The Adventures of Chester: A Comprehensive Look at Interagency Jointness

Solving the Interagency Puzzle is a new article in Policy Review. The author is "Sunil B. Desai, a major in the United States Marine Corps, . . .currently assigned to U.S. Strategic Command. He wrote this article while serving as an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2003-04."

Major Desai gives the entire question of interagency jointness excellent treatment. He defines the problem:

or any nation, coordinating the diverse elements of national power diplomatic, economic, intelligence, military, and law enforcement to name a few is inherently difficult. The stakes of poor coordination among the various agencies that wield the instruments of national power, however, are exceptionally high a reality that struck home for all Americans and most of the world on September 11, 2001. Although the United States governments interagency community including departments, independent agencies, and many other organizations is one in which the power of a unified whole would be greater than the sum of its parts working separately, unifying the whole has been elusive . . . the essence of the problem is that the entire interagency community is dominated by individual agency cultures rather than a common interagency culture.

He defines four main factors which impede the evolution of interagency coordination:

First, the interagency community lacks a formal overarching concept of operations or doctrine for coordination for either routine or crisis response situations. Second, the interagency community lacks an independent authority responsible for the development and training of personnel in such a doctrine. Third, individual agencies use different regional structures to organize their policies and operations both abroad and domestically. Fourth, personnel policies within most, if not all, agencies develop personnel who are primarily dedicated to their own agency rather than the interagency community.

Major Desai discusses the object of an interagency joint doctrine:

the interagency community lacks a doctrine parallel to the militarys joint doctrine. As a result, the structure and procedures used for interagency coordination have changed with each presidential administration, thereby exacerbating the problem . . . A new president can, as seems fitting, alter grand strategy the national strategic objectives the interagency community strives to achieve. To the greatest extent possible, however, the detailed mechanics used by the interagency community to achieve that grand strategy should not be altered.

He critiques the existing guidance and regulations for interagency joint operations:

the pol-mil construct is fundamentally flawed and cannot be part of a viable interagency doctrine. First, although it intends to encompass all elements of national power, the plan format emphasizes diplomatic and military considerations thereby marginaling the other elements of national power, such as economic, intelligence, and law enforcement. Second, it promotes division by implicitly recognizing two distinct communities, military and nonmilitary, rather than one interagency community. Third, it fails to incorporate the importance of vertical coordination (among federal, state, and local governments) as well as the complete breadth of horizontal coordination (among the different entities of government, the private sector, and the international community). Fourth, it perpetuates the dominance of individual agency cultures in the interagency community by building each interagency task force around a lead agency. For example, Joint-Interagency Task Forces, used in multiagency counter-drug operations, report to the regional military commander. Likewise, even though many agencies contribute to them, the fbis Joint Terrorism Task Forces are fbi-centric.

He offers an alternative:

Instead of using the pol-mil construct to build interagency task forces, a broader integrated approach would be more conducive to coordination and cooperation. The leader of each major integrated task force would be designated by, represent, and report to the president. Unlike joint doctrine, which allows senior officers from each service to be eligible to lead joint military commands, the increased complexity and sensitivities of the interagency community demand that leaders of interagency task forces not be from a specific agency. Rather, leaders of integrated task forces should be accomplished leaders without strong ties to any agency but with some experience in the dynamics of the interaction among those agencies. Ideally, former elected officials such as governors, congressmen, and mayors would fill these leadership positions.

Major Desai then calls for a combined national command authority:

In fact, eventually it may be prudent to consolidate the hsc staff as well as the other interagency councils within the nsc staff structure. Moreover, the potential for two different processes — one used by the nsc staff and the other by the hsc staff — to create more rather than less confusion requires urgent attention.

The good Major rightly focuses on the geographic implications of interagency jointness:

Although the geographic regions around which the nsc organizes its regional policy coordination committees are identical to those around which the State Department organizes its regional bureaus, the unity of regional structures used by the interagency community ends there. Most significantly, the geographic regions used by the nsc and the State Department bear little resemblance to those used by the dod or the Central Intelligence Agency (cia). In fact, the nsc-State Department regional structure for the world has six regions, whereas the dod has five and the cia has three. This disparity prevents a regional unity of effort — let alone clear lines of responsibility and authority — from being achieved and thus impedes efficient and effective planning and conduct of policy and operations.

He notes the necessary personnel changes needed for this improved coordination to become a reality:

Interagency personnel assignments also would enhance a common culture within the interagency community. Although some agencies already have interagency exchange assignments, these assignments are mostly at the headquarters level. Assignments among all agencies to regional and local offices (and operational military units), however, are necessary to develop an interagency mindset early in the careers of personnel and to ensure integration at all levels. Many positions at all levels in every agency could be effectively filled by personnel from other agencies. For example, Department of Justice personnel could serve in legal sections, Department of Homeland Security personnel could serve in security and force protection units, and cia personnel could hold billets in intelligence sections. Personnel from the various law enforcement agencies could be assigned to military police units or security sections of other federal agencies, and vice versa.

He then notes that striving for interagency coordination cannot just be an extension of the military goal of jointness as it is today:

Simply expanding joint doctrine to include interagency coordination, however, will only preserve its military focus and discourage the full involvement of nonmilitary agencies. Moreover, using joint military terminology and concepts (and watering down their military meaning) for use in the interagency context creates more confusion rather than less. To solve this puzzle the interagency community must have its own overarching doctrine and a single strong interagency culture.

Finally, Major Desai states how his changes might come about:

Although new legislation will be necessary to achieve an enduring interagency culture, progress can be made without it. By executive order, the president can establish the basic doctrine, create — within his Executive Office — an office with the authority to develop it, and direct all executive branch agencies to submit proposals for aligning their regional structures and implementing personnel exchange programs such as those described here.

In the end, this article is outstanding. Major Desai very cleanly defines the problem, offers well-reasoned solutions examined from several angles, keeps his eye on the interagency ball at all times, not favoring the military, and offers cogent recommendations.

There are but two points with which to take issue. First, more consideration should be given to discussing the implications of expanded military and civilian interaction. There are fundamental issues of civilian control of the military, and military control of civilians that must be resovled. Would military personnel ever be put under the charge of a civilian leader on the ground from another agency -- specifically at the larger, operational level (of course, no pure FBI agent will ever lead an infantry battalion -- but think of the relationship between General Abizaid and Paul Bremer, and the resulting disconnects between the military side of the house and the civilian side. If command is to be unified, and then decentralized, there will be a point of civilian-military intersection much further down the chain than than is normally the case. He touches on this aspect briefly here:

Exacerbating this disunity is the different degree of authority placed on the regional leaders of the different agencies . . . Moreover, from a basic leadership or management standpoint, it is simply impossible for one person (the president or the secretary of state) to directly lead or even manage some 200 people (all the ambassadors). Thus, serious consideration should be given to appointing regional ambassadors. Such regional ambassadors, of necessity, would be senior to the individual ambassadors to nations in their regions and would provide the appropriate link to the president, the secretary of state, the State Department’s regional bureaus, and the regional leaders of all other agencies.

At some point, decisions will have to be as to which generals work for which diplomats, and vice versa. Again, this is a whole new realm in civilian-military relations -- Could looking to the British from the 19th century provide one model?

The second difficulty is a question of the conception of "doctrine." As Major Desai defines it, doctrine consists of standardized procedures for coordinating different actions, and can be instated by the President via Executive Order. This definition considers doctrineto be a series of processes which are mandated and are there to smooth out planning cycles and speed up decisionmaking.

Forming integrated headquarters and task forces and conducting integrated operations, however, cannot be done without a doctrine. Properly developed, an integrated doctrine would provide the framework necessary to help ensure that all national policies, plans, and operations are integrated and none is centered on any one agency. Ultimately, such an integrated doctrine would cultivate a strong interagency culture in which individual agency goals would be subordinate to national interagency goals.

But this is only one way of viewing doctrine. The other is to grasp doctrine as a philosophy of war. In other words, to conceive of a fundamental understanding of the basic causes, nature, and theory of warfare, and then to work backward from there toward understanding how to win in its conduct. I say philosophy of war not merely to describe combat, but in the sense that Plato used it, "always existing by nature between every Greek city-state." In other words, a philosophy of foreign affairs, or of foreign policy (though it is less and less foreign, as Major Desai's comments on the Homeland Security Dept show.) This definition of doctrine most definitely cannot be solved by Executive Order, and more than likely cannot be solved by legislative mandate either.

To use the military as an example, the current doctrine, while not explicitly described as thus, is an adoption of maneuver warfare, which seeks to attack weakness and avoid strength, and to attack specific nodes in a network to achieve its collapse rather than to attrit it as a whole (though exceptions are made in many cases). These ideas spring from a philosophy of war that began in the 1980s in the theories of Colonel John Boyd. Boyd's theories were adopted by a sort of underground cult of junior officers, and eventually influenced every service -- albeit over many years of heated debate. It must be noted that Boyd's ideas did not come to be very influential until several years after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which institutionalized the concepts of jointness. Boyd's ideas answered the philosophical challenge of that integration. (Ultimately, the very worry about interagency jointness is an outgrowth of the concept of combined arms, which seeks to use all elements of firepower in a coordinated method to achieve a tactical or operational result. Interagency jointness seeks to use all elements of national power to achieve victory on a much larger stage.)

To apply the concerns of a philosophy of war to an interagency jointness perspective, the final result of a more joint national security apparatus will be a de facto agreement as to the proper conduct of war in its broadest definition. There will still be arguments and wargaming of particular strategies and policies, but the fundamental questions of defining war -- meaning war in its broadest sense, to include foreign policy as a whole -- will be reached through a long series of internal debates, trial and error, and psychologizing about the motives of other friendly and hostile actors. The debates will shift to that of questioning whether a given policy or strategy is within the overall philosophy, rather than debating the philosophy itself. There is a great gain to be had in the ease of policy execution which will result, and within it a great danger that other, competing philosophies of war will over time find ways to avoid, bypass, or collapse our own.

Update: Col Boyd's first name is "John" not "William." I have corrected the above text. Please forgive me, Boyd apostles.

Posted by Chester on February 8, 2005 8:42 PM to The Adventures of Chester