Stop Bucking and Start Learning
The President is getting some kudos for the frank and forthright way he stepped up last week to articulate the government failings in the Christmas Day attack. After much media noise he announced that no one would be fired, and he took full responsibility for the mistakes. Loyalty is a good if an uncommon virtue in DC. But just saying the buck stops here too often means it stops nowhere. The President had a few good lines and not much else to follow through. What is really alarming about the Christmas Day attacks is not that they happen, or that we dissolve into a wave of recrimination, but that we learn nothing.
The US government is built on agencies with generally poor political and bureaucratic leadership. We have a semi feudal system, rife with patronage and a club mentality. Political appointees as a class are well educated, underqualified, and woefully unprepared for office. Senior bureaucrats, usually neglected by Congress, are subject to Darwinian selection to remove all evidence of any spine, humanity, imagination or leadership skill. If you really want something done on time, under budget, and is well led and executed – would you really give it to the US government, or worse subject it to a current USG contract?
When it comes to homeland security we really maximize our critical weaknesses. As one example there has been some discussion of moving the visa function out of State Department, and there has been predictable push back from Foggy Bottom. But regardless of who takes up the function, the requirement for juniors officers to sit on a visa line on a rotating basis creates an in-built weakness at every embassy around the world.
For those who are down on America, the longest lines in the world are still often found outside US consulates, of eager people looking for a visa. Along side of every queue is a cottage industry of people selling information or a quick way to cheat the lines complete with “information” on the new officers at the windows, and their behavior patterns.
Instead of staffing visa windows with folks who don’t want to be there – we should populate the visa windows with staff who do, and who have more than a year’s worth of experience doing it. In many large organizations rotating people just as they learn how to do their jobs is unfortunately routine, but putting entry to America in the hands of new people, who are overwhelmed, with on average less than 60 seconds to decide a case is foolhardy.
There are many cases I could draw across government, but there are few incentives for anyone to question conventional wisdom, and no promotion points in trying to steward and nurture our agencies and institutions. I attended a panel of distinguished Washington voices on counterterror issues yesterday, but the most disappointing aspect was that senior officials view this problem either as inevitable or too hard to solve.
There is some talk about accountability, but too often in DC speak this is reduced to putting a head on a block, but if actions have no consequences, then the walls, operations and values of institutions decay and cynicism grows. There is more to learning than ritual execution, but a lesson blandly recorded is not a lesson learned.
We don’t have learning institutions, we instead have industrialized the concept of CYA. For those who think this is an inevitable part of bureaucratic behavior I would argue that we are surrounded by examples of both good and bad behavior and that we need to learn before we are taught lessons we cannot afford. The US Army is a bureaucracy, and at times it has been as broken as any part of the US government, saddled with the worst of America’s social and economic problems, from race to drugs. It has also been rebuilt, not just once, but many times over.
Across the American military the concept of learning is ingrained from day one. It doesn’t give them immunity from making mistakes, it does give them a way to walk the fine line back from the brink of disaster to success. Why can’t we try to do this in other agencies? Almost a decade after 911 can we really afford the luxury of playing dumb and ignoring the lessons of history?
Mr. Geneve Mantri is the Government Relations Director, for Terrorism and Counterterrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA. Previously he served as a Stimson Center Fellow working for Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN ) on national security issues. He has also served as an Editor at National Defense University, as a consultant to the United Nations Children’s Fund and the United Nations Development Program in New York and Eastern Europe. He has also worked as a news producer for Independent Television News in London. He was educated at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in Massachusetts, and Warwick University, in the United Kingdom. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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