Change for America: National Security Policy
A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President
Chapters:
Overview:
Containing the Terrorist Threat, Jessica Stern
Overview:
The Costs and Benefits of Redeploying from Iraq, Lawrence Korb
Overview:
Reducing Global Poverty Is a Moral and Security Imperative, Gayle Smith
Overview:
Securing America from Nuclear Threats, Joseph Cirincione
Overview:
Prepare Our Homeland for the Worst, but Prepare Smartly, P. J. Crowley and Steve Richetti
Overview:
National Security, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law, Harold Hongju Koh
Overview:
Public Diplomacy Can Help Restore Lost U.S. Credibility, Doug Wilson
Department of Defense:
The Challenge of Transition During Wartime, Rudy deLeon
Department of State:
Rebuilding and Repositioning America’s Diplomatic Strength, Gregory B. Craig
Department of Homeland Security:
Rebuilding to Create What Should Have Been from the Beginning, Clark Kent Ervin
Federal Emergency Management Agency:
Rebuilding a Once Proud Agency, James Lee Witt
Department of Energy:
Implementing the New Energy Opportunity, Ronald E. Minsk and Elgie Holstein
Department of Veterans Affairs:
Seriously Caring for Our Wounded Warriors, Gail R. Wilensky
The Intelligence Community:
Making the Newly Created Bureaucracy Work, Jeremy Bash
Overview:
Terrorism has increased since the “war on terror” began. Even if attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq are excluded, the extreme jihadi terrorist movement is now spreading around the globe.1 During this same period, Al Qaeda evolved from a commander-cadre organization based in Afghanistan into a hybrid organization made up of self-recruited or locally organized cells, many of them linked, if only virtually, to resurgent leadership groups in Pakistan. 2 Largely because of these developments, the president-elect should begin preparing now for the possibility of a major terrorist attack during the transition period or early in the new presidency. The new president, however, needs to be sure that our counterterrorism policy is not based only on a desire to avenge wrongs or reduce fears, but instead to reduce terrorism, which is a national security problem and a military threat that cannot be obliterated with large-scale military action. Terrorism can only be contained, which means U.S. national security for the foreseeable future will require an effective counterterrorism strategy that involves the patient deployment of all instruments of national power, with special emphasis on intelligence, information operations, and covert action. Containing the threat of terrorism requires much more than military action. It requires undermining the terrorists’ narrative and reputation using the tools of counterinsurgency, adapted to the Internet age.
Jessica Stern, former director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, is the author of two books on terrorism and a lecturer in public policy and faculty affiliate at Harvard.
The Costs and Benefits of Redeploying from Iraq
Lawrence Korb
Overview:
The cost of continuing the war in Iraq makes the United States less safe from its real terrorist enemies around the world. Our nation’s overall security interests are not served by the open-ended occupation of Iraq, and our military presence ensures the flames of Islamic extremism will only burn brighter around the Muslim world. Redeploying our armed forces from Iraq over the course of 2009 should set the stage for political compromise and reconciliation among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian groups, and for greater regional involvement in bringing peace and stability to Iraq. But redeploying our armed forces from Iraq to other bases around the region and back home must be handled carefully, and must be accompanied by focused political, diplomatic, and counterterrorism steps to ensure the best outcome from the Bush administration’s massive strategic blunder. Closing out a war that should never have been fought after about six years of multiple civil conflicts within Iraq will not be easy, but U.S. security interests cannot be held hostage to a dysfunctional Iraqi government. The costs of remaining in Iraq indefinitely far outweigh any potential benefits.
Lawrence J. Korb, former assistant secretary of the Department of Defense (1981–1985), and a retired captain in the Naval Reserve, is author, co-author, editor, and contributor to 20 books, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and a senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information.
Reducing Global Poverty Is a Moral and Security Imperative
Gayle Smith
Overview:
The new president has an opportunity to fashion and leverage a defense, diplomacy, and development triad that creates a world where a majority of capable states and open societies share common goals, where democracy delivers, and where the trend toward extreme poverty is reversed. To accomplish this, he will have to make global economic development a priority and equip the United States to act by institutionalizing White House leadership, modernizing a dysfunctional foreign aid system, crafting a new relationship with Congress on the management of foreign aid, and securing the support of diverse stakeholders for a development agenda.
Gayle Smith, former journalist, special assistant to the president, and senior director for African Affairs at the National Security Council, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Securing America from Nuclear Threats
Joseph Cirincione
Overview:
The cold war is long over but the cold war weapons remain. The 44th president must finally disarm this deadly legacy, protecting America from nuclear threats old and new. This will require a threat assessment unbiased by ideology, an integrated and comprehensive strategy, the full power of presidential persuasion, and the cooperation of many nations large and small. With the right strategy aggressively implemented, the president could prevent nuclear terrorism, block the emergence of new nuclear states, reduce toward zero the risk of nuclear weapons use, and restore powerful global barriers to their spread. By confronting and subduing this planetary threat, the new president will help restore America’s global leadership and fulfill a presidential ambition first envisioned by President Harry Truman and promoted by presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan: a world free of nuclear weapons.
Joe Cirincione, former director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was a senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He is now president of the Ploughshares Fund.
Prepare Our Homeland for the Worst, but Prepare Smartly
P. J. Crowley and Steve Richetti
Overview:
The transition to a new president and a new administration will involve both risk and opportunity. It is possible that some kind of terrorist-related event could occur around the time the new president takes office. At the same time, seven years after 9/11 and almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, the new administration can review what has been done, make urgent adjustments, and establish clear and sustainable standards and requirements. The challenge begins with redefining what homeland security is and what being prepared entails. This will require refocusing priorities based primarily on what is at risk and ensuring that governments at all levels have the capacity to do what society expects.
The new president and his administration must assemble a new leadership team, work constructively with the outgoing Bush administration during the transition, meet with appropriate stakeholders, and talk candidly with the American people about risks to the homeland. It should produce a first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review and should use it to improve interagency coordination, define appropriate missions, and adapt existing structures. Longer term, the new president should push the private sector to make the systems that we rely upon every day more resilient, strengthen medical readiness in the event of a pandemic or biological event, and deploy more effective detection capabilities to prevent dangerous materials from being smuggled across or within our borders.
P. J. Crowley, formerly served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton for national security affairs and principal deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Defense. He is a senior fellow and director of homeland security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Steve Richetti was a deputy chief of staff to President Clinton and is now principal of Richetti, Inc.
National Security, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law
Harold Hongju Koh
Overview:
The United States is built on human rights and the rule of law, and our commitments to these ideals define who we are as a nation and a people. Although the United States has been recognized for generations as the world’s human rights leader, the Bush administration has done grievous damage to this reputation in the name of national security. A string of well-publicized policies have seriously diminished the United States’ global standing as a human rights leader and left our nation less secure and less free. The next president needs to reassert our historic commitments to human rights and the rule of law as major sources of our nation’s moral authority. Even before his Inauguration, the new president should unambiguously signal his intention to move decisively to restore respect for human rights in national security policy with a package of executive orders, proposed legislation, agency shakeups, and concrete foreign policy actions.
Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School, where he is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law. From 1998 to 2001, he served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.
Public Diplomacy Can Help Restore Lost U.S. Credibility
Doug Wilson
Overview:
International respect for America is at an all-time low. An often helter-skelter approach to public diplomacy over the past 25 years has rendered one of America’s most valuable foreign policy tools weak and ineffective. U.S. public diplomacy efforts have been ad hoc and filled with public relations gimmicks. Effective public diplomacy works to understand and help shape foreign public opinion and effectively integrate it into the policymaking process in order to help realize our national security and foreign policy goals. To accomplish this goal, the new president will have to work to restore, recruit, and retain a quality corps of skilled public-diplomacy practitioners and give these men and women the credibility they need to engage with skeptical or hostile foreign publics. He also will have to put new exchange and communication tools to use to convince public opinion leaders around the world to listen to the United States, to help the world better understand our values and motives, and to give us and our policies the benefit of the doubt. The 44th president must select a knowledgeable professional to serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The new undersecretary should conduct a comprehensive review of public diplomacy missions and determine how best to build upon historically successful approaches with 21st-century strategies and communication tools.
Doug Wilson, former congressional director and senior advisor at the United States Information Agency and principal deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Defense, is co-founder of the Leaders Project and a member of the board of directors of the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Department of Defense
The Challenge of Transition During Wartime
Rudy deLeon
The coming presidential transition, with the United States fighting two wars, will pose an unprecedented challenge at the Pentagon. The new secretary of defense must immediately reach out to the joint chiefs of staff and seek their counsel on how to implement the new president’s direction to change course in Iraq and Afghanistan and create a strategy that improves American security and safety. In the first 100 days, the priorities will be repealing the Bush doctrine of preemptive war and assisting the new White House team as it creates a new national security strategy that integrates a strong U.S. military posture with robust diplomacy, economic assistance, and cooperation with allies. Reaching out to our allies, reducing the operational tempo for U.S. ground units, vigilantly seeing to the medical treatment of America’s wounded warriors, and restoring Pentagon spending discipline are also among the top priorities for the new secretary of defense during the first year of the new administration.
Rudy deLeon, former deputy secretary at the Department of Defense, is the senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Department of State
Rebuilding and Repositioning America’s Diplomatic Strength
Gregory B. Craig
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia will still dominate the political debate in Washington, but the new president and his secretary of state will confront a range of other national security challenges—an energy crisis, a looming crisis in Iran, an increasingly unstable Pakistan, complex political emergencies in Sudan and Somalia, and the ongoing Arab- Israeli conflict. There will also be many new challenges to global human security—climate change, increased scarcity of critical resources, weak and failing states, and a global food crisis—alongside a number of modern, transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, and illicit trade.
The new president and his administration will face numerous constraints in meeting these challenges. America’s moral standing is at its lowest in modern history, our alliances with traditional and new allies are in urgent need of attention and repair, and a crippling budget deficit will limit the range of options. More troubling still, the White House will inherit a weakened Department of State that has for the last eight years abdicated the lead on U.S. foreign policy to the Department of Defense, failed to effectively adapt its core capabilities to the challenges of the 21st century, and overseen the erosion of the size and skills of the professional Foreign Service. The 44th president and his secretary of state will need quickly to reverse the sharp decline in the department’s standing, its resources and its morale. The opportunities are there, among other things, to forge a new bipartisan consensus between the new administration and Congress, create a regional security arrangement to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and launch an International Peace Corps to demonstrate anew U.S. global leadership at its best.
Gregory Craig was assistant to the president and special counsel during the Clinton administration. He also served as senior assistant to Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs. The former director of policy planning at the Department of State and a former White House special counsel, he is currently a partner at Williams and Connolly.
Department of Homeland Security
Rebuilding to Create What Should Have Been from the Beginning
Clark Kent Ervin
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the critically important Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, has itself become a disaster. The new president must therefore make it a priority to transform it into the model government agency that it should have been from the beginning. The new administration immediately should fill key DHS vacancies with counterterrorism and natural disaster preparedness experts, as well as skilled managers with experience supervising large bureaucracies.
Appointments should be made strictly on the basis of competence, with no regard whatsoever for party or ideological affiliation. The new administration will also have to work with Congress to increase the department’s budget in order to close security gaps. By the end of the first year, or as quickly as possible, DHS should begin screening 100 percent of air cargo for explosives; all airport personnel should, like passengers, be screened at checkpoints for deadly weapons; the department’s intelligence unit should be strengthened; and 100 percent of counterterrorism grants to cities should be allocated on the basis of risk. By the end of the first term, technology should be installed at every airport checkpoint that can significantly improve screeners’ ability to spot concealed weapons; technology should be developed and deployed at our seaports to screen all incoming cargo for radiation; our borders should be strengthened by completing the U.S. VISIT system by adding an exit feature; and consideration, at least, should be given to ending the visa waiver program. Finally, consideration should be given to radically restructuring and downsizing the department so that it focuses only on counterterrorism, leaving other functions, including natural disaster mitigation, response, and recovery, to other agencies.
Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general of the Departments of Homeland Security and State, is director of the Homeland Security Program at the Aspen Institute. He is the author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack.
Federal Emergency Management Agency
Rebuilding a Once Proud Agency
James Lee Witt
The experience of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the past eight years requires reassessing and rebuilding the agency from the ground up. Serious organizational, legal, relational, and leadership issues challenge FEMA’s ability to achieve its mission, and demand both cultural change within the agency and decisive action to restore public confidence. Early priorities include rethinking its place in the Department of Homeland Security, empowering the FEMA regional offices to better support the agency’s customers, and strengthening relationships with state and local counterparts. FEMA also needs to provide more resources and less restrictive funding to support state and local all-hazards emergency management capability. By the end of the first year, the new administration needs to institutionalize cultural change within the agency, professionalize and depoliticize agency activities, and show leadership within the emergency management community—particularly in the area of mitigating hazards. Over the longer-term, FEMA will need to professionalize emergency management as a discipline, review agency staffing levels to provide better customer support, and further reduce bureaucratic red tape in the delivery of agency services and programs.
James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is CEO of James Lee Witt Associates, a part of GlobalOptions Group, the nation’s premiere crisis management and preparedness services consulting firm.
Department of Energy
Implementing the New Energy Opportunity
Ronald E. Minsk and Elgie Holstein
Upon taking office, the new president will need to immediately address our economy’s dependence on oil as a primary fuel source, and the potentially catastrophic planetary consequences of large-scale international reliance on fossil fuels. In the first 100 days of the new administration, the new energy secretary will need to recommend to the president a series of executive orders to jump-start our nation’s transition to a low-carbon economy—placing the federal government at the center of efforts to put our economy on a path to a more sustainable and secure energy future. The themes reflected in the executive orders will be echoed in a DOE-led campaign to explain to the American people the need to become more energy-efficient. It will also educate the public about the many ways in which citizens can play a role in building the new energy economy, beginning with ways to save money by using energy more wisely. The new secretary of energy will also need to create strategies for developing the next generation of alternative energy sources, managing our strategic petroleum reserve, and administering our nuclear weapons complex. More broadly, DOE also must initiate new energy-efficiency standards for our everyday appliances and our homes and office buildings in order to more swiftly reduce our use of energy.
Ronald Minsk was former director of the National Economic Council and special assistant to President Bill Clinton.
Elgie (Elwood) Holstein served in the Clinton administration as special assistant to the president for economic policy.
Department of Veterans Affairs
Seriously Caring for Our Wounded Warriors
Gail R. Wilensky
The Department of Veterans Affairs must help the men and women of the U.S. armed forces make a successful and seamless transition from active duty to veteran status. Significant attention should be paid to the care of the severely wounded, but transition challenges exist for all 800,000 service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and since left the military. More progress needs to be made on the successful treatment of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. The number of newly discharged veterans also emphasizes the need to revise and restructure the disability evaluation system—by automating the process and simplifying the rules with clearer and more consistent decision making. In the long term, the new administration will need to reconsider the role of the VA—as an agency primarily focusing on the diseases and injuries related to military service or as an agency providing primary care and outpatient services to traditional VA users in partnership with academic health centers. The expansion of health care coverage to most or all Americans may further change the role of the VA.
Gail Wilensky, former director of Medicare/Medicaid, deputy assistant to the president on health and welfare issues, and Dole-Shalala Commissioner, is an economist and senior fellow at Project HOPE.
The Intelligence Community
Making the Newly Created Bureaucracy Work
Jeremy Bash
From stopping terrorism to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, few areas of government have a greater impact on U.S. security than the 16 agencies that comprise the intelligence community. It is also the arm of government that has changed the most over the past eight years. Following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, Congress overhauled the community in late 2004, establishing a Director of National Intelligence to oversee all 16 agencies. Three years into this new structure, there are signs of progress, such as improvements made to analytic standards and greater coordination among agencies in spying and information sharing. But much more needs to be done to establish the “unity of effort” called for in the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Further, controversy surrounding domestic wiretapping, interrogation techniques, and the overreliance on private contractors will require the new president to establish a clear legal framework for intelligence operations that protects America’s security while upholding our values.
Jeremy Bash, the chief counsel of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In this position, he advises the Committee Chairman and the other 11 Members of the Committee’s Majority on policy and oversight matters related to the operations of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies. He is a former counsel at the law firm of O’Melveny and Meyers. In 2000, he served as national security issues director for the Gore-Lieberman campaign.
