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Breaking the Proconsulate: ANew Design for National Power

President George W. Bush, in the seminal 2002 National Security Strategy, declared, "The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed." (1) Few would argue with this laudatory goal, but by 2005 most changes within the US government as a whole have been ad hoc modifications to existing institutions. With the noteworthy exception of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, there have been few truly transformational changes to the institutions of national security themselves. As noted by one analyst, "We have reconfigured our institutions to better address 'the spaces in-between'; but we have been far more reluctant to tamper with the basic institutions themselves. We have not fundamentally changed our habits of thought." (2) Examples of obvious absurdities abound--the fact that DOD's division of the world's nations in its Unified Command Plan bears no relation whatever to the State Department's regional bureaus, which, in turn, are different from the Central Intelligence Agency's regional groupings. DOD dutifully prepares its "National Military Strategy" (and now a "National Defense Strategy"), but there is no corresponding National Economic Strategy or National Information Strategy for two other key elements of power. "Unified Action" is a fine idea with a prominent place in DOD doctrinal publications; unfortunately, no one else in government pays much attention to DOD's doctrine. Culturally and organizationally, the geographic Combatant Commands are by far the most structured tools with which the United States can wield all the elements of its national power. But despite innovations such as the Joint Interagency Coordination Groups (JIACGs), evidence from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom demonstrates that true unified action among the interagency construct remains a distant, elusive goal. It is supremely ironic that an example from Vietnam, our only "lost" war, may offer a way out of this paradigm. The pacification program's capstone organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), while ultimately unsuccessful in its stated mission, offers a lesson in true interagency coordination. Taking the CORDS example one step further, our current geographic Combatant Commands should be redesigned to break their heavy military orientation, and be transformed into truly interagency organizations, under civilian leadership, and prepared to conduct the full spectrum of operations using all elements of national power within their assigned regions. (3) Unified Action--Theory and Reality DOD's doctrinal guidelines for unified action are outlined in Joint Publication 0-2, United Action Armed Forees. This publication states that unified action "synchronizes and/or integrates joint, single-service, special, multinational, and supporting operations with the operations of government agencies, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], and IOs [international organizations] ... to achieve unity of effort in the operational area." (4) Joint Publication 1, Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States, makes a weak attempt to delineate roles and responsibilities by stating that the "National Command Authority" integrates the elements of power, and, a bit more specifically, the National Security Council integrates the military and economic elements of power abroad, while the Ambassador and embassy country team take charge of diplomatic-military activities overseas. The informational element, perhaps not surprisingly, has "no single center of control." (5) To this vacuity of clear guidance for the strategic level, Joint Publication 3-08, Interagency Coordination During Joint Operations, flatly declares that at the operational level, "The JTF HQ [Joint Task Force headquarters] is the operational focal point for interagency coordination." (6) There is a clear implication here, echoed throughout DOD doctrinal publications, that the military Combatant Commander, or his subordinates at the Joint Task Force level, are first among equals for operational-level inter-agency coordination. …