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U.S. troops have managed to win over Iraqi leaders through “smart power.” Photo: E. Poole.

Think Tank

CSIS: From Soft Power to Smart Power

Hard power is traditional military might. Soft power is the policy of attraction and persuasion. Now, a major Washington-based think tank brings us “smart power”—what it calls the effective integration of hard power and soft to further our national goals.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) inaugurated its Smart Power Project in 2006. Its senior, bipartisan Smart Power Commission, made up of 20 national leaders from business, government, diplomacy, law, the military, Congress, and nongovernmental organizations, issued a report on November 6, 2007, to “present a new vision for American leadership and specific recommendations on how to begin to implement a Smart Power approach to foreign policy.”

Integrating soft and hard power can produce far greater results than either alone. Photo: E. Poole.

The release is one year to the day prior to the 2008 presidential election.

The privately funded Smart Power Project says it “aims to energize a bipartisan, national dialogue about America’s role in the world, and to provide policymakers—including the next president of the United States—with a strategic vision and concrete recommendations for how to integrate our soft and hard power tools into Smart Power to address current and future challenges and opportunities.”

CSIS scholars are producing analysis for the benefit of the commissioners. For a report on one of those products, see our “Innovation” section on page 5. To visit the Smart Power Project, click on www.csissmartpower.org.

Outsourcing Homeland Security Analysis

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) outsources vital research and analysis to help decisionmakers stay on the cutting edge of problem-solving. The DHS under secretary for science and technology issues an annual contract to a designated nonprofit group, the Homeland Security Institute, to provide what the group calls “practical and useful results” through “multi-disciplinary teams that support decision makers with actionable results to help them improve their effectiveness and efficiency.”

Based in northern Virginia, the Homeland Security Institute is what is known as a federally funded research and development center, or FFRDC, chartered by Congress to provide an independent analytical base isolated from politics and from commercial considerations.

FFRDCs are a form of private contractor that the United States has used for decades. Better-known FFRDCs include the Center for Naval Analyses, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Universities, nonprofit corporations, and for-profit companies administer the FFRDCs on contract.

When Congress chartered the Homeland Security Institute in 2004, it provided for special oversight of the group, including a statutory requirement of submitting an annual activity report to Congress. According to the Institute, “HSI is the only FFRDC focused solely on supporting the homeland security mission and was envisioned by Congress to serve as a long-term strategic partner with DHS.”

HSI takes a three- to five-year look ahead, providing strategic, operational, and tactical risk analysis; operations analysis, threat analysis, systems analysis, information-sharing analysis, policy and planning analysis, program analysis, and science and technology assessments; and training, education, and professional development of the homeland security workforce.

The public can receive information from HSI through the organization’s regular newsletter, analytical reports, and its scholarly Journal of Homeland Security. For more, see HSI’s Web site at www.homelandsecurity.org.

Pruning the Pork from Homeland Security

A new Heritage Foundation paper warns that the Department of Homeland Security risks turning its state and local grant programs into “entitlement” and pork-barrel projects.

In a new Backgrounder titled “After the 9/11 Act: Homeland Security Grants Still Moving in the Wrong Direction,” Matt A. Mayer and James J. Carafano raise alarms about how federal DHS grants are not accomplishing their intended mission. “State and local needs vary across the board. They need to be identified and integrated into a national standards plan that fulfills articulated goals. However, this plan must be a dynamic list compiled from an established baseline of risks,” they write. “The goal is to create an adaptive, flexible system to fit homeland security needs at all jurisdictional levels.

“Congress and the DHS can take several actions to meet this goal. Specifically, they should:

• Conduct a national capabilities assessment. Evaluating capabilities is the starting point for understanding U.S. strengths and weaknesses. Once the DHS executes this task, it will be in a better position to justify future allocations of homeland security grants and provide the government with a sense of what still needs to be done.
• Eliminate minimum and maximum grant requirements. Placing caps on homeland security grants distorts the purpose of these grants and hinders state and local efforts to address their highest-priority needs. Congress should revisit the original language concerning homeland security grants in the Patriot Act and replace the minimum requirements with a comprehensive rubric based solely on risk and an updated TCL (Target Capabilities List), eliminating the arbitrary 55 percent maximum cap as well.
• Refocus grant programs on core objectives. Congress needs to end its addiction to proliferating grants. Both Congress and the DHS need to restore the program’s federalist functions. The DHS needs to focus on truly national concerns in a way that lessens the appeal of wasteful pork-barrel projects, and Congress needs to give states enough latitude to access needed resources quickly and efficiently.”

Homeland Security Graduate Studies

Looking for a homeland security-related graduate program? The Rochester Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, offers a Master of Science in Professional Studies. Courses include cyber security, bacteriological and viral weapons threat and defense, network design and performance, the psychology of terrorism, cultural intelligence, and counterterrorism. The courses are offered in Washington, D.C. For details, visit www.c4ads.org.

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From the November/December 2007 issue of Serviam.