
Do our senior military education institutions teach strategy well?
Are they tased with identifying students who show great promise as
strategists? Is this attribute valued by the career civil service and
the military services when it comes to advancement and placement? These
questions may be worth investigating. Both Rep Skelton and Rep Israel
have a strong interest in these issues and may be worth engaging, as
may Rep Thomberry.
I hope this brief response proves of use to you.
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