Strategic myopia: the case for forward enagement.

• Author: Fuerth, Leon

OUR NATION'S ability to foresee and respond to increasingly complex and networked threats is handicapped by an archaic and compartmentalized interagency system that dates from the Cold War. While the current system is already hard-put to keep up with ongoing and near-term matters, it is especially deficient in planning for major, long-range contingencies. Some of these contingencies may seem remote, but they arguably have the power to shake the United States to its core. They demand our attention by virtue of their consequences.

The current organizational basis for conducting national security affairs is a legacy from the early Cold War. Because we now face a radically different constellation of problems, it follows that the strategy and management systems we use for dealing with them must be significantly readjusted.

During the Soviet period, the problem we faced was essentially confined to a point-source: the threat to our national existence presented by the conventional and nuclear forces of the USSR. This is a vast simplification, of course, but there was an underlying truth to it. The implications were profound. Because of our perception of a unitary Soviet threat, we prioritized the national security agenda around it into a hierarchy, and, associated with that hierarchy, we developed a pyramidal approach to the management of national security. Information about the nature of the Soviet threat existed within a relatively narrow and specialized domain, and the management of our response to that threat radiated from the president to the international security cabinet officers and out through the command system.

If we look at America's security agenda in the post-Cold War world, the pattern is much different for the foreseeable future. The problems we face are more likely to be approximately equal in magnitude, meaning that we cannot afford to divert our attention from any one of them for long and that designating one issue as dominant could be a serious mistake. The global environment is a major case in point. If in fact we have entered a final period when discretionary action might avert an epochal disturbance to climate, our attention is required now, not later. Information regarding these new issues is complex and sometimes very interactive. The expertise required to track these problems has broadened. Today, it is necessary to deploy parallel analytic and policymaking resources to deal with concerns such as terrorism, the above-mentioned environmental issues and pandemic disease. In other words, the very concept of national security must be expanded.

With that expansion comes a major challenge to the organizations upon which we rely for management of national policy. The menu of issues, the range of knowledge and the need for attention to the complex interactions among different clusters of problems exceed what can be handled by the vertically structured management system we presently employ. In the 21st century the security of the United States can no longer be preserved as a consequence of military power alone. National security is now a compound function of how well the United States manages all of its assets and with how much foresight we invest them in our future. We need to expand the operational definition of national security from its core interest in physical protection towards a comprehensive definition that embraces the sources and realities of power in the 21st century.

There are many examples of how previously distinct issues must now be viewed and managed as interrelated. Fiscal policy is an important example. We have arrived at levels of debt that can threaten domestic stability, even as they limit our ability to sustain the costs of our international position. Trade is another example. How can the United States remain the world's last remaining superpower if its industrial base is lost? How are our economic stability and our military strength compatible with increasing dependency on energy supplies that can be interrupted by producers, terrorists or natural causes? The destruction wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma give us a foretaste of environmental damage at a strategic level--what happens next time around? How will the United States retain its technological edge if its education system fails to produce sufficient numbers of engineers and scientists? Demographic questions, immigration and health care may all be domestic issues, but their impact...