Organised to fail

Organised to fail is Tennant's diagnosis that economic-security campaigns can underperform because authority, intelligence, implementation and assessment are divided across institutions without sufficient common objectives or decision rights. It is an analytical framework, not an official finding that the United States has no coordinating bodies or that every campaign has failed.

Existing architecture

The United States Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence is a formal national-security structure combining sanctions, financial intelligence, terrorist-finance and financial-crime functions within Treasury. Other authorities sit in the Departments of Commerce, State, Justice and elsewhere, with coordination through interagency processes. Any claim of absence must acknowledge these institutions and define the remaining gap.

Tennant's six-layer model separates political direction, intelligence, legal authority, instrument design, implementation and assessment. The model is useful because failure can occur at the interfaces. It is not an official organisational chart, and the layers do not always map to separate agencies.

Evidence of assessment gaps

The United States Government Accountability Office reported in 2019 that agencies assessed sanctions through several methods and that effectiveness depended on factors such as multilateral participation, target vulnerability and enforcement. This supports a conditional, not universal, account of performance.

GAO's 2025 review of Russia sanctions and export controls found that agencies had not fully established measurable objectives and targets for assessing selected measures. Recommendation status remained open through March 2026. This is direct evidence of a measurement gap in a defined campaign. It does not prove that no coordination occurred or that every measure failed.

Authority and coordination

The October 2022 advanced-computing rule illustrates distributed authority. Commerce used the Export Administration Regulations to control specified items, end uses and end users. Treasury could not create those item-based controls through an asset-freeze notice. Institutional specialisation is therefore necessary; fragmentation arises when objectives, data and assessment do not connect across the specialised authorities.

The relevant questions are practical. Who owns the campaign objective? Which agency can change the instrument? What information crosses boundaries? Which indicators trigger adjustment? Who assesses target adaptation and sender cost? A central body without these functions may not solve the problem, while a distributed system with clear decision rights can.

Assessment boundary

Aggregate figures require the same discipline. Assets may be blocked, immobilised, seized, transferred or estimated, each with a different legal status. Coalition size, designation count and announced value are inputs, not measures of strategic effect.

The framework's claim should therefore be tested campaign by campaign. Evidence of slow adjustment, contradictory guidance or missing metrics may support the diagnosis. The mere existence of several agencies does not.

Minimum campaign architecture

A workable campaign requires a named objective, an authorised lead, an instrument register, shared intelligence requirements and a scheduled assessment process. Those functions need not sit in one organisation, but their ownership must be explicit. Escalation paths should identify who can resolve conflicts between commercial, diplomatic, legal and security priorities.

The assessment process must also feed decisions. Reporting that records designations or blocked value without a threshold for adjustment cannot show whether the campaign is on course. A campaign architecture is credible when evidence can trigger reinforcement, redesign, suspension or termination.

See also

Economic security as national security | Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) | Assessment (EKC Phase 7) | Fused intelligence | Tool selection and sequencing

Sources

• United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, accessed 29 July 2026.
• United States Government Accountability Office, *Economic Sanctions: Agencies Assess Impacts on Targets, and Studies Suggest Several Factors Contribute to Sanctions' Effectiveness*, October 2019.
• United States Government Accountability Office, *Russia Sanctions and Export Controls: U.S. Agencies Should Establish Targets to Better Assess Effectiveness*, 2025.
• United States Department of Commerce, October 2022 advanced-computing and semiconductor controls, 13 October 2022.