National Security Reform and Classification Policy
“The security classification process … remains a major impediment to interagency information sharing,” a new report from the congressionally mandated supported Project on National Security Reform reaffirmed last week.
The 830-page report (pdf) proposes a significant restructuring of the U.S. government national security decision-making apparatus in order to increase integration and operational agility. The report addresses a range of organizational pathologies that afflict the national security system, and mines the literature on organizational behavior for new approaches to national security policy development and implementation. It grapples with serious issues, and flickers intermittently with insight and fresh thinking.
Unfortunately, although the report devotes sustained attention to classification policy, its analysis of that subject and its resulting recommendations are rather shallow.
“Sharing information across organizational boundaries is difficult… [because] agency cultures discourage information sharing,” the report states. But this is a restatement of the problem, not an explanation of it.
“Compartmentalized and obfuscatory classification procedures must be revised,” the authors recommend. They vaguely advocate a “common [government-wide] approach for information classification [that] will increase transparency, improve accessibility, and reinforce the overall notion that personnel in the national security system are stewards of the nation’s information, not owners thereof.”
At the same time, they acknowledge that the much “simpler” problem of establishing a government-wide approach to handling sensitive unclassified information required extensive coordination over a period of years “and its ultimate success is not yet evident.”
And so the real upshot of the report’s argument is that the classification system cannot be fixed at all, at least not in isolation or on its own existing terms. Rather, the authors argue, the entire national security apparatus must be reconceived and reconstructed to permit extremely agile, ad hoc teams of expert problem solvers drawn from all relevant agencies to temporarily collaborate on a particular issue and then to dissolve.
“Below the president, the national security system must be broken down into structures that easily attach, detach, and reattach with others to solve problems efficiently while remaining accountable to higher authorities who have the responsibility to monitor their performance.”
When that idyllic state has been achieved, then classification barriers will also have ceased to be a problem.
See “Forging a New Shield,” Project on National Security Reform, November 2008.
DOE has spent considerable time in the last few years focused on how to strengthen the Department’s workforce and deliver on its mission. The FY25 budget request looks to continue those investments.
The total number of U.S. nuclear warheads are now estimated to include 1,770 deployed warheads, 1,938 reserved for operational forces. An additional 1,336 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, for a total inventory of 5,044 warheads.
CHIPS is poised to ramp up demand for STEM graduates, but the nation’s education system is unprepared to produce them.
The Administration has continued to push for further clean energy investments, but faces a difficult fiscal environment in Congress – which has meant shortfalls for many priority areas like funding for CHIPS and Science.