By Abigail Greene '13

The military and international policy work currently so relevant to the United States on several fronts must be dominated by personality and interagency collaboration, National Security Council Director for Defense Policy Barry Pavel told the audience of students, faculty, and community members gathered in Princeton's Dodds Auditorium on Monday, Mar. 21.

“Boundaries matter, but personalities matter more,” Pavel said. “You want to structure your organizational boundaries in a way that maximizes your advantages and minimizes your disadvantages, and so you have to work across the seam.”

Such work, he went on to say, will require the sorts of interagency ventures that he called “the wave of the future,” specifically citing the Obama administration’s recent response to the crisis in Haiti and its adaptive approach to missile policy as perfect examples of such endeavors.

He noted that within the hour after the earthquake in Haiti, the United Nations Security Council had called in its relevant experts and the state department was holding the first of its interagency conferences that would come to occur two to three times each day for approximately thirty days.

“Each understood that managing the response to such disasters was a fight against the clock,” he said.

Pavel noted that even in the situation in Haiti, personalities and relationships again came to affect international policy.

“General Keane happened to have gone to school with the U.N. commander on the ground and ended up having an excellent working relationship with him. You cannot underestimate how helpful that was,” he said.

Pavel noted the “aggressive interagency dialogue” that maximized the success of the response to the earthquake, and went on to highlight the manifestations of this dialogue.

“Members of my staff started each day at 3 a.m. to prepare for the 4 a.m. update from the Pentagon, and worked late into the night,” he said. “And this is not to say that the system works perfectly just because we had a lot of meetings…but we did have a lot of people working at a very high tempo.”

“In many ways this crisis response mode is the N.S.C. in its truest form,” he added.

Pavel noted that the development of President Obama’s new missile policy was also very much one driven by interagency work and communication, remarking at what he called the “important outcome” that the advisors working on the policy reached a unanimous agreement as to how to proceed.

“Iran’s short- to medium-range missile capabilities are large and they’re growing quickly,” he said, “And the threat to our European allies was something we decided we couldn’t ignore.”

He responded one-by-one to the criticisms of President Obama’s missile approach that was the result of six months of missile policy discussion, saying that his goal was not to be defensive, but rather to acknowledge that in any such endeavor, differences of opinion will inevitably surface.

Pavel called the program “more comprehensive,” and said that it adds “another layer of defense” to the nations involved. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the program carries a certain level of risk.

“Sometimes,” he said, “You’re able to mitigate the risk, or sometimes you decide to consciously proceed regardless of the risks.”

And these are the times—frequent as they are in the negotiation of military strategy and international policy—when interagency activity will become of paramount importance, Pavel said.

In particular situations, he said, “I’ll leave it to scholars to determine what role those organizations played, but I do think these types of interagency structures will be the wave of the future.”

He went on to say that this same interagency cooperation is critical to the ability of the White House to function smoothly.

“I have had the good fortune to have worked at the NSC spanning two administrations,” he said. “I found the transition team to be extremely professional. It was really a pleasure to see those two teams interact and to see how seriously the transition was handled by both parties.”

Pavel added that President Obama continues to recognize this need for communication in his own practices, seeking to understand all of his advisors’ varying opinions on each issue.

“He asks very detailed questions and as a general rule he wants options,” said Pavel. “And even with those options, he will often take discussions farther than the options that have been provided to him.”

But at the same time, Pavel recognized that such cooperation is not always easy or even encouraged. In response to a question regarding tension in the White House, he characterized the relationships within the current administration as “collegial,” but noted that this is not always the case.

“I’ve never seen the kind of hackles up that I’ve seen in previous administrations,” he said. “I think the best way to get through some of those types of scenarios is to get to the root of the issue…and sometimes one of the parties doesn’t want you to do that.”

Pavel maintained that delays such as that associated with nuclear weapons policies are not due to political posturing, but rather to discussion, negotiation, and attention to detail.

“The stories you hear about tension and arguments are, as you would expect, not entirely true,” he said. “There have been lots of debates…there have been a lot of great discussions. These are complex issues.”

But despite the complexity of these issues and the difficulty of putting interagency work into practice, he expressed faith in the Obama administration and hope for the future of policy-making.

“The issues we are dealing with are complex and complicated in an increasingly interconnected world,” he acknowledged. “I’m not here to tell you that everything will be wine and roses forever, but it’s been very easy to work in this environment so far.”