CAN THE US NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAUCRACY REMAIN RELEVANT?

The elephant is great and powerful, but prefers to be blind.
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972)

(Here's an aside on the future of the "national security" system. Please bear with me as I work on it.)

The US national security budget is nearly $700 billion a year (much more if the total costs of Iraq/Afghanistan are thrown in), more than the rest of the world combined. Unfortunately, within that entire budget there isn't a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism. Fatally, most of the big thinkers working on the future of warfare do their critical work in their spare time, usually while working other jobs to put food on the table for their families. In sum, this deficit in imagination will soon be the critical determinant on whether the national security bureaucracy remains relevant in a rapidly changing global security environment. That relevance is the key to its future.

Here's why. The need for relevancy became apparent on 9/11, when a small group of attackers hit the US without regard, or even a passing thought, to the trillions the US had previously invested in national security. The public's response, this first time, was to pour more trillions to correct that failure. When another unanticipated situation occurs again (and it will, likely in a increasingly rapid succession as small group warfare climbs an exponential ramp of productivity improvements), the public will not be as generous as they were the first time to a legacy organization that can't/won't do the job we pay it for. In fact, the public's displeasure will likely be expressed in a series of major defunding events for the national security bureaucracy. Here's the process that will cause it:

• Funding will already be very scarce. The combination of demographically driven entitlement spending (the first baby boomers retire this year), ballooning deficits (funded by harder to get and more expensive debt), and an inability to raise new federal revenue (money under pressure moves global) means that money will be very tight. As a result, the Federal government's discretionary budget will suffer significant and prolonged shrinkage.
• A need to show results. Given insufficient funding over a prolonged period, much more attention will be paid to the returns of investment from government programs (a result of too many programs chasing an ever tighter budget in an increasingly transparent society). Those programs that don't perform well, will fall under the axe. Further, citizens, who increasingly view themselves as customers of government security services rather than passive recipients, will be increasingly critical of failures from programs that cost plenty but deliver little.
• Competition from below. New, grass roots efforts at the state and local levels will compete favorably against national programs. As in: if the federal bureaucracy can't protect us, we will do the job ourselves locally (New York City has already paved that pathway with its own counter-terrorism center). Expect a fight between local and federal, a fight where the local wins.

In short, the next black swan is likely to do the opposite of what the national security bureaucracy thinks. Rather than be the driver of massive rounds of new funding, it could turn it into a husk of its former self.

Given that simply remaining relevant will become the key to future public funding of our national security system, will the bureaucracy react to save its own hide? Likely not. The smart money is on a failure to change, irrelevance, and organizational dissolution.

NOTE: If you could get the top 20 people in the warfare/tech futures space under the same virtual roof and focused their output, the result would be complete dominance of the idea space. Low cost. High value. Within a year, their output would dominate the press and policy.

Comments

[XON]

Unfortunately, you're shouting fire after the barn has already burned down. I used to work at a majcom that had no assigned forces, but had a $150 million + $120 mill/year JOC set up. Other three-letter-agencies are, likewise, standing up all kinds of peripheral ops-support 'projects', while actual operations or (worse) strategic work remains stagnant or, in too many cases, de-funded.

[projectwhitehorse]

“I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes, whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.” - Alexis de Tocqueville

No analysis, no sythensis, no snowmobiles - we loose. Your comments seem point on to the reasons for developing the "resilient community" concept.

I will post a link to this on http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/

[Duncan Kinder]

"Unfortunately, within that entire budget there isn't a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism."

Such a think tank would propose/implement strategies/tactics/methodologies/solutions that would threaten/overturn the status quo. There is a fundamental difference between defeat of the terrorist threat, on the one hand ( which would require us to acknowledge that it is significant ) and denial of terrorism, on the other ( which does not require us critically to examine ourselves. ) We seek to deny terrorism, not to defeat it.

Social elites are notoriously unwilling to challenge themselves. The Meiji Restoration is the only exception I can think of, off hand.

As Fabius Maximus points out in his blog, the $700 billion figure is going to become economically unsustainable fairly soon.

[zenpundit]

"No analysis, no sythensis, no snowmobiles - we loose"

We might lose but not for any shortage of bureaucratic analysis but rather from a surplus which is myopic, self-interested and poorly executed.

Synthesis though is in short supply...as are snowmobiles.

[SunTzuMelange]

The market for silver bullets is based on neither buyers nor sellers having enough information to make efficient trade decisions. It derives from the work of Michael Spence (1973) who showed that in such markets, inefficient signals arise as proxies for useful metrics. Belief in the signal becomes the driving change, and the feedback loop becomes stable as long as no contradictory data turns up.

This means that the product delivered is only loosely related to the original mission. I looked closely at IT/net security, and discovered that the system reaches stability somewhere away from where you want it, and possibly in a net loss position. In time, the system moves away from the original metric is likely lost over time.

I think that national security might also be a market for silver bullets.
https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001012.html
I wrote about it (for IT/net) here
http://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html
but to fully appreciate it, Spence's paper is best.

[mittelwerk]

read max weber on the "routinization of charisma" on why all bureaucracies eventually lose their authority and deteriorate. in short, it's the result of increasing systemic abstraction, as over time individuals are replaced by functionaries and decisions by procedures.

as an analogy, look at the major-movie industry. decisions were once made by a man a big desk and handed off to key talent; now movies are made by massive committees of untalented "development" types and "producers (investors)" whose interest is not, strictly speaking, making movies. the result: an overproduced piece of crap that forgets it's supposed to be art.

the same is true of the defense bureaucracy -- except instead of economics replacing culture, its replacing politics. american post-cold war poltical focus is evaporating; if you can't really identify your enemy, you don't really have anything to defend.

[jesus reyes]

Lincoln, Smedley Butler, Eisenhower, Kennedy and many others warned against the military industrial complex. Nuclear weapons was a big mistake because it had the potential of ending warfare. Terrorism is an even greater mistake. China is currently being developed which is a much better enemy. Not only can you sell weapons to the US taxpayers but to the Indian taxpayers as well.

[Fabius Maximus]

Building on Robb's post... if the US suffers severe economic destabilization -- such as currency flight -- the global community might help. Just as the US has helped others through the IMF, they will help "revise" our government's spending to meet our income.
.
They might "suggest" (i.e., a condition for loans we desperately need) reducing defense spending.
.
Many interesting futures lie ahead of us!

[adam]

John,

Interesting points, and certainly a good time to ask them. The British currently have running their independent Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. It started in May 2007, ran a call for papers back in July 2007, and is due in 2009.

One of the Chairmen is former SBS swimmer-canoeist, Liberal leader, and UN viceroy of Bosnia - Paddy ("Pantsdown") Ashdown. He ran (post-SBS) a Royal Marines company in Belfast in the 1970s, and so might know a thing or two about urban operations. The other chairman is the former head of NATO.

Also included in the list of advisers are ex-SAS (and former head of the UK armed forces) Charles Guthrie (also known as Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank). Again, he's SAS from the 1960s and might know a bit about running into righteously annoyed and well-armed Muslims in their home territory (SAS undercover operations in Aden 1967-8 leaps to mind). Whether that gives him any insight into UK security is another matter entirely.

Anyway the commission is organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

http://www.ippr.org/ipprcommissions/index.asp?id=2656

The report aims to take a holistic approach to security. The usual barnstormers appear - Terrorist threats, WMD, alien abduction, Britney Spears, energy security and so on, and they'll also look at basic issues like climate change, poverty, peak oil, Islamic theology and whatnot.

Critically for John resilience is on the list of items to be considered. Its in the first bullet point.

http://www.ippr.org/ipprcommissions/?id=2656&tid=2656&node=6

With two former special forces commandos and the head of NATO giving the report its probably going to be a military based view of the world. I expect to see lots of (useless, expensive, late, long term and ineffective) kit on the wish list. Based on previous experience with think tanks I'm not holding out much hope for a reality based solution, or one that is enacted.

Moving back to the US I'd ask the question about what results the "Homeland Security" can actually show? Certainly they can argue that no terrorists attacks occurred, but that is rather like arguing for a negative. They won't ever have positive results to offer. That's going to be awkward for their lavish funding as the US goes into recession.

On the other side the Pentagon faces the same issue. I suppose that they could argue that they stopped Iraq falling into complete chaos, halting Iraq at simple chaos, but for $700bn a year (+ additional funding for Iraq + whatever excess they spend each year + whatever private contractors have cost + no-one has audited the Pentagon for 10 years) who really knows if it was worth the money?

[Nils]

Assume you saw this, John: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122636726473415991.html

The real question is: who are those top 20 warfare/tech futures people? Let's name names... if you can name 'em, I'll get 'em under the same virtual roof....

[John Robb]

Nils. Let me do that.