IX. Transform America's National Security Institutions to Meet the Challenges and Opportunities of the 21st Century

A. Summary of National Security Strategy 2002

The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different challenges. They must be transformed.

B. Current Context: Successes and Challenges

In the last four years, we have made substantial progress in transforming key national security institutions.

• The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security brought under one authority 22 federal entities with vital roles to play in protecting our Nation and preventing terrorist attacks within the United States. The Department is focused on three national security priorities: preventing terrorist attacks within the United States; reducing America’s vulnerability to terrorism; and minimizing the damage and facilitating the recovery from attacks that do occur.
• In 2004, the Intelligence Community launched its most significant reorganization since the 1947 National Security Act. The centerpiece is a new position, the Director of National Intelligence, endowed with expanded budgetary, acquisition, tasking, and personnel authorities to integrate more effectively the efforts of the Community into a more unified, coordinated, and effective whole. The transformation also includes a new National Counterterrorism Center and a new National Counterproliferation Center to manage and coordinate planning and activities in those critical areas. The transformation extends to the FBI, which has augmented its intelligence capabilities and is now more fully and effectively integrated with the Intelligence Community.
• The Department of Defense has completed the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, which details how the Department will continue to adapt and build to meet new challenges.
  • We are pursuing a future force that will provide tailored deterrence of both state and non-state threats (including WMD employment, terrorist attacks in the physical and information domains, and opportunistic aggression) while assuring allies and dissuading potential competitors. The Department of Defense also is expanding Special Operations Forces and investing in advanced conventional capabilities to help win the long war against terrorist extremists and to help dissuade any hostile military competitor from challenging the United States, its allies, and partners.
  • The Department is transforming itself to better balance its capabilities across four categories of challenges:
  • Traditional challenges posed by states employing conventional armies, navies, and air forces in well-established forms of military competition.
  • Irregular challenges from state and non-state actors employing methods such as terrorism and insurgency to counter our traditional military advantages, or engaging in criminal activity such as piracy and drug trafficking that threaten regional security.
  • Catastrophic challenges involving the acquisition, possession, and use of WMD by state and non-state actors; and deadly pandemics and other natural disasters that produce WMD-like effects.
  • Disruptive challenges from state and non-state actors who employ technologies and capabilities (such as biotechnology, cyber and space operations, or directed-energy weapons) in new ways to counter military advantages the United States currently enjoys.

C. The Way Ahead

We must extend and enhance the transformation of key institutions, both domestically and abroad.

At home, we will pursue three priorities:

• Sustaining the transformation already under way in the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Intelligence Community.
• Continuing to reorient the Department of State towards transformational diplomacy,which promotes effective democracy and responsible sovereignty. Our diplomats must be able to step outside their traditional role to become more involved with the challenges within other societies, helping them directly, channeling assistance, and learning from their experience. This effort will include:
  • Promoting the efforts of the new Director for Foreign Assistance/Administrator to ensure that foreign assistance is used as effectively as possible to meet our broad foreign policy objectives. This new office will align more fully the foreign assistance activities carried out by the Department of State and USAID, demonstrating that we are responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.
  • Improving our capability to plan for and respond to post-conflict and failed-state situations. The Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization will integrate all relevant United States Government resources and assets in conducting reconstruction and stabilization operations. This effort must focus on building the security and law enforcement structures that are often the prerequisite for restoring order and ensuring success.
  • Developing a civilian reserve corps, analogous to the military reserves. The civilian reserve corps would utilize, in a flexible and timely manner, the human resources of the American people for skills and capacities needed for international disaster relief and post-conflict reconstruction.
  • Strengthening our public diplomacy, so that we advocate the policies and values of the United States in a clear, accurate, and persuasive way to a watching and listening world. This includes actively engaging foreign audiences, expanding educational opportunities for Americans to learn about foreign languages and cultures and for foreign students and scholars to study in the United States; empowering the voices of our citizen ambassadors as well as those foreigners who share our commitment to a safer, more compassionate world; enlisting the support of the private sector; increasing our channels for dialogue with Muslim leaders and citizens; and confronting propaganda quickly, before myths and distortions have time to take root in the hearts and minds of people across the world.
  • Improving the capacity of agencies to plan, prepare, coordinate, integrate, and execute responses covering the full range of crisis contingencies and long-term challenges.
    • We need to strengthen the capacity of departments and agencies to do comprehensive, results-oriented planning.
    • Agencies that traditionally played only a domestic role increasingly have a role to play in our foreign and security policies. This requires us to better integrate interagency activity both at home and abroad.

Abroad, we will work with our allies on three priorities:

• Promoting meaningful reform of the U.N., including:
  • Creating structures to ensure financial accountability and administrative and organizational efficiency.
  • Enshrining the principle that membership and participation privileges are earned by responsible behavior and by reasonable burden-sharing of security and stability challenges.
  • Enhancing the capacity of the U.N. and associated regional organizations to stand up well-trained, rapidly deployable, sustainable military and gendarme units for peace operations.
• Ensuring that the U.N. reflects today’s geopolitical realities and is not shackled by obsolete structures.
• Reinvigorating the U.N.’s commitment, reflected in the U.N. Charter, to the promotion of democracy and human rights.
• Enhancing the role of democracies and democracy promotion throughout international and multilateral institutions, including:
  • Strengthening and institutionalizing the Community of Democracies.
  • Fostering the creation of regional democracy-based institutions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.
  • Improving the capacity of the U.N. and other multilateral institutions to advance the freedom agenda through tools like the U.N. Democracy Fund.
  • Coordinating more effectively the unique contributions of international financial institutions and regional development banks.
• Establishing results-oriented partnerships on the model of the PSI to meet new challenges and opportunities. These partnerships emphasize international cooperation, not international bureaucracy. They rely on voluntary adherence rather than binding treaties. They are oriented towards action and results rather than legislation or rule-making.