The national security system lacks the mechanisms to integrate the expertise and capabilities of the national security departments and agencies. The National Security Council committee system focuses almost exclusively on policy formulation. The Council gives inadequate attention to strategy, aligning resources with strategy, planning, implementation oversight, and assessment of mission performance. Moreover, this committee system produces lowest common denominator consensus decisions from diverse departmental positions.
What is needed are full-time, empowered teams with the full range of interagency expertise and the capability to address all processes. This teaming approach has in an imperfect model at the National Counterterrorism Center, but it has had greater success in classified missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This program will analyze these ongoing efforts; identify other complex national mission areas -- such as cybersecurity, reconstruction and stabilization, and counterproliferation -- where interagency teams are imperative; and work to create one or more of these teams on a pilot basis.
This program will also examine the need for interagency teams for major world regions, which PNSR has termed ‘Integrated Regional Centers’. For more than a decade, the national security system has determined that international security issues have needed to be addressed on a regional basis. Despite this determination, the only mechanisms for doing so are the regional combatant commands of the Department of Defense. This program will develop the concept of the Integrated Regional Centers, which would take a “whole-of-government” approach on a regional basis. The regional combatant commands would become a subordinate organization to the Integrated Regional Centers.
National Counterterrorism Center
A major effort on the interagency teams program, the Project on National Security Reform conducted a comprehensive study of NCTC’s mission to integrate whole-of-government counterterrorism capabilities into strategic plans. A team of fourteen distinguished professionals from across the counterterrorism community informed and guided the study.
PNSR is interested in NCTC as one model of an integrating mechanism to support the National Security Staff in strategic end-to-end management of the national security system. PNSR found that the creation of NCTC and its Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning (DSOP) represents a significant step in the U.S. Government’s approach to confronting complex and cross-cutting national missions such as counterterrorism, but much work remains before this vision can be fully achieved.
The report— Towards Integrating Complex National Missions: Lessons from the National Counterterrorism Center’s Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning— was released in February 2010. It calls for strengthening the interagency processes that serve as the connective tissue among government agencies charged with countering the terrorist threat. It focuses on DSOP within NCTC, but identifies many systemic impediments with implications for the broader national security system. The review, based on the results of extensive research and engagement with government stakeholders, includes steps that the President, National Security Staff, NCTC, and Congress could take immediately to further national security reform.
Since its release, the PNSR study on NCTC/DSOP has been met with great interest in the broader national security community. It has been the subject of congressional testimony and has received significant attention in the press and in the public, culminating most recently in a major event, jointly sponsored by PNSR and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to roll-out the report. This event was televised by C-SPAN. PNSR continues to socialize the study’s findings and recommendations and is also exploring how the lessons from DSOP’s experience could be applied to other complex national security missions.
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