Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
3/28/2014
The Congressionally appointed panel on National Nuclear Security Administration governance hasn’t come up with any recommendations yet, but the co-chairmen of the committee made it clear this week at a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing that the current governance structure for the agency is not working. The panel’s co-chairmen, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine and former Strategic Command chief Adm. Richard Mies, offered a sometimes-scathing assessment of the semi-autonomous NNSA as they provided an interim report to Congress on their work, with Augustine suggesting that the “NNSA experiment … has failed” and Mies noting that the NNSA governance model is “fundamentally flawed.” Augustine added: NNSA “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and customers in DoD that it can deliver weapons and critical nuclear facilities on schedule and on budget. Simply stated, there is no plan for success with available resources. NNSA is on a trajectory toward crisis unless strong leadership arrests the current course and reorients its governance to better focus on mission priorities and deliverables.”
For now, the health of the nuclear deterrent remains strong, Mies said, but that may not always remain true. “I certainly think at the present time the glass is half-full,” he said. “But I think as we look to the longer term in the future, if dramatic action is not taken, then the concern is more a half-empty view.” Augustine emphasized that now is no time for the nuclear deterrent to be ignored. “We along with our allies are in a complex nuclear age with several nuclear powers modernizing their arsenals, new nuclear technologies emerging, and potential new actors as well as regional challenges raising significant concerns,” he said. “This would be a dangerous time to stumble.”
The panel is expected to submit its final report later this summer. “The current DOE-NNSA structure has not established the effective operational system that Congress intended,” Augustine said. “This needs to be fixed as a matter of priority, and these fixes will not be simple or quick.”
Organizational Change on Tap, But How?
Augustine said the panel is still trying to determine what the appropriate governance structure is for the agency. A potential move to the Department of Defense has been suggested, as has a shift to a fully autonomous agency or a move back within the Department of Energy. “Under the current structure, at least as it’s being carried out, it’s clear that it doesn’t work and it’s probably going to be very difficult to fix,” he said, adding: “The list of options is not great.”
Organizational change also is unlikely to completely fix the agency’s problems, Augustine noted. “The changes we will recommend undoubtedly will be difficult to implement regardless of where the enterprise is located within the government’s structure, since the fundamental problems are cultural more than organizational,” he said. “Organizational change, while not unimportant, is only a small portion—the easy portion—of the revisions that must be made. Previous efforts to reform and previous studies calling for action have largely failed due to lack of leadership follow-through, a lack of accountability for enacting change, and, we might add, the lack of effective, sustained top-level demand for change from the national leadership.”
Rep. Rogers to Panel: ‘Be Bold’
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, emphasized that the panel was seeking significant change. “When your advisory panel was established, the specific report request was that, quote, ‘Conferees believe changes at the margins are not a solution,’ close quote,” Rogers said. “And I know you all realize that, so be bold.”
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who was influential in creating the NNSA in the late 1990s, cautioned against a move back to the structure before the agency was created, when NNSA was a part of DOE. At the time, he said NNSA was created as a semi-autonomous agency as a way to protect it from parts of DOE that were impeding its mission back then. “I don’t want to go backwards to those days either, because it was a, quote, ‘dysfunctional’ bureaucracy incapable of reforming itself,” Thornberry said. “I’m not sure it’s much better, but I don’t want to go back and be worse.” He hinted that more autonomy for the agency might not actually be better. “Even if you have an autonomous agency, if you don’t have attention from the president, from the secretary of defense, I don’t know, would it matter? How do you legislate cultural or leadership focus?”
Panel Outlines ‘Systemic Disorders’
Mies said the panel has identified five “systemic disorders” that can be traced back to national complacency about the nation’s nuclear deterrent. Primary among the disorders is a loss of sustained national leadership focus that has allowed NNSA and the nuclear security enterprise to “muddle through.” He said: “This lack of attention has resulted in public confusion, congressional distrust and a serious erosion of advocacy, expertise and proficiency in a sustainment of these capabilities.”
A “fundamentally flawed” NNSA governance model has also adversely impacted the nuclear deterrent, Mies said. “NNSA has not established effective leadership, policy, culture or integrated decision-making,” he said. “Indeed, the design and implementation of NNSA governance has led to numerous redundancies, confused authorities and weakened accountability.” He also said NNSA and DOE policy-making and oversight organizations “reflect few of the characteristics of successful organizations” and lack clearly defined and roles, responsibilities and authorities. “Too many people can stop mission-essential work for a host of reasons, and those who are responsible for getting the work done often find their decisions ignored or overturned,” he said. “Chains of command are not well-defined and resources are micromanaged.”
The relationship between NNSA headquarters and the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories has also eroded over the past two decades to an “arms-length, customer-to-con-tractor adversarial relationship.” Mies said the deterioration of that relationship, which was also described in a 2012 National Academy of Sciences study, has resulted in a loss of the benefits of the federally funded research and development center model. “The trust factor essential to this model … results from unclear accountability for risk, a fee structure and contract approach that invites detailed, transactional, compliance-based oversight rather than a more strategic approach with performance-based standards,” Mies said.
Mies also said a more strategic approach was needed to strengthen the relationship between the NNSA and its biggest customer, the Department of Defense. “There is no affordable, executable, joint DOD/DOE vision plan or program for the future of nuclear weapons capabilities. This is at once a cultural and communications divide,” Mies said. “But there’s also a fundamental lack of mechanisms to ensure that requisite collaboration and consensus to address core mission requirements.”