The military profession organizes men so as to over-come their inherent fears and failings.
Samuel Huntington12
In 1947, Congress passed the most important secu-rity legislation since the Root Reforms, the National Security Act, setting up the basic contours of all sub-sequent security legislation.13 Its goal was to solve two major problems. First, with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Act meant specifically to pre-vent another Pearl Harbor. The solution to the second problem, interservice bickering, was the creation of a Secretary of Defense in the chain of command over the services. When the initial law provided a secretary too feeble to exercise real power, Congress strength-ened the position in a series of amendments in 1949 and 1950. The trend throughout the post-war era saw ever greater involvement of civilians in military policy and in areas once thought of as strictly concerning the profession of arms. One example was the Uniform Code of Military Justice passed by Congress in 1950, that took power away from military commanders and instituted a civilian “Court of Military Appeals” over the courts martial system. The services had only them-selves to blame. The Army, Navy and Air Force could not agree on roles and missions or allocation of the defense budget. The interservice fights became more public, more pronounced, and more vicious as each branch used members of Congress and the press to help fight their turf battles. The early post-war period set the tone for strong civilian leadership and tough service fights.14
After 1947, the next major restructuring came in 1986 with the Goldwater-Nichols Department of De-fense Restructuring Act that addressed sacred service interests—personnel and procurement.15 Services that had worked well together in fighting a world war with relatively unlimited resources proved to be poor teammates in a resource-constrained environment.
The 1986 Act aimed to fix the interservice tensions stemming from defeat in the Vietnam War, the failed Iranian hostage rescue of 1980, and the successful, but awkwardly executed, invasion of Grenada in 1983.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act took power away from the services and gave it to regional commanders who no longer had to plead their case to the Army, Navy, and Air Force chiefs. It also forced the services to start a process of shared procurement, especially for cut-ting edge technology. Additionally, Congress created an all-services staff composed of officers destined one day for flag rank. Then Congress forced the services to create a new education system to prepare officers to work together as a “joint staff.” Finally, Congress gave the Chairman explicit remit to recommend changes in roles and mission for the services, particularly in re-gards to new technology.
The third and final major security legislation in the post-war era occurred in 2002 with the Homeland Security Act. In response to the al-Qaeda terrorist at-tacks in 2001, the President and Congress created the DHS. Congress clearly articulated its broad mission,
“Prevent terrorist attacks within the United States.”16 The same reforming drive that created the 1947 Na-tional Defense Act to prevent another Pearl Harbor animated the political process after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pen-tagon in Washington, DC. Government, and lots of
it, was the best way to secure the nation from future terrorist attacks. DHS had its start in an era of crisis that prevented rational thought about the best way to accomplish its assignment.
The enormous DHS mission expanded after Hur-ricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. In addition to preventing terrorist attacks, it would also lead the nation’s response to natural disasters. Yet DHS has no military or paramilitary arm capable of accomplishing the missions it was assigned. Despite several reorganizations, the initial problems of the organization have gone unresolved. Although a thor-ough review of the first 10 years might provide some valuable insights, DHS is the only agency in this study that has no official historian assigned to it. Nonethe-less, because of its gargantuan size and scope, all other agencies will have to find a way to deal with it over the next decade.
Organizations and resources dedicated to security have shown steady growth, particularly after 1945.
The three biggest changes since 1945 (the 1947 Nation-al Security Act, 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, and the 2002 Homeland Security Act) have come as a result of attack or defeat, and each act expanded the concept of security. The word “security” has proved remarkably elastic, encompassing threats that a previous genera-tion would have seen as problems outside the remit of security organizations. The security industry shows no sign of slowing.
All professionals look to expand their organiza-tions, and the security specialists have been remark-ably successful since 2001. The professionalization of security is in full swing. Budding security specialists can now receive a master’s and doctorate degrees in homeland security in the same way that the
post-1945 generation developed security studies programs to counter the Soviet nuclear threat. San Diego State University (San Diego, CA) and the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs (Colorado Springs, CO), among others, offer doctorate degrees in homeland se-curity along with a host of online schools. Should the security studies programs at prestigious universities like Stanford (Stanford, CA) and Johns Hopkins (Balti-more, MD) think of these programs dismissively, they should remember that established fields like history and political science initially looked at their programs as unworthy disciplines in the 1940s and 1950s.