WELCOME
The Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) is a non-partisan, non-profit initiative sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Presidency. PNSR’s mission is to assist national leadership in improving the U.S. government’s ability to effectively provide for the nation’s security in the 21st century.
The current national security system is largely the product of the National Security Act of 1947. The system is comprised of the National Security Council (NSC), and more recently, the Homeland Security Council (HSC), and by federal government agencies and departments, each of which is overseen by separate congressional committees. Designed for a different era, each part operates with relative independence. When confronting contemporary security challenges, they work together with a common goal.
To reach its reform goals, PNSR must accomplish four important steps:
- Modeled on the historic effort that led to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, PNSR is conducting a rigorous examination of the origins, history, and performance of the national security system.
- Based on this analysis, PNSR will identify alternative solutions and propose recommendations for improving the national security system to include a draft new National Security Act.
- Communicate the importance of national security reform to the hundreds of senior leaders, thousands of government workers, and – most critically – the millions of American citizens who expect and deserve a secure future.
- Assist the U.S. government in implementing national security reform.
"I think it is only natural that I should attempt to speak on the general subject of our national security. I have no intention of speaking solely of ships and planes and guns and tanks, because they are not national security. Our national security is found in the combined moral, mental and physical strength of 140 million people, including the productivity of their factories and their farms and the skills with which they utilize their own resources. Moreover, the security forces that we have are not engaged, and it is not their purpose, merely to defend a certain area of land, certain properties; or indeed, merely our homes and firesides. It is their purpose and their mission to defend a way of life, our form of democracy: a democracy that has at its core a system of free enterprise; by which we live and which guarantees to every single human being equal rights before the law. That is the kind of thing that we are talking about securing when we talk about the security of this nation."
-President Dwight Eisenhower (Text of address before the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York from May 6, 1948)
