Q&A: Goldwater-Nichols analogy?

Michael Brand wrote:

Just read James Dobbins piece in Foreign Affairs piece on Iraq. He paints the Iraq mostly as a system failure in that our interagency process is deficient to handle the new realities of the Long War. He refers that we need something like a Goldwater/Nichols bill to force interagency
collaboration the way G/N forced the military braches to work together.

Any thoughts about what that legislation would look like in a SysAdmin world?

Tom writes:

Bit of dream that's been around for while, but G-N analogy is no good.

G-N forced service cooperation by diminishing power of service secretaries within Defense Department and elevating Joint Staff. That's possible within a department but a whole different affair among departments. The NSC can't aspire to similar heights because full departmental-level secretaries and their agencies won't submit to a coordinating body the way service secretaries did in 1986, because they were already subordinate to SECDEF within an existing department.

So the analogy is a huge stretch: from establishing clear lines of authority within an existing department to establishing the same across them, trying to super-empower a non-budget-owning entity (NSC) to ride herd over them.

That's why I argue for a Department of Everything Else: no bureaucratic center of gravity that controls budget, no real power created.

Comments

[Mark in Texas]

Maybe in another generation or two there will be another Republican President and Congress so that some sort of interagency cooperation might be attempted or better still, Civil Service protection might be relaxed or eliminated (did you know that UAW work rules add $1000 to the cost of every car they work on? The federal government seems to have a similar problem)

But unless the Democrats actually govern the way they talk when they dismiss the possibility that jihadi terrorists really do want to kill us and several thousand more Americans die, don't expect these type of reforms in your lifetime.

[Michael]

Time for some of my patented dumb questions. Wouldn't the Department Secretaries be subordinated to the President? Is there anything preventing him from telling the Secretaries to quit squabbling and work together (aside from his own cluelessness)?

[Tom Barnett]

Michael,

If it were that easy, you wouldn't need G-N and Iraq would have worked. The departments have very different rule sets, and secretaries tend to become captives of their respective bureaucracies ("I didn't take this job to turn State into some minon of DoD!" and so on).