Reader Comments, October 2007.

• Author: Cotter, Michael W.
• Position: Letter to the editor

TO: The Editor, American Diplomacy

SUBJECT: Geographic Bureaucracies and National Security

I read with interest the recent posting by a group of authors from the Joint Forces Staff College entitled "Geographic Bureaucracies and National Security: The Need For a Common Interagency Framework." While the analysis is interesting, it contains a basic flaw which undercuts the entire argument.

The authors' thesis is that U.S. government agencies involved in defense and foreign affairs organize themselves differently and that these divergent organizations lead to communication and coordination failures which have a negative impact on policy implementation. As examples, the study notes that the State Department is organized into six regional bureaus, the Directorate of Intelligence in the CIA in three regional offices, and the Defense Department in six (soon to be seven) Unified Commands.

Unfortunately, this analysis mixes apples and oranges. The State Department and CIA organizations are Washington-based and policy-oriented, located in those agencies' headquarters. DoD's Unified Commands, on the other hand, are operational commands located overseas. The logical counterparts to the Unified Commands would have to be the other agencies' operational entities--embassies, managed by the State Department, and the CIA's overseas Stations. In order to compare DoD's policy arrangements to those of State and CIA, the authors should have analyzed the regional and/or functional organization of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

This is not to say that coordination among national security agencies is not a problem. It is, and is likely to remain so because of the different focus and cultures of those agencies. The need for coordination in Washington has long been evident, and the National Security Council was designed to be the government's primary policy coordination body. The new Directorate of National Intelligence is intended to do the same for intelligence analysis, again...