Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform) – Page 51

2000/08/292009/12/04

Review: Deliver Us from Evil–Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict

5 Star, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Humanitarian Assistance, Insurgency & Revolution, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, War & Face of Battle

Fundamental Primer on Real-World Security Challenges,

August 29, 2000

William Shawcross

EDIT of 23 Feb 08 to add links. This remains a priceless reference work.

This book is serious, scholarly yet down to earth, compassionate, insightful, terribly relevant and most useful to any citizen, overseas practitioner, or policymaker. By the books own rendering, “good will without strength can make things worse.” Most compellingly, the author demonstrates both the nuances and the complexities of “peace operations”, and the fact that they require at least as much forethought, commitment, and sustainment as combat operations. Food scarcity and dangerous public health are the root symptoms, not the core issues. The most dangerous element is not the competing sides, but the criminal gangs that emerge to “stoke the fires of nationalism and ethnicity in order to create an environment of fear and vulnerability” (and great profit). At the same time, humanitarianism has become a big part of the problem-we have not yet learned how to distinguish between those conflicts where intervention is warranted (e.g. massive genocide campaigns) and those where internal conflicts need to be settled internally. In feeding the competing parties, we are both prolonging the conflict, and giving rise to criminal organizations that learn to leverage both the on-going conflict and the incoming relief supplies. Perhaps more troubling, there appears to be a clear double-standard-whether deliberate or circumstantial-between attempts to bring order to the white western or Arab fringe countries and what appears to be callous indifference to black African and distant Asian turmoil that includes hundreds of thousands victim to genocide and tens of thousands victim to living amputation, mutilation, and rape. When all is said and done, and these are my conclusions from reading this excellent work, 1) there is no international intelligence system in place suitable to providing both the global coverage and public education needed to mobilize and sustain multi-national peacekeeping coalitions; 2) the United Nations is not structured, funded, nor capable of carrying out disciplined effective peacekeeping operations, and the contributing nations are unreliable in how and when they will provide incremental assistance; 3) we still have a long way to go in devising new concepts, doctrines, and technologies and programs for effectively integrating and applying preventive diplomacy, transformed defense, transnational law enforcement, and public services (water, food, health and education) in a manner that furthers regionally-based peace and prosperity instead of feeding the fires of local unrest.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: A Season of Inquiry–The Senate Intelligence Investigation

4 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Devastating, informative, essential reference,

April 8, 2000

Loch K. Johnson

“You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and then.” Harry Truman, as cited on the first page of the book. Well, in the U.S. Government, before you get a real housecleaning, it appears you have to build the vacuum cleaner from scratch every few years, and even then you only get the big dirt on the margins. This book is a very important book with all the more value today as we finally get serious about intelligence reform. Loch's professional and extraordinarily detailed account of the entire Church Committee investigation, its findings, White House attempts to avoid reform, and the rather bland outcomes that finally resulted, should be considered the key to understanding where we are today and why we so desperately need legislation to achieve substantive reform. Had Senator Church been chosen by Jimmy Carter as Vice President (Church was favored by the convention, with Mondale and Stevenson tied behind him), who knows what good might have come of his White House service.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: Flawed by Design–The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC

5 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Too Hard to Fix on the Margins–Fix Big or Don't Fix At All,

April 8, 2000

Amy Zegart

This is a very worthy and thoughtful book. It breaks new ground in understanding the bureaucratic and political realities that surrounded the emergence of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was weak by design, strongly opposed by the military services from the beginning. Its covert activities emerged as a Presidential prerogative, unopposed by others in part because it kept CIA from being effective at coordinated analysis, for which it had neither the power nor the talent. Most usefully, the book presents a new institutionalist theory of bureaucracy that gives full weight to the original design, the political players including the bureaucrats themselves, and external events. Unlike domestic agencies that have strong interest groups, open information, legislative domain, and unconnected bureaucracies, the author finds that national security agencies, being characterized by weak interest groups, secrecy, executive domain, and connected bureaucracies, evolve differently from other bureaucracies, and are much harder to reform. On balance, the author finds that intelligence per se, in contrast to defense or domestic issues, is simply not worth the time and Presidential political capital needed to fix but that if reform is in the air, the President should either pound on the table and put the full weight of their office behind a substantive reform proposal, or walk away from any reform at all-the middle road will not successful.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: Banishing Bureaucracy–The Five Strategies For Reinventing Government

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Great Thoughts That Did Not Take Root in USG,

April 8, 2000

David Osborne

Well, the Vice President loved it and the President bought into it, but it did not make a difference. The National Performance Review identified a number of substantive objectives for intelligence reform, and the intelligence bureaucracy was successful in ignoring the White House. I suspect it has something to do with one of the fundamentals: “Unleash-but Harness-the Pioneers.” The U.S. Intelligence Community can't stand pioneers unless they are spending billions of dollars on something really, really secret that has a high probability of failure. Reinvention boils down to uncoupling or deconstructing a whole bunch of stuff, and then allowing the pieces to compete. It requires managers that can “let go” and employees that can “take hold.” Above all, it requires openness and accountability….

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Manifesto for Good People Trapped in Bad Organizations,

April 8, 2000

Gifford Pinchot

The seven essentials of organizational intelligence include widespread truth and rights; freedom of enterprise, liberated teams, equality and diversity, voluntary learning networks, democratic self-rule, and limited corporate government. It was this book, and the very strong applause that the author received from all those attending OSS '96, that caused me to realize that the U.S. Intelligence Community is just chock full of very good people that want to change, but are not being allowed to change by the organizational circumstances within which they are trapped-frozen in time and budget.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: Wedge–The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA

5 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret)

FBI and CIA at War With One Another–Hurting America,

April 8, 2000

Mark Riebling

I cannot do this book justice, other than to say that I had never understood the depth and stupidity of the bureaucratic hostility between the FBI and the CIA-mostly the fault of the CIA these days but certainly inspired in part by Hoover in the early days-until I read this book; and that it should be required reading for every senior CIA manager. From the FBI's failure to communicate its very early knowledge of Japanese collection requirement on Pearl Harbor via the Germans, to the assassination of President Kennedy, the World Trade Center bombing and the Aldrich Ames case, this book makes me ashamed and angry about how bureaucracy and secrecy subvert loyalty, integrity, and common professional sense on both sides of this “wedgie” contest.

2000/04/072009/11/01

Review: The Politics of Information Management–Policy Guidelines

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Required Reading for Boards and Stockholders,

April 7, 2000

Paul A. Strassmann

Many of the cartoons published in the Irreverent Dictionary came from this book, and I was among those who suggested to Paul that he should publish the cartoons separately. They were, however, essential to this otherwise intimidating book that is nothing less than an operating manual for the Captain of the Virtual Network. The bottom line that I took from this book is that Kevin Kelly is right, our national and international information systems are “out of control” and our policy leaders have abdicated their responsibilities to technicians who do not have the political, economic, or common sense of two ducks and a chicken. As Paul alludes in one of his footnotes, the Network today is somewhat in relationship to the “horseless carriage” stage of the automobile, and we have a very long way to go before policy helps make computers as user-friendly and reliable and interoperable as the telephone and the automobile are today.