A Brookings Forum HOMELAND SECURITY: The White House Plan Explained and Examined The Brookings Institution September 4, 2002 Presentation: RICHARD A. FALKENRATH Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Policy and Plans, Office of Homeland Security, The White House Moderator: JAMES B. STEINBERG Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Studies, the Brookings Institution Participants: RUTH A. DAVID President and CEO, ANSER (Analytic Services Inc.) MICHAEL E. O'HANLON Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution PETER R. ORSZAG Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution PHILIP ZELIKOW Director, Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History, University of Virginia Professional Word Processing & Transcribing (801) 942-7044 2 **THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT** MR. JAMES B. STEINBERG: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Brookings. It's a great pleasure to have such a large and enthusiastic crowd in our first days back in the September season. I'm pleased to welcome you here for a very important discussion today on homeland security. We're privileged to have as our principal speaker today Richard Falkenrath who is the special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Senior Director for Policy and Plans in the Office of Homeland Security. It's obviously an extremely important position and a very timely topic that he's come here to discuss. We're particularly pleased to have him here because he is the model of what we like to think of ourselves here as being scholars and practitioners. His career is really a model example of that. He joined the Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, but prior to that he served as the Director for Proliferation Strategy in the National Security Council, a very distinguished body in its own right. Before joining the Bush Administration he was at the Kennedy School where he was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and he remains on leave from the Kennedy School at this time. From 1995 to 1998 he was the Executive Director of the Belford Center for Science and International Affairs which is one of the premier centers for the study of international security in the United States. He has a very distinguished academic background with a suma cum laude degree, undergraduate degree from Occidental College and a PhD from the Department of War Studies at Kings College in London. Rich is going to begin the study with a presentation about the Administration's policy and some of the issues that we're now facing in the public debate and the debate up in Congress and following that we'll have a panel discussion. I will introduce the panelists after Rich is finished with his talk. I just want to also announce that this event will be archived on the Brookings web site and we'll be providing streaming audio and video of the event to users who click where indicated on the main Brookings homepage which is "www.brookings.edu", and there will also be a full transcript of the event posted on the Brookings web site shortly after today's talk. Professional Word Processing & Transcribing (801) 942-7044 HOMELAND SECURITY - 9/4/02 3 First let me ask you to join me in welcoming Rich Falkenrath. MR. RICHARD A. FALKENRATH: Thank you very much, Jim. It's really a privilege for me to be here and I thank Brooking for inviting me and hosting it. It's also a terrific panel coming up with people I respect a lot, so I look forward to that discussion. Let me just give you the outline of my talk. I'm going to go through four things. I'm going to start off by talking to you about the President's National Strategy for Homeland Security. It's this document which is available on the web site in hard copy if you haven't gotten it around town. I'll give you a quick overview of that. Second, I'm going to give you some observations on the first year since 9/11. It's not quite a year but we're getting close. These are personal observations. They're both as a practitioner since I've sat and experienced some of this, and also as an academic since I've thought about it and written about it before joining the government. I'm just going to share with you a few observations. Third, I'll describe to you something that's pretty familiar I think to most people who follow the news, the President's proposed to create a Department of Homeland Security. I'll run through that quickly and describe some of our principles in crafting the proposal. Fourth, where I think I'll probably spend the most time is on the differences that we have, that the Administration has with the Senate reported bill creating a Department of Homeland Security. That's getting a lot of media attention right now. It's a very heated debate. Lots of this debate is carried out in very short sentences and sort of sound bytes and I'm going to spend some more time going through with you the issues as we see them at a sort of slower pace than is normally done in much of this. The National Strategy for Homeland Security, this document. The country's never had a comprehensive National Strategy for Homeland Security. This is the first. Partly that's because homeland security itself was not a distinct policy area. It's not something people recognized like economics or fiscal policy or national security. It was new. Experts were beginning to zero in on it as a very important emerging area of governance but it wasn't until 9/11 that everyone accepted that this was a distinct area and it needed a distinct strategy. 9/11 revealed that fact. It was always there. For the experts, I think they identified it, but 9/11 revealed to everyone that we need to think of homeland security as a distinct activity of our Professional Word Processing & Transcribing (801) 942-7044 HOMELAND SECURITY - 9/4/02 4 government, the federal system, and that's really the purpose of the document. The President's Executive Order of October 8th creating the Office of Homeland Security gave that entity, which is exactly what he could create as Executive -- he couldn't create a department but he can create an entity within the White House -- that gave the office where I now work as its first charge to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy. So we got to work on it right away. It took awhile, it took about eight months to complete but it was published a little less than two months ago now. Strategy has a lot of different definitions and meanings. I surveyed many of them both before entering government and then in government when I was engaged in this exercise. There's no perfect template for what a strategy should look like. Very sophisticated, experienced people have different ideas of how it should be defined and how it should be structured. We did our best to find one that we thought worked for the country at this time and for this President and this Administration. At its heart a strategy is an explicit ends/means relationship. A statement of what our goals are and what we're going to do to achieve those goals. I think when we distill strategy, that's what you're left with. It's about your ends and your means for achieving them, and it's an explicit statement of how those two things relate. Put somewhat more academically, it's our theory for how we're going to cause security for ourselves. That is how people define grand strategies, for instance. I recognize that this strategy is sort of incomplete in the sense that it doesn't deal with the international dimension of homeland security. It does not deal with the war on terrorism. That we as an Administration have defined as national security and we've been criticized for that. A very good report by the Aspen Strategy Group took us to task for that and said no, they should be integrated, they should not be separated in the way that the Administration has proposed to do so. We're aware of that, but nonetheless we had to proceed. The end, the first step in strategy, figuring out what your goals are. At the highest level of abstraction our goals are three. To prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, first. Second, to reduce America's vulnerability to terrorism. And third, to minimize the damage and recover from attacks that occur. These are not operational objectives. We can't measure our progress against specific yardsticks with these objectives, but we needed a high level statement of what we're trying to do and that's it. The means by which we're going to try to achieve them, what we are trying to do to achieve these goals are many. When you start racking up all the things that the federal Professional Word Processing & Transcribing (801) 942-7044 HOMELAND SECURITY - 9/4/02 5 government, state and local governments, private sectors, citizens are doing right now to achieve the goals that I just identified, it is an enormous list of things that are going on. Very few people in my experience take a comprehensive view of everything the federal government is doing to secure the homeland. Very few people take a comprehensive view of everything a nation is doing to achieve these goals.