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The congressionally mandated US Commission on National Security/21st Century (formerly the National Security Studies Group) was established by the Defense Department to provide the first comprehensive review of the national security environment, processes, and organizations since the National Security Act of 1947. The bipartisan group was chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, and included members with a wide variety of expertise and backgrounds: Anne Armstrong, Norm Augustine, Lynne Cheney, John Dancy, John Galvin, Leslie Gelb, Newt Gingrich, Lee Hamilton, Lionel Olmer, Donald Rice, Henry Schacht, James Schlesinger, Harry Train, and Andrew Young. The NSSG mandate is to identify threats emerging early in the next century and to recommend changes to the national security structure to meet those threats. The commission produced three reports for the Secretary of Defense. The first report, New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century, was issued in September 1999 and describes the emerging threat environment facing the United States. The second report, Seeking A National Strategy: A Concert For Preserving Security And Promoting Freedom, was issued on April 19, 2000, and is intended to design a national security strategy for this new threat environment. The Commission’s third report, issued in February 2001, proposes necessary changes to the national security structure in order to implement that strategy effectively. |
US Commission on National SecurityCSBA's assessment Hart-Rudman Commission Report: A Critique, finds a number of important issues raised, but overall that the report falls short of crafting a strategy for preserving US security. The commission’s task was an enormously difficult and ambitious one. Moreover, it was made all the more difficult by the decision to limit the report’s recommendations and findings to areas where consensus could be reached among the panel’s 14 members. Overall, the commission performs a modest, but important, service in outlining a range of US security interests and strategic objectives. Unfortunately, it comes up short in its most important (and difficult) task: crafting a strategy for preserving US security in what it rightly observes is a rapidly changing, and increasingly challenging, security environment. As discussed at the end of this analysis, fundamentally, strategy is about setting priorities and making choices between competing alternatives under conditions of limited resources. Unfortunately, the commission fails to clearly set strategic priorities, make choices among competing alternatives for achieving its objectives, or provide a meaningful indication of the resources that would be required to achieve its objectives. Yet these actions are inherent to crafting a strategy. The commission does raise a number of important issues in its report. But it generally does not provide meaningful guidance concerning those issues. This critique focuses on ten of the policy areas identified in the report that could have major implications for defense strategy and budgetary requirements:
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