Book Review: Kettl's System Under Stress on Homeland Security
This paper presents a critical review of Donald Kettl's System Under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics (2nd ed., 2007), which examines how the U.S. political system responds to the stresses of providing homeland security in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The review describes the book's structure, method, and central argument — that strong individual leadership is essential for effective disaster response and coordination within a complex federal bureaucracy. The reviewer evaluates the validity of Kettl's evidence, the exploratory nature of his thesis, and the book's strengths and limitations, including its failure to probe alternative explanations and deeper structural critiques of the American political system.
- Introduction: Context, scope, and purpose of Kettl's book
- Description and Overview: Book structure, method, and key statements on leadership
- Evaluation of Method and Thesis: Assessment of exploratory approach and emerging thesis
- Data, Validity, and Conclusions: Evidence selection, logical validity, and supported conclusions
- What Others Have Said: Mixed reviews noting limited new insight for experts
- Summary: Strengths and Weaknesses: What the book does and does not accomplish
- Overall Significance: Final judgment on the book's value and limitations
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What makes this paper effective
- The review follows a clear evaluative structure, moving systematically from description to analysis to judgment, which gives readers a well-organized understanding of both the book's content and its merits.
- The reviewer supports evaluative claims with direct quotations from Kettl, demonstrating close reading and allowing the evidence to speak for itself rather than relying on paraphrase alone.
- The critique section is balanced — acknowledging the book's accessible strengths while pointing to substantive gaps, such as the absence of alternative explanations and comparison with deeper scholarly critiques like Peter Dale Scott's work.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of the evaluative book review format: it distinguishes between description (what the book says) and evaluation (how well it says it), organized into discrete labeled subsections. This structure prevents the common error of summarizing a book without critically assessing it, making the review genuinely analytical rather than merely reportorial.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introduction that contextualizes the book and its author. A descriptive section covers the overview, method, book structure, and notable quotations. An evaluation section then assesses method, thesis, data validity, and whether conclusions are supported. The review concludes with a summary of strengths and weaknesses, brief engagement with other reviewers' opinions, and a final judgment on the book's overall significance. This mirrors a standard academic book review format appropriate for graduate-level coursework.
Introduction
This review covers Kettl's (2007) System Under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics, published by CQ Press in Washington, D.C. (151 pp.). The book is relevant because it addresses the need to assess the status of the Department of Homeland Security in light of the various stresses it encounters. It frames that discussion within the scope of 9/11 and the disaster of Hurricane Katrina by asking what happened, why the government apparently failed to protect its citizens, and what lessons have or have not been learned from these disasters.
The author states in his Preface that from 2002 to 2003 he worked "with the Century Foundation as executive director of its Project on Federalism and Homeland Security" (p. x). His background on homeland security issues is primarily academic, though the book's organizing metaphor is drawn from cardiology: just as a stress test tells how well the heart works, Kettl's purpose is to examine how well the nation's defenses are working. The 2007 edition is the second edition of the book, rewritten in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and is intended for students of American government, public policy, public administration, intergovernmental relations, and homeland security.
The historical context shaping the work is that of disaster — namely, the 9/11 terror attacks and the organizational failures of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to respond appropriately to Katrina. The scope of the work includes an assessment of the impact of 9/11 on the nation and the response of its leaders; system-wide breakdowns that allowed the attacks and what gaps were subsequently plugged within the intelligence community; the problems of federal bureaucracy that made coordination fail at Katrina; the political system's attempts to prevent disasters that can never be fully eliminated in terms of risk; the tension between security and civil liberties; and how the political system can respond to "such crushing strain" (p. ix). This scope is somewhat large for the scant 150 pages the text occupies; nonetheless, the author's approach is deliberately exploratory, and the aim is to raise questions more than to answer them definitively.
Description and Overview
One of the keys to understanding this work is the role that leadership plays in homeland security and in the coordination of the various programs and offices that must now collaborate under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. Kettl (2007) highlights, for instance, the role that U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen played in the disaster response in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Allen helped coordinate personnel at the local, state, and federal levels at a moment when other leaders were hopelessly failing to take coordinated action. It is this type of leadership that must be cultivated in order to establish effective homeland security. Without it, the bureaucratic nature of the federal government threatens to serve as an obstacle to the goal of security. Political leaders should be aware of that need and should facilitate, rather than frustrate, leadership development and the appropriate placement of command.
The author draws on popular sources such as CNN and the Boston Globe, as well as White House press releases, scholarly articles, white papers, RAND publications, reports from the U.S. General Accounting Office, the 9/11 Commission Report, Congressional documents, testimonies, transcripts of speeches, and investigative journalism by reporters such as Seymour Hersh. Because the nature of the work is exploratory, there is no substantial thesis stated at the outset; rather, the work drives toward a broader question at its conclusion based upon the evidence presented. That question is: how does the American political system respond to the stresses facing homeland security?
The book is structured around seven chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for examining the problems of homeland security by looking specifically at 9/11 and its ramifications. The second chapter examines failures in the system and what steps have been taken to address them. The third chapter looks at the problem of coordination within a federal bureaucracy. The fourth chapter takes up this same matter at the levels of state and local government. The fifth chapter explores the problem of trying to maximally protect against threats that can never truly be eliminated. The sixth chapter examines the policy problem of balancing the need for security with the need to protect civil liberties. The seventh chapter addresses the central question arising from the evidence collected — namely, how the U.S. political system can face the stress test.
In chapter 2, Kettl (2007) notes that Arlington County "responded so well" to the disaster of 9/11 "because of the leadership the county's emergency services officials had shown in the years leading up to the attacks" (p. 34). Later, in the book's exploration of federal bureaucracy, Kettl (2007) notes that FEMA failed at Katrina but succeeded in earlier years: "it did far better in dealing with a string of disasters in the 1990s, including major hurricanes and a California earthquake, but that was due far more to the agency's leadership, especially from its director, James Lee Witt" (p. 77). Kettl (2007) also observes that the "huge impact of the terrorist attacks created a demand for strong leadership" (p. 127), and, in his discussion of Katrina, that "increasingly complex problems and growing organizational complexity require even stronger individual leadership. These leaders can serve as bridge builders, to link organizations who share a piece of important, interconnected missions… Never before has leadership been as important" (p. 143). Each of these statements underscores the all-important issue of leadership in the face of the homeland security problem.
Evaluation of Method and Thesis
The author's method is efficient in that it draws from a wide variety of sources to develop a picture of what has happened in the realm of homeland security and the American political system since 9/11. It successfully combines popular and scholarly sources to explore a critical period in American history surrounding the overhaul of the nation's homeland security approach. The method is not explicitly described by the author, but his exploratory intentions are evident from the outset.
Because the work is exploratory in nature, it does not present a thesis at the outset but gradually works toward a central research question: how can the American political system address the stress it faces in its homeland security operations? The work explores the factors contributing to that stress and also examines possible ways of addressing it — chiefly through the efforts of strong individual leaders. This conclusion is developed throughout the work, as the author repeatedly points to the role that strong leadership must play in homeland security. The work does not set out to prove a point so much as to arrive at one made clear by the accumulation of evidence, which is analyzed in the final chapter.
References
Kettl, D. F. (2007). System under stress: Homeland security and American politics. CQ Press.
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