Homeland Security

What exactly does that mean?

By Roy D. Follendore III

December 2, 2002

Those wise politicians we Americans have elected have decided to replace many different organizations by combining them into one huge organization. The advantage in doing this is supposed to be greater efficiency and faster response to internal issues of national security. Instead of many bureaucracies there will now be one larger and far more powerful one. This is expected to streamline the interactivity of the various departments and vanquish the potential of internal cross organizational error.

It is quite interesting to note that the leaders who have chosen this particular path also are the same ones who do not believe in the scientific concept of natural evolution. Had they a better understanding of the most important implications of evolution, they would have recognized that it is diversity and not consistency that is in the long term sustainable. Biological organisms represent the evolution of organizations. One reason is that working through large organizations have different problems than those found with working through collective organizations.

As a whole it is not easy to sustain the level of productivity within a large massive organization, particularly those where stochastic environments and influences are involved. Large organizations require more upkeep because they are not as efficient. Management cliques that can control all aspects and goals form easily and are far more difficult to control or eliminate within large organizations. They are also far more costly to operate because they are more easily biased toward fewer issues. They are therefore more capable of failing completely. They are less flexible and their divisions of labor tend to be serial rather than parallel so they do not effectively compete for problems. This means that their integrity exists in one basket. They can not legitimately provide checks and balances over a duration. Because of the hierarchical channeling of reports, people sitting at the top of a large organizational pyramid become acutely unaware just how corrupt and unstable their organizations have become. Management in large organizations becomes authoritarian and centralized where rules introduce rigidity because it is easier for the managers to coordinate specific goals.

When we begin to analyze the history of the USSR, we can can see why large ungainly organizations were so ineffective at some things and so overly effective at others. When we begin to look at the extinctions of the dinosaurs we can see how overly large organisms that attempt to respond to threats without diversity catastrophically fail. Americans disregard the fact that the justification for uniting the diversified democratic offices of Germany under the single organization authority having a single presidential agenda was the burning of the Reichstag.

There are many many things that can be expected to go wrong with the experiment of the Office of Homeland Security. Time will tell if these problems jeopardize the objectives for which it is named. We had better rethink what we are doing because we can easily be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Authors Analysis: As this gigantic organization begins to gain momentum, Americans can expect Homeland Security to start pumping out the publicity spin. Television shows like "Cops" and "10 Most Wanted" as well as Hollywood will pbe catered to get out the message that "You are now safer!." A recent poll stated that only 4 out of 10 Americans believe this will be true. Most people simply do not trust that Office of Homeland Security will do much to protect any of us. But Police Departments are a source of great political pull, particularly in the large cities and the Office of Homeland Security promises them the opportunity to get direct access to the economic support of the Federal Government. Federal war on drug policies already gave local police the laws which provided the seizure, confiscation and sell of personal property as a means to increase their budgets. A part of every major police force has a paramilitary orientation. The big question comes when the real turf battles begin. Homeland Security implies much more than terrorism. Future Federal Homeland Security Laws can be expected to take over more and more of the responsibility for security states. Under centralized national authority, they can be expected to continue to become more pervasive and restrictive. As a consequence, the homeland boys begin to take more control over local police affairs, as the inevitably will, the local animosity of those interested in their own community security will become more and more evident. The Office of Homeland Security is a continuation of the old landslide toward centralized government. Americans have not been ambivalent about the need for personal space. States have always been managed a little differently because the local populations are made up of populations that are a little different. This level of chaos has actually worked for us because it allows the dissenting minority population to move where there is a better fit for them. The uniformity that far greater centralized authority brings will assure a social pressure cooker. Dissatisfaction would then slowly begin to increase with the risks to national security that have nothing to do with terrorism. If this occurs there is no amount of spin that can solve our problems.

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