Experts' Report Urges Changes in National Security System

A bipartisan panel of foreign policy experts, including some associated with the incoming Obama administration, has recommended changes in the White House national security apparatus that would provide the president and his staff with new tools to ensure interagency cooperation.

Chief among its recommendations is merging the National Security and Homeland Security councils and creating a director for national security who would manage implementation of the president's policies rather than just coordinate the views of Cabinet members and present them to the president, as the national security adviser currently does.

"The basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed and complexity of emerging security issues prevents the White House from effectively controlling the system," says the report of the Project on National Security Reform, released yesterday.

As an example, the report said that "after more than seven years, the U.S. government has proved unable to integrate adequately the military and nonmilitary dimensions of the complex war on terror."

The two-year project, run under the auspices of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, was financed primarily with $6.4 million from Congress and employed 25 former senior national security officials. Several Obama appointees are among the "guiding coalition" that helped supervise the project, including retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, chosen to be national security adviser, Michèle A. Flournoy, one of the leaders of Obama's Pentagon transition team, and James B. Steinberg, the campaign's foreign policy adviser who is said to be a candidate for deputy secretary of state. Retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, thought to be the leading candidate for director of national intelligence, was the project's deputy executive director.

At yesterday's news conference introducing the report and recommendations, Blair described another project proposal that would call for establishing interagency teams directed at dealing with priority issues. Thomas R. Pickering, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Clinton administration, compared the proposed mission teams to the Executive Committee formed in the Kennedy White House that handled the Cuban missile crisis.

James R. Locher III, executive director of the project, said that the president could issue an executive order to establish the national security interagency system but that other elements of the project's proposals would require legislation.