monitoring

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DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
While the individual members of the solution provider team may have real or perceived biases
or conflicts of interest, the overall solution provider team will have a more balanced
perspective, and any recommendation from them must pass through the independent filter of
the White Team.
4.6.2. Implementing the White Team
Two factors are required for implementing the White Team: 1) the identification of a cadre of
analysts who see a strong opportunity for a valued career experience, if not profession; and 2)
the establishment of an institutional mechanism that can ensure the team’s access and impact
across the interagency.
Regarding the first factor, the Task Force discovered that the experienced systems analysis
workforce of the Cold War has largely disappeared, just as it has in other areas related to
nuclear weapons. Moreover, although there have been significant successes in
nonproliferation and counterproliferation analysis, these approaches have tended to focus on
problems bounded by treaties and agreements, or by specific actors of interest. They do not
easily scale to meet emerging challenges across the globe. The Task Force has attempted to
portray how much more complex the environment is today and into the foreseeable future. As
a result, new approaches and new tools are called for. The leading agencies therefore should
understand that part of their charters should be the re‐growth of knowledgeable professionals,
especially systems analysts, to support threat assessment, trade‐off studies and experiments,
and investment prioritization.
The second factor for a successful White Team is the institutional home and support that it will
require in order to maintain both investment and operational functions throughout the
interagency. The Task Force debated a number of mechanisms:
• Establishing a “czar”
• Appointing an executive agent
• Instituting a “holding company” model, similar to the On‐Site Inspection Agency
• Assigning a mission manager (whose role is discussed in the next chapter)
• Identifying a coalition of the willing, coordinated through an Interagency Coordinating
Committee
• Utilizing the “Ungroup” model, which worked so effectively as an ad hoc, high level
interagency group through the negotiation and implementation of the original START
treaty and other arms control agreements.
Each option has its pros and cons within the context of the monitoring and verification
problem, and none seemed well suited or sufficiently innovative to address the problem as the
Task Force sees it; something more unique would be needed, at least initially, in order to
protect the White Team while it establishes itself. The Task Force modeled its idea after the
Phase One Engineering Team (POET), which was established within a couple of years after the
DSB TASK FORCE REPORT Chapter 4: Address the Problem | 49
Nuclear Treaty Monitoring Verification Technologies
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