Achieving Complex National Security Missions: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Design and Management of Collaborative Institutions
Iverson, Erik
2009
- Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Abstract: The diffuse national security challenges facing the United States today require that we not only reform the institutions that defend this country, but that we also reassess how we think about national security. Today's challenges bear little semblance to those ... read moreof Harry Truman's time. Today's government only faintly resembles the bureaucracy of Max Weber's writings. Yet America's national security institutions have changed comparatively little since 1947. More importantly, the way in which we think about government organization has not kept pace with the shifting realities of contemporary governance. This paper argues that the United States can improve the effectiveness of its national security institutions by improving their capacity to achieve unity of effort with one another. In order to do this, however, it is first necessary to change how we think about bureaucracy. Traditional bureaucratic theory must be updated to reflect the realities of the complex and increasingly interdependent mission space within which today's organizations operate. National security reform and reorganization should be guided by a new analytic construct that more precisely describes the determinants of institutional success in the execution of collaborative missions. Unlike traditional bureaucratic analyses, the analytic construct proposed herein begins to explain why some bureaucratic institutions succeed in collaborative endeavors while others fail. The first four sections of this paper establish the foundation of knowledge from which the proposed analytic construct is derived. Analysis of the history of America's national security institutions, bureaucratic theory, and the national security literature inform the development of this new analytic framework. The first section of this paper will briefly describe the genesis and evolution of the modern national security system since the National Security Act of 1947. The second section will analyze traditional bureaucratic theory over the course of history and synthesize the most relevant contemporary theory into a unified analytic framework. The third section will evaluate the American national security system's effectiveness in the current international security environment. The fourth section will build upon the conclusions of the existing literature to make a pointed case for national security reform in the near-term. Furthermore, this section will argue that traditional bureaucratic theory is insufficient to guide contemporary reform efforts in the modern interagency environment. These first sections of the paper describe a host of complex problems, cross-cutting issues, and distinct challenges confronting American national security institutions. Ensuing analysis identifies three meta-level problems: novel threats confronting a predominantly static national security system, dis-unity of effort across the executive branch, and a dearth of strategic planning across the U.S. Government. These challenges are both multi-dimensional and cross-disciplinary; they are present, to varying degrees, at the national, operational, and intergovernmental levels of analysis, and they cut across an increasingly broad spectrum of disciplines. In the section entitled Principles of Reform, this paper distills eight major principles of reform concerning: the scope of national security, unity of effort, the vitality of institutions, planning and resource allocation, national security workforce integration, information sharing and knowledge management, civilian control of the military, and accountability and oversight. In so doing, this paper makes two important points. First, it demonstrates that many of the fundamental issues that constrain the performance of the American national security system are inherently bureaucratic. Paradoxically, however, it also argues that the solutions to these bureaucratic problems can no longer be found in traditional bureaucratic theory. This paper demonstrates that the analytic constructs of traditional bureaucratic theory have limited descriptive and explanatory value when applied to contemporary institutions. Like the Cold War American national security establishment, bureaucratic theory has failed to evolve with the times. The final sections of this paper propose, develop, and test an analytic construct that begins to address this crucial knowledge gap. This paper argues that four discrete factors are of paramount importance in the design and management of collaborative bureaucratic organizations: 1. Authorities; 2. Resources and capabilities; 3. Information and knowledge management; and 4. Accountability and oversight. These factors do not represent the sum total of the variables that can affect the performance of modern bureaucratic organizations. Rather, these are the four factors that matter most according to the historical, theoretical, and analytic sources synthesized in this paper. This paper proposes a detailed analytic framework for assessing each of these factors in the section entitled Theory Building. The utility of this analytic lens is demonstrated in this paper through the side-by-side application of a traditional bureaucratic analysis (defined in the section entitled Traditional Bureaucratic Theory) and a bureaucratic analysis focused on the four factors outlined above to a set of contemporary cases. The section entitled Case Studies examines three very distinct cases at the national, operational, and intergovernmental levels of analysis. The subjects selected--the National Counter Terrorism Center, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams of Afghanistan/Iraq, and the Arizona State Counter Terrorism Information Center--are each responsible for integrating cross-disciplinary and interorganizational capabilities in discrete contextual circumstances. They are broadly representative of a new class of collaborative institutions designed to bridge critical seams between departments, disciplines, and levels of government. There is no singular formula for success to be derived from this analysis; every carefully-defined problem requires a carefully-calibrated solution. Instead, this analysis is significant because it describes the determinants of bureaucratic effectiveness in today's networked organizational environment and begins to set the intellectual foundation necessary to build a more integrated national security system populated by a new breed of collaborative bureaucratic institutions.read less
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