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Blogfriend Michael Tanji weighs in on my “Orientalism” post with the bureaucratic facts of life:

Don’t misconstrue what HUMINT is about though. This is not the FBI and the goal is not to turn Bob Smith into the Islamic Donnie Brasco; the goal is to become the guy who meets, befriends, and manages the Donnie Brascos. Regardless, as tough as some say it is to get into the mix, clearly it does not take a degree in rocket science to make the grade; mostly it is about a willingness to put up with life in the third world.

….A day in the life of an analyst, functionally speaking, is not unlike that of many other cube-dwelling, research/writer-oriented jobs in the world. For a collector though it is in many ways unparalleled in both hazards as well as drudgery. The hazards are fairly obvious, since intelligence work is more or less illegal everywhere; drudgery because for every 30-minute meeting one has there are hours if not days of preparation necessary to help avoid the hazards. Use a car? Gotta document why and where to. Spend money? Gotta document why and who to and how much. Everything requires documentation, which is standard procedure for a bureaucracy, but extremely inconvenient if you are running around the hinterlands with a bunch of guys who would get more than a little suspicious if you started asking for receipts after every meal.

….Setting aside the very real psychological and physical issues involved in such a strategy, consider the equally real bureaucratic issues. This person(s) have to be recruited (creates a file); hired (admin shuffle and more papers to the file); trained far away from N. VA (more expense, admin and paper); and paid (more admin and paper). Now he’s an employee, he’s got all sorts of fun stuff like equal opportunity and ethnic sensitivity training to take, performance evaluations, etc., etc. The system isn’t designed for people or missions like this, so it’s either develop a series of waivers (more admin and paper) or do things off the books (dangerous and, depending on your point of view, more stuff-of-movies).

(In case you were wondering, the references to ‘admin and paper’ allude to both the level of effort involved, the fact that more and more people would know what was going on, and the fact that such a situation invites leaks.)

Read the rest here.

MountainRunner gets a special, solo, Recommended Reading today.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner – “Departure Assessment of Embassy Baghdad”

This is simply an utterly amazing “must read”. An excoriating, damning and devastating cri de coeur  by an insider, leveled at the institutional culture of the State Department bureaucracy and Foreign Service that has not had a top to botom, clear the decks, clean slate, reform since the 1920’s. Kudos to Matt for printing this document – it should be a far bigger story than it is. Had an equivalent arisen in the Defense Department over Iraq, it would be front-page news in The New York Times for a week. Easily. A few excerpts:

….After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. 

….Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up.  It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken

…. Likewise, the State Department’s culture of delay and indecision, natural to any bureaucracy, is out of sync with the urgency felt by the American people and the Congress in furthering America’s interests in Iraq. The delay in staffing the Commanding General’s Ministerial Performance initiative (from May to the present) would be considered grossly negligent if not willful in any environment.  I would venture to say that if the management of the Embassy and the State Department’s Iraq operation were judged by rules that govern business judgment and asset waste in the private sector, the delays, indecision, and reorganizations over the past year, would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal. In light of the nation’s sacrifice, what we have seen this past year in the Embassy is incomprehensible.

Read the rest here.

Count me as somebody who believes that the State Department is grossly underfunded for the tasks at hand and that the public is too seldom aware of the dirty and dangerous jobs that FSO regularly undetake, far from glamorous and comfortable European postings. However, systemic reform of State and the Foreign Service is several decades overdue and this post screams as to why. When your net effect ranges from useless to obstructive, it’s time to go.

The Wilson Quarterly has a not terribly flattering review of the creation of The Department of Homeland Security:

“The Homeland Security Hash”

“Much as it opposed a new department, the Bush administration felt it could not let the Senate Demo­crats take the lead on homeland security, especially not with the congressional elections looming in November. By early spring, the White House had decided to design its own ­merger.

It could not be just any merger, however. According to a 2005 retrospective by Washington Post reporters Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald and a study last year by four researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Defense Management Reform (Legislating Civil Service Reform: The Homeland Security Act of 2002), the White House concluded that if it wanted to take back the homeland security issue, nothing but the biggest merger in modern history would do. Ignoring warnings of bureaucratic train wrecks and a clash of cultures, the administration put five White House aides to work on designing a maximum ­merger.

Selected for their loyalty more than their collective knowledge of government reorganization, the Gang of Five-or the G-5, as its members liked to call themselves-included a future Internal Revenue Service commissioner, a National Guard major general, and three other ­mid-­level aides. But experienced or not, the G-5 was given firm instructions to think big. “The overriding guidance,” G-5 member Bruce M. Lawlor later told the Post, “was that everything was on the table for consideration.”

The members of the G-5 took their mandate seriously, and began searching the federal organization manual for merger targets. Although the G-5 used the Senate proposal as a foundation and certainly knew enough to get started, the planners soon strayed far from the notion that the new department should be built around agencies with similar missions. What about adding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? The Secret Service? The National Guard? The Drug Enforcement Administration? The Federal Aviation ­Administration?

The choices seemed endless. The G-5 even considered detaching the Lawrence Livermore ­nuclear ­research laboratory from the Department of Energy and slipping it into Homeland Security. Richard Falkenrath, a G-5 member, simply called up a friend and asked which laboratory might fit: “He goes, ‘Livermore.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. See you later.’ Click.”

It was all part of the ­maximum-­merger zeitgeist. More agencies equaled a better ­reorganization.”

Read the whole thing here.

I’m not an expert on DHS matters, so anyone who has some knowledge of this process is cordially invited to sound off in the comments.
 

CALLING FOR AN IRON BROOM AT THE IC

Michael Tanji blasts “business as usual” in the intelligence community in a post at Threatswatch.

“All of these and countless other tales of institutional woe in our national security system can be traced to bad management. Those who share this view and have first-hand experience are loathe to call it “leadership” because leaders would have long since found a way out of the mess our hard- and soft-power institutions find themselves in. People who were on the job in national-security positions before 9/11 will readily divulge that nothing substantial has changed in the past five years; they probably log more hours, but the administrivia is as thick as ever and the security, budgetary and procedural morass – not to mention inter-agency in-fighting – is just as bad as it has always been. Those who joined after 9/11 have no frame of reference, but the fact that many are opting to vote with their feet indicates they know a bad thing when they see it.

….I have waxed and waned about the need to purge current management because it can be dangerous to paint with too broad a brush. However, this latest round of stories about business as usual in our national security apparatus has forced me to cast off any misgivings I might have harbored for throwing out a very small baby in a great volume of tepid, fetid bathwater. We should thank those who have served honorably for their time, energy and sacrifice, but their time is over.”

Read all of it.