The Old and the New

Government's constancy is a virtue, but also a handicap in the face of change.

It's summertime and the living is easy, as the lyricist wrote. And so somewhere in the firmament of government, one hopes, are agencies whose leaders and employees arrive at the office every day confident that they can meet the challenges of the future with stress-free work of a routine nature.

But if such entities exist, they don't spring easily to mind. Indeed, every important agency of government seems to face growing challenges-from war and danger abroad and at home to demographic and economic change-all making new demands on government resources.

Nowhere, of course, is the pressure greater than at the Defense Department. War in Iraq and Afghanistan has strained every fiber of that great institution, and it also has exposed flaws and gaps in the department's planning for meeting staffing and equipment needs. In this issue, we cover the Air Force's continuing effort to adjust to the post-Cold War environment-as we explored the Navy's challenges in our July 15 issue and will examine the Army's even greater difficulties later this summer.

In one of the greatest photographs of these wars, writes Katherine McIntire Peters, Air Force combat controllers, like members of some ancient cavalry, "wear the tribal garb of their Afghan allies and sit astride horses with wooden saddles." They are using the latest technology-laser goggles, satellite navigation systems-to call in strikes from decades-old B-52 bombers on multiple targets within 600 yards of friendly forces.

This marriage of the old and the new was brilliant. It also pointed to the effectiveness of air power in the early stages of conventional war. But the Air Force's long-term procurement plans do not yet seem geared to the new face of war, Peters writes, and the incoming Air Force chief of staff talks of the need for a new "mission roadmap."

Beth Dickey writes in this issue about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, now at the center of debate about the future of America's coastal counties, which house more than half the nation's population on just 17 percent of its land. Important issues of environmental and economic well-being are at stake in these counties and the ocean waters offshore, and NOAA is ill-equipped to deal with them, buried as it is in the depths of the Commerce Department. Many think that NOAA should get its own statutory charter as ocean issues become more pressing.

Meanwhile, the awkward marriage that created the Homeland Security Department has long been on the rocks. Now, after counseling at the hands of Secretary Michael Chertoff, a whole new round of reorganization faces leaders of the 22 agencies that gathered underneath the departmental tent.

People in these departments may be forgiven if they don't bound happily to work every day, but just think about Bradley Belt, whose Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation all of a sudden faces a funding deficit of $23 billion and growing.

One might think it all cries out for a little "change management," the topic of a Shane Harris feature. Some agencies' successful formula for managing change, he writes, has been: Resist it. Constancy, after all, is a hallmark of government. But for most, the answer, however difficult, is the opposite: Embrace it.