At first glance, the latest reform project at the Department of Defense resembles some unpronounceable game of Scrabble: Offices known arcanely as DSWA, OSIA, and DTSA will merge into the equally opaque DTRA. But as House and Senate conferees reconvene this week to wrangle out the final Defense appropriations bill, the members must strive to decipher this alphabet soup-and the 15 years of bureaucratic battles that made it.
At stake, said Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre, is how the nation meets "the largest security challenge we face in the next decade: the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear technologies"-weapons sought by enemies, from North Korea to Iraq, and capable of killing thousands. The powerful Hamre is personally pushing the reform as a much-needed-and, say his supporters, long-overdue-rationalization of the Pentagon's anti-proliferation efforts into a single, coherent organization, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
Against this plan rails a single civil servant of what is normally the most anonymous kind. Yet Peter Leitner, a reviewer of export licenses at the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), has testified repeatedly on Capitol Hill, blasting his own superiors. His charge: that Hamre's plan will fatally compromise controls on the export of dangerous technologies.
"DOD, over the last six years," said Leitner, "has been severely weakened" in its ability to keep American technology out of unfriendly hands. By folding his agency, DTSA, into another, Leitner said, the planned reorganization would "put a stake through the heart of . . . whatever's left."
A crucial problem, said Leitner, is the proposed chain of command. Currently, DTSA's export-control functions report to the undersecretary of defense for policy. As part of the new, composite DTRA, however, those functions would report to the undersecretary for acquisition and technology. "Acquisition is involved in exports," Leitner warned, because it seeks to keep the American defense industry profitable, in part through foreign sales of the very type that DTSA regulates. "You have an inherent conflict there."
DTSA's first director, Stephen D. Bryen, suspects a deliberate Clinton administration plan: "They saw an opportunity to disembowel it," he said of the agency he founded in 1983-85. "Take it out of Policy, and it won't be accountable."
Leitner, Bryen, and other export-control hawks have found a willing audience among congressional Republicans, already suspicious that the administration subordinates national security to free trade. "The administration seems to have a basic rule: In case of a problem, tilt towards [granting] the export license," said Sen. Jon L. Kyl, R-Ariz. "That's flawed policy. It plays right into the hands of terrorist organizations, it plays right into the hands of rogue states that wish us ill."
Kyl introduced an amendment to the Defense appropriations bill that would have mandated DTSA's continued independence. He withdrew it, for procedural reasons, but he received assurances that the conference would look at the issue. Powerful senators, such as Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., John W. Warner, R-Va., and Fred D. Thompson, R-Tenn., have declared their support.
The House has already passed language that would keep export controls under the "overall supervision" of the undersecretary for policy. A House National Security Committee spokesperson admitted, however, that the vague wording "does not specifically preclude DTSA from being reorganized" into a new agency under Acquisition.
Ironically, Deputy Secretary Hamre stressed that his reform plan always provided that Policy would retain overall supervision of export controls. "The formal process of security review and the inter-agency process still [are] going to go through Policy," Hamre said, even if the export-control office belongs to Acquisition for administrative purposes. All of this fervor on the Hill, he suggested, results from a misunderstanding of his intent: "We never intended to move that [oversight]. It's been my failing, for not properly explaining it, but once I sit down and talk to people about it . . . we have support."
Either way, agreed Jay Davis, the director-designate of the new DTRA, "the criteria against which the [export-control] activities are set belong to Policy." As head of a composite agency, he explained, he will be responsible to multiple bosses, Policy among them. Acquisition, however, "has the most-magic control, which is the money. . . . No matter what the wiring diagram says, the budget for this agency goes through [Acquisition]." Such fiscal realities give thoughtful observers pause.
So do organizational realities: By folding DTSA into the new DTRA, the reorganization would introduce another layer of bureaucracy between the civil servants actually reviewing export licenses at DTSA and the Pentagon's top decision makers. A director of DTSA from the Bush administration, William N. Rudman, said that slogging up a single step of the hierarchy was hard enough: "You have to get somebody who has other things on his plate, and to whom your stuff is a nuisance and technically incomprehensible, and you have to get him energized to deal with his peers."
Rudman can see no sound reason for the new administrative scheme. His explanation: "Obviously, Clinton would sell his mother for a vote. . . . Strategic considerations mean nothing here, and it's all politics."
The irony of Rudman's charge is that his former subordinate at DTSA, Leitner, has leveled the same charge against him. "During Rudman's tenure," Leitner remembered angrily, "the U.S. government led an effort to eliminate one-third of the items on the COCOM list [of restricted exports]-purely a political exercise."
It is such long-held and bitter memories of past battles that make today's debate so acrimonious. Leitner is the voice of a group of deeply discontented DTSA staffers-a majority within the agency, he claims, and certainly a significant minority. Their grievances go back for years. They long for DTSA's days of greatest influence-under Reagan, when Bryen was director, and export controls were frozen strong by the Cold War. Their standards of security are high: Leitner even admitted "reservations" about the Reagan administration's policy, saying it was too lax toward China.
"These people have objected to every export-control decision the last three administrations have made," fumed William A. Reinsch, undersecretary of commerce for export administration. Commerce, as official advocate for America's exporters, has fought DTSA bitterly since the Reagan days. DTSA has historically retaliated with end runs up to sympathetic conservatives on Capitol Hill-much the way Leitner is doing now. In fact, former Reagan-Bush Commerce officials recalled Leitner in particular as "one of the most outspoken. . . . Leitner used to go up on the Hill and spill his guts."
Nor is civil strife within DTSA a novelty. While Leitner criticized Rudman's post-Cold War loosening of restrictions, Rudman referred to Leitner-whom he demoted-as "a zealot" and "professionally insane." Before Rudman's 1993 retirement, a 1992 Defense inspector general's report damned DTSA for mismanagement and low morale. Summed up David Silverberg, who covered DTSA at the time for Defense News, "This office was in deep shit, way back then."
"We had lost our reason for being," recalled Rudman: the Cold War.
Since then, said Davis, "DTSA and its management haven't changed, but the world's changed around them." They continued to operate under an old paradigm of export control: "Put a fence around the United States, and don't let something out." That approach kept bulky machine tools and mainframe computers out of the hands of a clearly defined adversary in Moscow. But "what does it mean to try to do technology control" in the 1990s, Davis asked, "when everything you need to produce biological weapons, you can legitimately buy ... out of a scientific catalogue?"
"Too many people in DTSA," said Hamre, "are still holding on to that old model. The goal isn't to process as many license applications as we can. The goal is to try to find out what is truly damaging to America's security." He said, "DTSA is spending 95 percent of its time looking at things that, I personally believe, in many ways, are irrelevant."
Hamre hopes the new agency, DTRA, will create the "intellectual infrastructure" for a new approach, much as the RAND Corp., the California-based think tank, laid the intellectual foundation for Air Force strategy at the dawn of the nuclear age. Only a composite agency, he argues, can achieve that goal.
The new DTRA would combine DTSA's export-control experts with two larger agencies. One, the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), has won a world-class reputation monitoring arms control treaties, in such places as the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The other, the Defense Special Weapons Agency (DSWA), is the direct organizational descendant of the Manhattan Project. DSWA studies not only the effects of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, but also new means of safely attacking their silos and sites of manufacture. DSWA also administers the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which helps former Soviet states dismantle their aging and unwanted nuclear arsenals.
These two agencies, Hamre and Davis argue, can offer DTSA a new wealth of knowledge-gained both in the laboratory and in the field-about the truly dangerous technologies. DTSA can then apply that knowledge to export controls. "If you don't bring DTSA into [DTRA]," said Hamre, "we would have to create those capabilities in the new agency anyway, because the new agency is going to be about controlling the spread of technologies."
What would this brave new paradigm look like? Instead of simply enforcing export-control rules, said Davis, "you put in place an information system that says, Here's a class of technologies where the 'flow' looks funny." A veteran of the second inspection team into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, Davis concluded that Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs bypassed old-style controls by purchasing individually innocuous items from diverse sources. Only an analysis of the overall "flow" of materials into the country, he argues, could detect such a buildup.
DTSA is "the piece of my agency I know the least about," Davis admits. And Hamre acknowledges, "We don't have our act together yet, because we're still thinking our way through it."
If they want to satisfy skeptics in Congress, they had better think fast.
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