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.