Vol. 16 No. 10 (October, 2006) pp.839-840

 

COPS, SOLDIERS, AND DIPLOMATS:  EXPLAINING AGENCY BEHAVIOR IN THE WAR ON DRUGS, by Tony Payan.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.  220pp.  Cloth $65.00.  ISBN: 0-7391-1221-X. Paper (2007). $27.95.  ISBN: 0-7391-2064-6.

 

Reviewed by Philip Kronebusch, Department of Political Science, St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict.  Pkronebusch [at] csbsju.edu.

 

The government agency reorganization that Congress and the President established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has heightened the relevance of studies that examine how organizations change and resist change.  While Tony Payan’s book makes a passing reference to 9/11, its focus is on the response of federal agencies to the “War on Drugs” of the 1980s and ’90s.  Using theories of organizational behavior, Payan examines the responses of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Customs (the “cops” referred to in the title), the military (the “soldiers”), and the Department of State (the “diplomats”).  As such, the foreign affairs dimension of the War on Drugs is the subject of the analysis.  State and local law enforcement, as well as court decisions, are not part of this study.

 

Payan’s aim is to test two models of organizational behavior.  The first is “bureaucratic politics,” which posits that “governmental organizations desire to increase both their budgets and their autonomy to the maximum extent possible” (p.173).  The second model Payan intends to test is “organizational culture,” which he defines as “the mission of an organization, the hierarchy of the tasks stemming from that mission, the norms and practices of the organization, and the basic attitudes and assumptions of its members” (p.37).  If culture has “any effects on the response of an organization toward external stimuli,” then “culture matters” (p.31).

 

The bulk of the book consists of Payan’s analyses of several governmental organizations.  Often relying on the author’s own interviews with high-level agency officials, these studies provide richly detailed accounts of organizational responses to the demands of the drug war.

 

In short, different institutions responded differently.  While the DEA was not originally intended to have a role in international drug interdiction, during the early 1990s, the DEA’s workforce abroad reached 10%.  In contrast to the DEA’s emphasis on the use of investigators and informants to gather intelligence, Customs spent its additional resources on sophisticated surveillance technologies. 

 

According to Payan, the U.S. military resisted the mandate to support the drug war.  The Pentagon kept anti-drug initiatives weak and also sought to channel anti-drug money to fund programs that were ill-suited to that purpose.  Payan provides detail on the Air Force’s Over-the-Horizon Backscatter Radar Program, which was paid for by the counter-narcotics budget even though this radar could not detect the small, low-flying aircraft that were [*840] used by narcotics traffickers.  This example shows that when a mission that the organization finds discordant is imposed, the organization “will use those resources in such a way as to reinforce what the organization is already doing” (p.128).

 

The Department of State was resistant to the demands of the drug war.  Foreign Service Officers, especially those stationed in Latin American countries, viewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and other countries as already so complex that an emphasis on drug control efforts would be disruptive.  However, the State department did play a significant role in order to defend its turf.  That is, the State Department maintained tight control over U.S. anti-narcotics efforts in Latin America because not to do so would have meant a major loss of control over U.S. foreign policy.  In 1986, Congress required the State Department to “decertify” countries not cooperating with the U.S. anti-narcotics efforts.  However, “the overwhelming majority of decertified countries were nations with whom the United States has no diplomatic relations anyway. . . .  Iran, for example, in spite of a near-zero tolerance for drug production and traffic, has been decertified continuously” (pp.154-155).

 

In the conclusion, Payan reconsiders the “bureaucratic politics” and “organizational culture” models of organizational behavior and concludes that both models are necessary to understand organizational responses to the drug war.  Organizations do seek to expand their budgets and their autonomy, as the bureaucratic politics model posits, but their pursuit of greater resources “is shaped and colored by the pre-established cultural preferences of the organization,” as the “organizational model” would predict (p.187).

 

While Payan says, in the preface, that it is not the purpose of the book to show that the drug war is a failed policy, in the end he provides an excellent assessment of why the billions of dollars that have been spent have yielded so little success.  Scholars of organizational behavior already know this lesson, but the author’s use of organizational theory and personal interviews to study the drug war provides a new level of detail that shows why policy makers often do not see the results that they intend.  The book as a whole, as well as individual chapters, would serve well in undergraduate and graduate courses on organizational theory and public policy. 

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Philip Kronebusch.