Joining the national security dots

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Joining the national security dots

CARL UNGERER December 15, 2009

The elevation of national security issues across many aspects of government policy, and the growth of public sector agencies has made the national security agenda more complicated and complex. The creation of the National Security Adviser's position in 2008, situated in the Prime Minister's department, was designed specifically to bring greater co-ordination to the national security task and to build a more "cohesive culture" across the policy community. But, as the number of moving parts continues to grow, finding common ground between them has become increasingly difficult.

Such complexity is evident in the number of current policy reviews and commissions of inquiry into various aspects of the national security agenda. In addition to the December 2008 National Security Statement to Parliament, the Government has initiated three major White Paper processes (Defence, Counter-Terrorism and Energy Security), conducted multiple policy reviews (homeland and border security, policing and intelligence, cyber-security and bio-security) and released several other policy framework documents (counter-radicalisation, science and innovation, energy security and legal reforms).

Each of these documents is meant to speak to a particular aspect of the national security agenda or to solve a particular puzzle. And each is designed to be subordinate to the general principles laid out in the National Security Statement. But there are still several tensions between the various strands of the overall policy framework.

The assertion made by security analysts and policymakers — that there is no longer a sensible distinction to be made between internal and external security and between domestic and foreign policy — is not matched by the current processes of government. The intelligence community is a case in point. As the principal source of advice to government on new and emerging security risks, the six agencies of the Australian Intelligence Community remain separated by some hard barriers. Overseas and domestic collection is mandated to different agencies. Strict legislative and regulatory controls ensure that such barriers are not crossed.

A second major debate concerns the connection between the functions of intelligence and policing agencies. In Australia, the lack of formality in exchanges between domestic security intelligence and the police was identified by the 2007 Street Review as a major impediment to national security after the unsuccessful prosecution of a local terrorism suspect.

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A third tension concerns the balance and emphasis between military and non-military instruments of national security policy. A notable gap in the current schedule of government white papers is the foreign affairs and trade portfolio. The proposed Foreign Policy Statement to Parliament has not yet materialised. And it has been more than four years, and a change of government, since the last white paper on Australia's overseas aid program was written. Given the centrality of diplomacy and development to national security, new policy statements in both areas are needed.

Having rejected the US model of a Department of Homeland Security, in which most bureaucratic elements of the national security community would be brought together under one roof, the creation of the National Security Adviser's position was meant to be the connective tissue that joined the community together and provided leadership. But a more integrated national security policy will require greater cohesion among the various strands of activity than one position can manage.

The contemporary problem for government is how to assess, prevent, mitigate and respond to the new security environment with key instruments of national security policy distributed across multiple agencies and jurisdictions. The problem here is that, while the threat environment is networked and multi-faceted, government operates with a structure that is still compartmentalised and based on a division of labour designed to respond to the relatively predictable patterns of the Cold War, but is consistently wrong-footed by the new risk environment.

So what would an integrated national security strategy look like? It would first need to acknowledge that the national security agenda is not fixed but one that varies over time. Risks that are interconnected such as cyber security and terrorism can have cascading consequences, often rendering a comprehensive understanding of the scale of a crisis beyond the competency of a single agency. Such events have been described as "outside the box", "too fast" and "too strange".

Mechanisms must therefore be found for identifying and incorporating new and emerging risks into national security planning without compromising the existing security structures. Horizon scanning or strategic forecasting plays an increasingly important role in the planning assumptions of key allies such as Canada and Britain, but remains an under-resourced and therefore under-valued element of the Australian national security effort. The immediate introduction of a dedicated and well-funded horizon-scanning capability at the heart of the national security establishment should be a top priority for government.

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Second, a fully integrated national security strategy would have the agility to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of risks on an all-hazards basis and to allocate funds to those priorities in a timely and effective manner. Although work towards a single national security budget has started, such efforts will only be useful if they can move funding between and within agencies in response to changes in the security environment. But such a change is not being contemplated. It would require a fundamental reorganisation of government budgetary processes, to the extent that individual agencies and ministers would lose the ability to decide how and when portfolio budgets were spent.

Finally, a national security strategy should be built around a single conceptual framework. This is important for ensuring a commonality of effort and clear policy direction.

The concept that is best suited to the current environment is "networked security". A network is a complex system of individual elements. A network can be formally constituted or created online as a virtual community. It can be formed, funded and disbanded as needs arise. The network model acknowledges that current national security threats are interconnected and unlikely to be solved through the actions of one agency, one policy decision or one country acting alone.

A networked strategy would involve building inter- and intra-governmental teams around a set of identified security risks and would incorporate advice from the private sector and the wider community. Internationally, it would privilege "like-minded" coalitions of countries to address specific security problems. In practice, it would bring national security priorities and funding into closer alignment by addressing issues from a more holistic, whole-of-government perspective.

Dr Carl Ungerer is the director of the national security project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

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