But the central question which bedevils any new leadership position in government remains to be answered. How much authority will be granted the Federal government's point man on Homeland Security?

     Good intentions on an issue of national priority are not enough. For more than a decade the "Drug Czar" has languished in the nether land of political impotence, able to see the problem and able to see the resources available and required to attack the problem, but unable to direct their efficient and effective use. An even more recent example was the short-lived Economic Security Council established by President Clinton, only to exert little influence within the government, no influence outside the government, and die with the end of the Clinton Administration. The problem is that enormous power already resides in existing departments and agencies-any new organization threatens those people who were already busily engaged in addressing some small part of the larger problem. Since neither the Drug Czar nor the National Economic Adviser was granted power over the planning, actions, personnel or budgets of existing agencies or their ongoing programs, the result was a façade of cooperation (and sometimes not even that) followed by a return to business as usual.

     Despite their prescience in identifying the new threats to homeland security, the various reports issued over the past few years have descriptive rather than specific concerning the power to be granted a new agency head for homeland security.

     All recommendations agree that one person needs to be in charge of the overarching homeland security effort at the national level. But nowhere in the language of any reports or of any of the bills pending before Congress has anyone laid out the specific power that one person would have to get the job done. The danger is that a new organization without specified power will result in "more of the same."

Examples from the Past
     The Department of Defense offers an excellent example in this regard. Created in 1947 in response to the clear need for central coordination and direction of effort demonstrated in World War II, the Department eventually included many organizations and institutions intended to provide that unity: a Secretary of Defense, a Joint Staff with a Chairman, regional commanders-in-chief who took on many additional duties and responsibilities over time. But what the new organization failed to provide was the authority over planning, budgeting, resources and personnel required to force the Services to take joint coordination and operations seriously. The result was a long series of expensive uncoordinated efforts, and a failure to achieve the synergy that our powerful forces should have enjoyed.

• In Korea, Air Force and Navy efforts were poorly coordinated.
• In Vietnam, several different wars were waged at the same time, with little coordination, for example, between Army, Navy, and Air Force air operations, or between the bombing campaigns in the north and the south.
• During the Cold War, the military Services frequently produced entirely different plans for the same theater of operations, expecting to use the same assets in several different locations at the same time, without any central authority to require coordination.
• And there was no requirement that purchases from different Services be coordinated, or that equipment be interoperable, or that staffs or commanders gain even a rudimentary understanding of how their counterparts from the other Services acted, thought, or did business.

     Not until the catastrophic failure of coordination at Desert One in 1979 (during the Iranian hostage rescue operations), and the subsequent effort by Congress to sort out the mess (under the Goldwater-Nichols Bill of 1986) did the US military begin to gain the synergy of joint warfighting previously squandered by individual Service parochialism. And many experts believe that centralized, joint authority is remains inadequate today, especially as it promotes (or fails to promote) efficient operations with other agencies and departments.

The Question of Authority in Practice
     The success of Goldwater-Nichols efforts, such as they are, hinges upon the authority over planning, tasking, training, budgets, and individual career advancement newly vested in joint commanders-all reinforced by the requirement for joint commanders to report directly to Congress in annual testimony concerning the effectiveness and efficiency of the support they are receiving. Nothing short of this sort of authority will provide the Homeland Security Adviser the leverage and authority he needs to coordinate the actions of 43 federal agencies, 50 states and two territories, thousands of local governments, and millions of private entities, across a strategic cycle of seven independent functions which differ dramatically according to which of the six national level threats they are addressing. This is a massive job. Tight coordination is going to require significant new authority.

     If, that is, America's elected officials want tight coordination. It is possible that faced with the unintended consequences of such consolidation of power, those officials will decide that the risk is not worth the cure, and opt for less consolidation, less efficiency, and less chance of central over-control. This is a valid option, as long as it is selected in full knowledge and after careful consideration of the alternatives.

     The goal of the Institute for Homeland Security is to lay out these alternatives in an easily understood format, in order to stimulate the public dialogue required to make a considered decision.

     Essentially we are faced with two questions:

• How much authority to grant the Homeland Security Adviser over planning and preparation for the events described by the strategic cycle? (Deterrence, Protection, Preemption, Crisis Management, Consequence Management, Attribution, and Retaliation ... leading back to Deterrence)
• How much authority to grant the Homeland Security Adviser over the actual execution of these actions, especially in time or crisis?

Authority Over Preparation Involves

• Setting standards, for everything from organization, equipment, and response times, to training, education and personnel advancement - and then inspecting to enforce those standards.
  • Example: Fire trucks responding to the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 used different frequencies and different radios and could not coordinate their efforts. Some central, higher authority must direct compatibility.
    
    
• Establishing doctrine - how agencies think about and approach their duties.
  • Example: Some nations require a bill of lading before a ship arrives in their ports; we require this information weeks after arrival . . . because our operations have long focused on collecting customs duties, not security.
    
    
• Exercising doctrine, plans and procedures.
  • Example: Even something as simple as a communications exercise involving contacting key personnel and having them communicate across the various level of governments would go a long way toward preparing us for crisis management and consequence management. But doing this even once a year with every federal, state, and local agency would be a major undertaking.
    
    
• Controlling personnel and personnel policies.
  • Example: The Armed Services became serious about jointness when Congress imposed joint experience as a requirement for promotion to senior ranks. Perhaps a similar policy would help the law enforcement community to understand the intelligence community.
    
    
• Providing for education and training institutions.
  • Example: Senior military leaders are educated at war colleges. Where will senior homeland security leaders be educated?
    
    
• Reporting up, down, and laterally-to the President, Congress, department and agency heads, state and local elected leaders, etc.
  • Example: Every US four star commander-in-chief in the world goes before Congress at least once a year to report personally and independently whether his forces are ready and his support is adequate. This provides both a check and a lever for those commanders over the Services, who provide their forces. Perhaps the Homeland Security Adviser needs a similar lever over established bureaucracies.
• Setting priorities for funding.
  • Without control over funding or directive authority over personnel, no agency head can expect other agencies to abandon their priorities and accept his.

     Within the area of preparation, authority for the Homeland Security Adviser can range from very tight (he speaks and other agencies must respond because of legal, budget, or personnel authority), down to very loose (he "coordinates" and makes suggestions, but cannot direct). In order to clarify these options, this range of authority is described along the vertical axis in the chart that follows.

Authority Over Execution Involves

• Who the authority covers.
  • Example: At one extreme, will the Adviser be able to reach down to state or local police concerning domestic issues, or reach out to military or intelligence assets overseas? At the other extreme, will he be restricted to dealing with only a limited number of federal agencies and only on US soil?
• The degree of that authority.
  • Example: Whatever agencies are included within his purview at whatever level, do they have to respond to his directions? Or will he only make suggestions to improve coordination?

     In order to clarify the options, this range of authority is described along the horizontal axis in the chart which follows.

Charting the Adviser's Authority

     Somewhere on this chart is described every combination and degree of authority that might be exercised by the Adviser.

• In the upper left corner of the upper left corner (box #1), the adviser would be provided a degree of control over assets at every level that even the President cannot currently exercise in time of war. The American people and their elected representatives are probably not looking for such a concentration of power, even in response to threats to the homeland.
  
  
• At the other extreme, the lower right corner of the lower right corner (box #16), the Adviser really controls nothing, either in preparation or execution of homeland security activities. Here he is reduced to the status of a bureaucratic beggar - asking agency heads to cooperate, but without any real authority to compel them to do so.
  

How to Start: America's citizens and their elected representatives must decide
     It is the inclination of this Institute that the best description of the authority the Adviser should hold lies in the upper left corner of the upper right box (box #4 - marked by X). We are, however, quite open to other arguments and positions. However, we are not open to delay.

     Even if clear lines of authority and a clear mandate for the Homeland Security Adviser were established, promoting homeland security across the range of threats and at every level of government is a huge task. Accomplishing that task with the Adviser's exact degree of authority shrouded in ambiguity is probably not possible.

     Perhaps the key question is how much security our people want, and how much power they are willing to concentrate in one office in order to gain it. This decision drives how much central authority for planning and execution we can provide the individual responsible for these functions at the national level.

     Until our public engages in this debate and our elected leaders make a selection, homeland security will remain a fragmented effort dominated by individual agencies, programs and agendas. And our nation will remain vulnerable to catastrophic attack.

-Dave McIntyre, a retired military officer and former Dean of the National War College, is the Deputy Director for Research of the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security.