HOW TO DO IT? A DIFFERENT WAY OF ORGANIZING THE GOVERNMENT
As presently configured, the national security institutions of the U.S. government
are still the institutions constructed to win the Cold War. The United States
confronts a very different world today. Instead of facing a few very dangerous
adversaries, the United States confronts a number of less visible challenges that
surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states and call for quick, imaginative,
and agile responses.
The men and women of the World War II generation rose to the challenges of the 1940s
and 1950s. They restructured the government so that it could protect the country.
That is now the job of the generation that experienced 9/11. Those attacks showed,
emphatically, that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not
good enough. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a
system designed generations ago for a world that no longer exists.
We recommend significant changes in the organization of the government. We know that
the quality of the people is more important than the quality of the wiring diagrams.
Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the outstanding efforts of so many
individual officials straining, often without success, against the boundaries of the
possible. Good people can overcome bad structures. They should not have to.
The United States has the resources and the people. The government should combine
them more effectively, achieving unity of effort. We offer five major
recommendations to do that:
unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamist
terrorists across the foreign-domestic divide with a National Counterterrorism
Center;
unifying the intelligence community with a new National Intelligence Director;
unifying the many participants in the counterterrorism effort and their
knowledge in a network-based information-sharing system that transcends
traditional governmental boundaries;
unifying and strengthening congressional oversight to improve quality and
accountability; and
strengthening the FBI and homeland defenders.
UNITY OF EFFORT ACROSS THE FOREIGN-DOMESTIC DIVIDE
Joint Action
Much of the public commentary about the 9/11 attacks has dealt with "lost
opportunities,"some of which we reviewed in chapter 11. These are often
characterized as problems of "watchlisting," of "information sharing," or of
"connecting the dots." In chapter 11 we explained that these labels are too narrow.
They describe the symptoms, not the disease.
In each of our examples, no one was firmly in charge of managing the case and able to
draw relevant intelligence from anywhere in the government, assign responsibilities
across the agencies (foreign or domestic), track progress, and quickly bring
obstacles up to the level where they could be resolved. Responsibility and
accountability were diffuse.
The agencies cooperated, some of the time. But even such cooperation as there was is
not the same thing as joint action. When agencies cooperate, one defines the problem
and seeks help with it. When they act jointly, the problem and options for action
are defined differently from the start. Individuals from different backgrounds come
together in analyzing a case and planning how to manage it.
In our hearings we regularly asked witnesses: Who is the quarterback? The other
players are in their positions, doing their jobs. But who is calling the play that
assigns roles to help them execute as a team?
Since 9/11, those issues have not been resolved. In some ways joint work has gotten
better, and in some ways worse. The effort of fighting terrorism has flooded over
many of the usual agency boundaries because of its sheer quantity and energy.
Attitudes have changed. Officials are keenly conscious of trying to avoid the
mistakes of 9/11. They try to share information. They circulate-even to the
President-practically every reported threat, however dubious.
Partly because of all this effort, the challenge of coordinating it has multiplied.
Before 9/11, the CIA was plainly the lead agency confronting al Qaeda. The FBI
played a very secondary role. The engagement of the departments of Defense and State
was more episodic.
Today the CIA is still central. But the FBI is much more active, along with
other parts of the Justice Department.
The Defense Department effort is now enormous. Three of its unified commands,
each headed by a four-star general, have counterterrorism as a primary mission:
Special Operations Command, Central Command (both headquartered in Florida), and
Northern Command (headquartered in Colorado).
A new Department of Homeland Security combines formidable resources in border
and transportation security, along with analysis of domestic vulnerability and
other tasks.
The State Department has the lead on many of the foreign policy tasks we
described in chapter 12.
At the White House, the National Security Council (NSC) now is joined by a
parallel presidential advisory structure, the Homeland Security Council.
So far we have mentioned two reasons for joint action-the virtue of joint planning
and the advantage of having someone in charge to ensure a unified effort. There is a
third: the simple shortage of experts with sufficient skills. The limited pool of
critical experts-for example, skilled counterterrorism analysts and linguists-is
being depleted. Expanding these capabilities will require not just money, but time.
Primary responsibility for terrorism analysis has been assigned to the Terrorist
Threat Integration Center (TTIC), created in 2003, based at the CIA headquarters but
staffed with representatives of many agencies, reporting directly to the Director of
Central Intelligence. Yet the CIA houses another intelligence "fusion" center: the
Counterterrorist Center that played such a key role before 9/11. A third major
analytic unit is at Defense, in the Defense Intelligence Agency. A fourth,
concentrating more on homeland vulnerabilities, is at the Department of Homeland
Security. The FBI is in the process of building the analytic capability it has long
lacked, and it also has the Terrorist Screening Center.
The U.S.government cannot afford so much duplication of effort. There are not enough
experienced experts to go around. The duplication also places extra demands on
already hard-pressed single-source national technical intelligence collectors like
the National Security Agency.
Combining Joint Intelligence and Joint Action
A "smart" government would integrate all sources of information to see the enemy as a
whole. Integrated all-source analysis should also inform and shape strategies to
collect more intelligence. Yet the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, while it has
primary responsibility for terrorism analysis, is formally proscribed from having
any oversight or operational authority and is not part of any operational entity,
other than reporting to the director of central intelligence.
The government now tries to handle the problem of joint management, informed by
analysis of intelligence from all sources, in two ways.
First, agencies with lead responsibility for certain problems have constructed
their own interagency entities and task forces in order to get cooperation. The
Counterterrorist Center at CIA, for example, recruits liaison officers from
throughout the intelligence community. The military's Central Command has its
own interagency center, recruiting liaison officers from all the agencies from
which it might need help. The FBI has Joint Terrorism Task Forces in 84
locations to coordinate the activities of other agencies when action may be
required.
Second, the problem of joint operational planning is often passed to the White
House, where the NSC staff tries to play this role. The national security staff
at the White House (both NSC and new Homeland Security Council staff) has
already become 50 percent larger since 9/11. But our impression, after talking
to serving officials, is that even this enlarged staff is consumed by meetings
on day-to-day issues, sifting each day's threat information and trying to
coordinate everyday operations.
Even as it crowds into every square inch of available office space, the NSC staff is
still not sized or funded to be an executive agency. In chapter 3 we described some
of the problems that arose in the 1980s when a White House staff, constitutionally
insulated from the usual mechanisms of oversight, became involved in direct
operations. During the 1990s Richard Clarke occasionally tried to exercise such
authority, sometimes successfully, but often causing friction.
Yet a subtler and more serious danger is that as the NSC staff is consumed by these
day-to-day tasks, it has less capacity to find the time and detachment needed to
advise a president on larger policy issues. That means less time to work on major
new initiatives, help with legislative management to steer needed bills through
Congress, and track the design and implementation of the strategic plans for
regions, countries, and issues that we discuss in chapter 12. Much of the job of
operational coordination remains with the agencies, especially the CIA. There DCI
Tenet and his chief aides ran interagency meetings nearly every day to coordinate
much of the government's day-to-day work. The DCI insisted he did not make policy
and only oversaw its implementation. In the struggle against terrorism these
distinctions seem increasingly artificial. Also, as the DCI becomes a lead
coordinator of the government's operations, it becomes harder to play all the
position's other roles, including that of analyst in chief.
The problem is nearly intractable because of the way the government is currently
structured. Lines of operational authority run to the expanding executive
departments, and they are guarded for understandable reasons: the DCI commands the
CIA's personnel overseas; the secretary of defense will not yield to others in
conveying commands to military forces; the Justice Department will not give up the
responsibility of deciding whether to seek arrest warrants. But the result is that
each agency or department needs its own intelligence apparatus to support the
performance of its duties. It is hard to "break down stovepipes" when there are so
many stoves that are legally and politically entitled to have cast-iron pipes of
their own.
Recalling the Goldwater-Nichols legislation of 1986, Secretary Rumsfeld reminded us
that to achieve better joint capability, each of the armed services had to "give up
some of their turf and authorities and prerogatives." Today, he said, the executive
branch is "stove-piped much like the four services were nearly 20 years ago." He
wondered if it might be appropriate to ask agencies to "give up some of their
existing turf and authority in exchange for a stronger, faster, more efficient
government wide joint effort." Privately, other key
officials have made the same point to us.
We therefore propose a new institution: a civilian-led unified joint command for
counterterrorism. It should combine strategic intelligence and joint operational
planning.
In the Pentagon's Joint Staff, which serves the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, intelligence is handled by the J-2 directorate, operational planning by J-3,
and overall policy by J-5. Our concept combines the J-2 and J-3 functions
(intelligence and operational planning) in one agency, keeping overall policy
coordination where it belongs, in the National Security Council.
Recommendation: We recommend the establishment of a National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), built on the foundation of the existing
Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). Breaking the older mold of national
government organization, this NCTC should be a center for joint operational
planning and joint intelligence, staffed by personnel from the various agencies.
The head of the NCTC should have authority to evaluate the performance of the
people assigned to the Center.
Such a joint center should be developed in the same spirit that guided the
military's creation of unified joint commands, or the shaping of earlier
national agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office, which was formed to
organize the work of the CIA and several defense agencies in space.
NCTC-Intelligence. The NCTC should lead strategic
analysis, pooling all-source intelligence, foreign and domestic, about
transnational terrorist organizations with global reach. It should develop net
assessments (comparing enemy capabilities and intentions against U.S. defenses
and countermeasures). It should also provide warning. It should do this work by
drawing on the efforts of the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and other departments
and agencies. It should task collection requirements both inside and outside the
United States.
The intelligence function (J-2) should build on the existing TTIC structure
and remain distinct, as a national intelligence center, within the NCTC. As the
government's principal knowledge bank on Islamist terrorism, with the main
responsibility for strategic analysis and net assessment, it should absorb a
significant portion of the analytical talent now residing in the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center and the DIA's Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combatting
Terrorism (JITF-CT).
NCTC-Operations. The NCTC should perform joint planning.
The plans would assign operational responsibilities to lead agencies, such as
State, the CIA, the FBI, Defense and its combatant commands, Homeland Security,
and other agencies. The NCTC should not direct the actual execution of these
operations, leaving that job to the agencies. The NCTC would then track
implementation; it would look across the foreign-domestic divide and across
agency boundaries, updating plans to follow through on cases.
The joint operational planning function (J-3) will be new to theTTIC
structure. The NCTC can draw on analogous work now being done in the CIA and
every other involved department of the government, as well as reaching out to
knowledgeable officials in state and local agencies throughout the United
States.
The NCTC should not be a policymaking body. Its operations and planning should
follow the policy direction of the president and the National Security
Council.
Consider this hypothetical case. The NSA discovers that a suspected terrorist is
traveling to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. The NCTC should draw on joint
intelligence resources, including its own NSA counterterrorism experts, to
analyze the identities and possible destinations of these individuals. Informed
by this analysis, the NCTC would then organize and plan the management of the
case, drawing on the talents and differing kinds of experience among the several
agency representatives assigned to it-assigning tasks to the CIA overseas, to
Homeland Security watching entry points into the United States, and to the FBI.
If military assistance might be needed, the Special Operations Command could be
asked to develop an appropriate concept for such an operation. The NCTC would be
accountable for tracking the progress of the case, ensuring that the plan
evolved with it, and integrating the information into a warning. The NCTC would
be responsible for being sure that intelligence gathered from the activities in
the field became part of the government's institutional memory about Islamist
terrorist personalities, organizations, and possible means of attack.
In each case the involved agency would make its own senior managers aware of what
it was being asked to do. If those agency heads objected, and the issue could
not easily be resolved, then the disagreement about roles and missions could be
brought before the National Security Council and the president.
NCTC-Authorities.
The head of the NCTC should be appointed by the president, and should be equivalent
in rank to a deputy head of a cabinet department. The head of the NCTC would report
to the national intelligence director, an office whose creation we recommend below,
placed in the Executive Office of the President. The head of the NCTC would thus
also report indirectly to the president. This official's nomination should be
confirmed by the Senate and he or she should testify to the Congress, as is the case
now with other statutory presidential offices, like the U.S. trade representative.
To avoid the fate of other entities with great nominal authority and little
real power, the head of the NCTC must have the right to concur in the choices of
personnel to lead the operating entities of the departments and agencies focused
on counterterrorism, specifically including the head of the Counterterrorist
Center, the head of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, the commanders of the
Defense Department's Special Operations Command and Northern Command, and the
State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism.
The head of the NCTC should also work with the director of the Office of
Management and Budget in developing the president's counterterrorism budget.
There are precedents for surrendering authority for joint planning while
preserving an agency's operational control. In the international context, NATO
commanders may get line authority over forces assigned by other nations. In U.S.
unified commands, commanders plan operations that may involve units belonging to
one of the services. In each case, procedures are worked out, formal and
informal, to define the limits of the joint commander's authority.
The most serious disadvantage of the NCTC is the reverse of its greatest virtue. The
struggle against Islamist terrorism is so important that any clear-cut
centralization of authority to manage and be accountable for it may concentrate too
much power in one place. The proposed NCTC would be given the authority of planning
the activities of other agencies. Law or executive order must define the scope of
such line authority.
The NCTC would not eliminate interagency policy disputes. These would still go to the
National Security Council. To improve coordination at the White House, we believe
the existing Homeland Security Council should soon be merged into a single National
Security Council. The creation of the NCTC should help the NSC staff concentrate on
its core duties of assisting the president and supporting interdepartmental
policymaking.
We recognize that this is a new and difficult idea precisely because the authorities
we recommend for the NCTC really would, as Secretary Rumsfeld foresaw, ask strong
agencies to "give up some of their turf and authority in exchange for a stronger,
faster, more efficient government wide joint effort." Countering transnational
Islamist terrorism will test whether the U.S. government can fashion more flexible
models of management needed to deal with the twenty-first-century world.
An argument against change is that the nation is at war, and cannot afford to
reorganize in midstream. But some of the main innovations of the 1940s and 1950s,
including the creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even the construction of the
Pentagon itself, were undertaken in the midst of war. Surely the country cannot wait
until the struggle against Islamist terrorism is over.
"Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse,
bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility
so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost." That comment was made more than 40 years ago, about Pearl
Harbor. We hope another commission, writing in the future about another attack, does
not again find this quotation to be so apt.
UNITY OF EFFORT IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
In our first section, we concentrated on counterterrorism, discussing how to combine
the analysis of information from all sources of intelligence with the joint planning
of operations that draw on that analysis. In this section, we step back from looking
just at the counterterrorism problem. We reflect on whether the government is
organized adequately to direct resources and build the intelligence capabilities it
will need not just for countering terrorism, but for the broader range of national
security challenges in the decades ahead.
The Need for a Change
During the Cold War, intelligence agencies did not depend on seamless integration to
track and count the thousands of military targets-such as tanks and missiles-fielded
by the Soviet Union and other adversary states. Each agency concentrated on its
specialized mission, acquiring its own information and then sharing it via formal,
finished reports. The Department of Defense had given birth to and dominated the
main agencies for technical collection of intelligence. Resources were shifted at an
incremental pace, coping with challenges that arose over years, even decades.
We summarized the resulting organization of the intelligence community in chapter 3.
It is outlined below.
Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community
Office of the Director of Central Intelligence, which includes the Office of the
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, the Community
Management Staff, theTerrorism Threat Integration Center, the National Intelligence
Council, and other community offices.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which performs human source collection,
all-source analysis, and advanced science and technology.
National intelligence agencies:
National Security Agency (NSA), which performs signals collection and analysis
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which performs imagery
collection and analysis
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which develops, acquires, and launches
space systems for intelligence collection Other national reconnaissance
programs
Departmental intelligence agencies:
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Department of Defense
Intelligence entities of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the Department of State
Office of Terrorism and Finance Intelligence of the Department of Treasury
Office of Intelligence and the Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence
Divisions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice
Office of Intelligence of the Department of Energy
Directorate of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
(IAIP) and Directorate of Coast Guard Intelligence of the Department of
Homeland Security
The need to restructure the intelligence community grows out of six problems that
have become apparent before and after 9/11:
Structural barriers to performing joint intelligence work. National
intelligence is still organized around the collection disciplines of the home
agencies, not the joint mission. The importance of integrated, allsource
analysis cannot be overstated. Without it, it is not possible to "connect the
dots." No one component holds all the relevant information.
By contrast, in organizing national defense, the Goldwater- Nichols
legislation of 1986 created joint commands for operations in the field, the
Unified Command Plan. The services-the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine
Corps-organize, train, and equip their people and units to perform their
missions. Then they assign personnel and units to the joint combatant commander,
like the commanding general of the Central Command (CENTCOM). The Goldwater-
Nichols Act required officers to serve tours outside their service in order to
win promotion. The culture of the Defense Department was transformed, its
collective mind-set moved from service-specific to "joint," and its operations
became more integrated.
Lack of common standards and practices across the
foreign-domestic divide. The leadership of the intelligence community
should be able to pool information gathered overseas with information gathered
in the United States, holding the work-wherever it is done-to a common standard
of quality in how it is collected, processed (e.g., translated), reported,
shared, and analyzed. A common set of personnel standards for intelligence can
create a group of professionals better able to operate in joint activities,
transcending their own service-specific mind-sets.
Divided management of national intelligence capabilities.
While the CIA was once "central" to our national intelligence capabilities,
following the end of the Cold War it has been less able to influence the use of
the nation's imagery and signals intelligence capabilities in three national
agencies housed within the Department of Defense: the National Security Agency,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance
Office. One of the lessons learned from the 1991 Gulf War was the value of
national intelligence systems (satellites in particular) in precision warfare.
Since that war, the department has appropriately drawn these agencies into its
transformation of the military. Helping to orchestrate this transformation is
the under secretary of defense for intelligence, a position established by
Congress after 9/11. An unintended consequence of these developments has been
the far greater demand made by Defense on technical systems, leaving the DCI
less able to influence how these technical resources are allocated and used.
Weak capacity to set priorities and move resources. The
agencies are mainly organized around what they collect or the way they collect
it. But the priorities for collection are national. As the DCI makes hard
choices about moving resources, he or she must have the power to reach across
agencies and reallocate effort.
Too many jobs. The DCI now has at least three jobs. He is
expected to run a particular agency, the CIA. He is expected to manage the loose
confederation of agencies that is the intelligence community. He is expected to
be the analyst in chief for the government, sifting evidence and directly
briefing the President as his principal intelligence adviser. No recent DCI has
been able to do all three effectively. Usually what loses out is management of
the intelligence community, a difficult task even in the best case because the
DCI's current authorities are weak. With so much to do, the DCI often has not
used even the authority he has.
Too complex and secret. Over the decades, the agencies
and the rules surrounding the intelligence community have accumulated to a depth
that practically defies public comprehension. There are now 15 agencies or parts
of agencies in the intelligence community. The community and the DCI's
authorities have become arcane matters, understood only by initiates after long
study. Even the most basic information about how much money is actually
allocated to or within the intelligence community and most of its key components
is shrouded from public view.
The current DCI is responsible for community performance but lacks the three
authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control
over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the
ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel.
The only budget power of the DCI over agencies other than the CIA lies in
coordinating the budget requests of the various intelligence agencies into a single
program for submission to Congress. The overall funding request of the 15
intelligence entities in this program is then presented to the president and
Congress in 15 separate volumes.
When Congress passes an appropriations bill to allocate money to intelligence
agencies, most of their funding is hidden in the Defense Department in order to keep
intelligence spending secret. Therefore, although the House and Senate Intelligence
committees are the authorizing committees for funding of the intelligence community,
the final budget review is handled in the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations
committees. Those committees have no subcommittees just for intelligence, and only a
few members and staff review the requests.
The appropriations for the CIA and the national intelligence agencies- NSA, NGA, and
NRO-are then given to the secretary of defense. The secretary transfers the CIA's
money to the DCI but disburses the national agencies' money directly. Money for the
FBI's national security components falls within the appropriations for Commerce,
Justice, and State and goes to the attorney general.
In addition, the DCI lacks hire-and-fire authority over most of the intelligence
community's senior managers. For the national intelligence agencies housed in the
Defense Department, the secretary of defense must seek the DCI's concurrence
regarding the nomination of these directors, who are presidentially appointed. But
the secretary may submit recommendations to the president without receiving this
concurrence. The DCI cannot fire these officials. The DCI has even less influence
over the head of the FBI's national security component, who is appointed by the
attorney general in consultation with the DCI.
Combining Joint Work with Stronger Management
We have received recommendations on the topic of intelligence reform from many
sources. Other commissions have been over this same ground. Thoughtful bills have
been introduced, most recently a bill by the chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee Porter Goss (R-Fla.), and another by the ranking minority member, Jane
Harman (D-Calif.). In the Senate, Senators Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.) have introduced reform proposals as well. Past efforts have foundered,
because the president did not support them; because the DCI, the secretary of
defense, or both opposed them; and because some proposals lacked merit. We have
tried to take stock of these experiences, and borrow from strong elements in many of
the ideas that have already been developed by others.
Recommendation: The current position of Director of Central
Intelligence should be replaced by a National Intelligence Director with two
main areas of responsibility: (1) to oversee national intelligence centers on
specific subjects of interest across the U.S. government and (2) to manage the
national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to
it.
First, the National Intelligence Director should oversee national intelligence
centers to provide all-source analysis and plan intelligence operations for the
whole government on major problems.
One such problem is counterterrorism. In this case, we believe that the center
should be the intelligence entity (formerly TTIC) inside the National
Counterterrorism Center we have proposed. It would sit there alongside the
operations management unit we described earlier, with both making up the NCTC,
in the Executive Office of the President. Other national intelligence
centers-for instance, on counterproliferation, crime and narcotics, and
China-would be housed in whatever department or agency is best suited for them.
The National Intelligence Director would retain the present DCI's role as the
principal intelligence adviser to the president. We hope the president will come
to look directly to the directors of the national intelligence centers to
provide all-source analysis in their areas of responsibility, balancing the
advice of these intelligence chiefs against the contrasting viewpoints that may
be offered by department heads at State, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice,
and other agencies.
Second, the National Intelligence Director should manage the national intelligence
program and oversee the component agencies of the intelligence community. (See
diagram.)
The National Intelligence Director would submit a unified budget for national
intelligence that reflects priorities chosen by the National Security Council,
an appropriate balance among the varieties of technical and human intelligence
collection, and analysis. He or she would receive an appropriation for national
intelligence and apportion the funds to the appropriate agencies, in line with
that budget, and with authority to reprogram funds among the national
intelligence agencies to meet any new priority (as counterterrorism was in the
1990s). The National Intelligence Director should approve and submit nominations
to the president of the individuals who would lead the CIA, DIA, FBI
Intelligence Office, NSA, NGA, NRO, Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security, and other
national intelligence capabilities.
The National Intelligence Director would manage this national effort with the
help of three deputies, each of whom would also hold a key position in one of
the component agencies.
foreign intelligence (the head of the CIA)
defense intelligence (the under secretary of defense for intelligence)
homeland intelligence (the FBI's executive assistant director for intelligence
or the under secretary of homeland security for information analysis and
infrastructure protection) Other agencies in the intelligence community would
coordinate their work within each of these three areas, largely staying housed
in the same departments or agencies that support them now.
Returning to the analogy of the Defense Department's organization, these three
deputies-like the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines-would have the
job of acquiring the systems, training the people, and executing the operations
planned by the national intelligence centers.
And, just as the combatant commanders also report to the secretary of defense, the
directors of the national intelligence centers-e.g., for counterproliferation, crime
and narcotics, and the rest-also would report to the National Intelligence Director.
The Defense Department's military intelligence programs-the joint military
intelligence program (JMIP) and the tactical intelligence and related activities
program (TIARA)-would remain part of that department's responsibility.
The National Intelligence Director would set personnel policies to establish
standards for education and training and facilitate assignments at the national
intelligence centers and across agency lines. The National Intelligence Director
also would set information sharing and information technology policies to
maximize data sharing, as well as policies to protect the security of
information.
Too many agencies now have an opportunity to say no to change. The National
Intelligence Director should participate in an NSC executive committee that can
resolve differences in priorities among the agencies and bring the major
disputes to the president for decision.
The National Intelligence Director should be located in the Executive Office of the
President. This official, who would be confirmed by the Senate and would testify
before Congress, would have a relatively small staff of several hundred people,
taking the place of the existing community management offices housed at the CIA.
In managing the whole community, the National Intelligence Director is still
providing a service function. With the partial exception of his or her
responsibilities for overseeing the NCTC, the National Intelligence Director should
support the consumers of national intelligence-the president and policymaking
advisers such as the secretaries of state, defense, and homeland security and the
attorney general.
We are wary of too easily equating government management problems with those of the
private sector. But we have noticed that some very large private firms rely on a
powerful CEO who has significant control over how money is spent and can hire or
fire leaders of the major divisions, assisted by a relatively modest staff, while
leaving responsibility for execution in the operating divisions. There are
disadvantages to separating the position of National Intelligence Director from the
job of heading the CIA. For example, the National Intelligence Director will not
head a major agency of his or her own and may have a weaker base of support. But we
believe that these disadvantages are outweighed by several other considerations:
The National Intelligence Director must be able to directly oversee
intelligence collection inside the United States. Yet law and custom has
counseled against giving such a plain domestic role to the head of the CIA.
The CIA will be one among several claimants for funds in setting national
priorities. The National Intelligence Director should not be both one of the
advocates and the judge of them all.
Covert operations tend to be highly tactical, requiring close attention. The
National Intelligence Director should rely on the relevant joint mission center
to oversee these details, helping to coordinate closely with the White House.
The CIA will be able to concentrate on building the capabilities to carry out
such operations and on providing the personnel who will be directing and
executing such operations in the field.
Rebuilding the analytic and human intelligence collection capabilities of the
CIA should be a full-time effort, and the director of the CIA should focus on
extending its comparative advantages.
Recommendation: The CIA Director should emphasize (a) rebuilding the
CIA's analytic capabilities; (b) transforming the clandestine service by
building its human intelligence capabilities; (c) developing a stronger language
program, with high standards and sufficient financial incentives; (d) renewing
emphasis on recruiting diversity among operations officers so they can blend
more easily in foreign cities; (e) ensuring a seamless relationship between
human source collection and signals collection at the operational level; and (f)
stressing a better balance between unilateral and liaison operations.
The CIA should retain responsibility for the direction and execution of clandestine
and covert operations, as assigned by the relevant national intelligence center and
authorized by the National Intelligence Director and the president. This would
include propaganda, renditions, and nonmilitary disruption. We believe, however,
that one important area of responsibility should change.
Recommendation: Lead responsibility for directing and executing
paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the
Defense Department. There it should be consolidated with the capabilities for
training, direction, and execution of such operations already being developed in
the Special Operations Command.
Before 9/11, the CIA did not invest in developing a robust capability to
conduct paramilitary operations with U.S. personnel. It relied on proxies
instead, organized by CIA operatives without the requisite military training.
The results were unsatisfactory.
Whether the price is measured in either money or people, the United States
cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret
military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles, and secretly training
foreign military or paramilitary forces. The United States should concentrate
responsibility and necessary legal authorities in one entity.
The post-9/11 Afghanistan precedent of using joint CIA-military teams for
covert and clandestine operations was a good one. We believe this proposal to be
consistent with it. Each agency would concentrate on its comparative advantages
in building capabilities for joint missions. The operation itself would be
planned in common.
The CIA has a reputation for agility in operations. The military has a
reputation for being methodical and cumbersome. We do not know if these
stereotypes match current reality; they may also be one more symptom of the
civil-military misunderstandings we described in chapter 4. It is a problem to
be resolved in policy guidance and agency management, not in the creation of
redundant, overlapping capabilities and authorities in such sensitive work. The
CIA's experts should be integrated into the military's training, exercises, and
planning. To quote a CIA official now serving in the field:"One fight, one
team."
Recommendation: Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we
have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national
intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret.
Congress should pass a separate appropriations act for intelligence, defending
the broad allocation of how these tens of billions of dollars have been assigned
among the varieties of intelligence work.
The specifics of the intelligence appropriation would remain classified, as they are
today. Opponents of declassification argue that America's enemies could learn about
intelligence capabilities by tracking the top-line appropriations figure. Yet the
top-line figure by itself provides little insight into U.S. intelligence sources and
methods. The U.S. government readily provides copious information about spending on
its military forces, including military intelligence. The intelligence community
should not be subject to that much disclosure. But when even aggregate categorical
numbers remain hidden, it is hard to judge priorities and foster accountability.
UNITY OF EFFORT IN SHARING INFORMATION
Information Sharing
We have already stressed the importance of intelligence analysis that can draw on all
relevant sources of information. The biggest impediment to all-source analysis-to a
greater likelihood of connecting the dots-is the human or systemic resistance to
sharing information.
The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. When databases not
usually thought of as "intelligence," such as customs or immigration information,
are included, the storehouse is immense. But the U.S. government has a weak system
for processing and using what it has. In interviews around the government, official
after official urged us to call attention to frustrations with the unglamorous "back
office" side of government operations. In the 9/11 story, for example, we sometimes
see examples of information that could be accessed-like the undistributed NSA
information that would have helped identify Nawaf al Hazmi in January 2000. But
someone had to ask for it. In that case, no one did. Or, as in the episodes we
describe in chapter 8, the information is distributed, but in a compartmented
channel. Or the information is available, and someone does ask, but it cannot be
shared.
What all these stories have in common is a system that requires a demonstrated "need
to know" before sharing. This approach assumes it is possible to know, in advance,
who will need to use the information. Such a system implicitly assumes that the risk
of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits of wider sharing. Those Cold War
assumptions are no longer appropriate. The culture of agencies feeling they own the
information they gathered at taxpayer expense must be replaced by a culture in which
the agencies instead feel they have a duty to the information-to repay the
taxpayers' investment by making that information available.
Each intelligence agency has its own security practices, outgrowths of the Cold War.
We certainly understand the reason for these practices. Counterintelligence concerns
are still real, even if the old Soviet enemy has been replaced by other spies.
But the security concerns need to be weighed against the costs. Current security
requirements nurture overclassification and excessive compartmentation of
information among agencies. Each agency's incentive structure opposes sharing, with
risks (criminal, civil, and internal administrative sanctions) but few rewards for
sharing information. No one has to pay the long-term costs of overclassifying
information, though these costs-even in literal financial terms- are substantial.
There are no punishments for not sharing information. Agencies uphold a
"need-to-know" culture of information protection rather than promoting a
"need-to-share" culture of integration.
Recommendation: Information procedures should provide incentives for
sharing, to restore a better balance between security and shared knowledge.
Intelligence gathered about transnational terrorism should be processed, turned into
reports, and distributed according to the same quality standards, whether it is
collected in Pakistan or in Texas.
The logical objection is that sources and methods may vary greatly in different
locations. We therefore propose that when a report is first created, its data be
separated from the sources and methods by which they are obtained. The report should
begin with the information in its most shareable, but still meaningful, form.
Therefore the maximum number of recipients can access some form of that information.
If knowledge of further details becomes important, any user can query further, with
access granted or denied according to the rules set for the network-and with queries
leaving an audit trail in order to determine who accessed the information. But the
questions may not come at all unless experts at the "edge" of the network can
readily discover the clues that prompt to them.
We propose that information be shared horizontally, across new networks that
transcend individual agencies.
The current system is structured on an old mainframe, or hub-andspoke,
concept. In this older approach, each agency has its own database. Agency users
send information to the database and then can retrieve it from the database.
A decentralized network model, the concept behind much of the information
revolution, shares data horizontally too. Agencies would still have their own
databases, but those databases would be searchable across agency lines. In this
system, secrets are protected through the design of the network and an
"information rights management" approach that controls access to the data, not
access to the whole network. An outstanding conceptual framework for this kind
of "trusted information network" has been developed by a task force of leading
professionals in national security, information technology, and law assembled by
the Markle Foundation. Its report has been widely discussed throughout the U.S.
government, but has not yet been converted into action.
Recommendation: The president should lead the government-wide effort
to bring the major national security institutions into the information
revolution. He should coordinate the resolution of the legal, policy, and
technical issues across agencies to create a "trusted information network."
No one agency can do it alone. Well-meaning agency officials are under
tremendous pressure to update their systems. Alone, they may only be able to
modernize the stovepipes, not replace them.
Only presidential leadership can develop government-wide concepts and
standards. Currently, no one is doing this job. Backed by the Office of
Management and Budget, a new National Intelligence Director empowered to set
common standards for information use throughout the community, and a secretary
of homeland security who helps extend the system to public agencies and relevant
private-sector databases, a government-wide initiative can succeed.
White House leadership is also needed because the policy and legal issues are
harder than the technical ones. The necessary technology already exists. What
does not are the rules for acquiring, accessing, sharing, and using the vast
stores of public and private data that may be available. When information
sharing works, it is a powerful tool. Therefore the sharing and uses of
information must be guided by a set of practical policy guidelines that
simultaneously empower and constrain officials, telling them clearly what is and
is not permitted.
"This is government acting in new ways, to face new threats," the most recent Markle
report explains." And while such change is necessary, it must be accomplished while
engendering the people's trust that privacy and other civil liberties are being
protected, that businesses are not being unduly burdened with requests for
extraneous or useless information, that taxpayer money is being well spent, and
that, ultimately, the network will be effective in protecting our security." The
authors add: "Leadership is emerging from all levels of government and from many
places in the private sector. What is needed now is a plan to accelerate these
efforts, and public debate and consensus on the goals."
UNITY OF EFFORT IN THE CONGRESS
Strengthen Congressional Oversight of Intelligence and Homeland Security
Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the
most difficult and important. So long as oversight is governed by current
congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the
security they want and need. The United States needs a strong, stable, and capable
congressional committee structure to give America's national intelligence agencies
oversight, support, and leadership. Few things are more difficult to change in
Washington than congressional committee jurisdiction and prerogatives. To a member,
these assignments are almost as important as the map of his or her congressional
district. The American people may have to insist that these changes occur, or they
may well not happen. Having interviewed numerous members of Congress from both
parties, as well as congressional staff members, we found that dissatisfaction with
congressional oversight remains widespread.
The future challenges of America's intelligence agencies are daunting. They include
the need to develop leading-edge technologies that give our policymakers and
warfighters a decisive edge in any conflict where the interests of the United States
are vital. Not only does good intelligence win wars, but the best intelligence
enables us to prevent them from happening altogether. Under the terms of existing
rules and resolutions the House and Senate intelligence committees lack the power,
influence, and sustained capability to meet this challenge. While few members of
Congress have the broad knowledge of intelligence activities or the know-how about
the technologies employed, all members need to feel assured that good oversight is
happening. When their unfamiliarity with the subject is combined with the need to
preserve security, a mandate emerges for substantial change.
Tinkering with the existing structure is not sufficient. Either Congress should
create a joint committee for intelligence, using the Joint Atomic Energy Committee
as its model, or it should create House and Senate committees with combined
authorizing and appropriations powers.
Whichever of these two forms are chosen, the goal should be a structure- codified by
resolution with powers expressly granted and carefully limited- allowing a
relatively small group of members of Congress, given time and reason to master the
subject and the agencies, to conduct oversight of the intelligence establishment and
be clearly accountable for their work. The staff of this committee should be
nonpartisan and work for the entire committee and not for individual members.
The other reforms we have suggested-for a National Counterterrorism Center and a
National Intelligence Director-will not work if congressional oversight does not
change too. Unity of effort in executive management can be lost if it is fractured
by divided congressional oversight.
Recommendation: Congressional oversight for intelligence-and
counterterrorism-is now dysfunctional. Congress should address this problem. We
have considered various alternatives: A joint committee on the old model of the
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy is one. A single committee in each house of
Congress, combining authorizing and appropriating authorities, is another.
The new committee or committees should conduct continuing studies of the
activities of the intelligence agencies and report problems relating to the
development and use of intelligence to all members of the House and Senate.
We have already recommended that the total level of funding for intelligence
be made public, and that the national intelligence program be appropriated to
the National Intelligence Director, not to the secretary of defense.
We also recommend that the intelligence committee should have a subcommittee
specifically dedicated to oversight, freed from the consuming responsibility of
working on the budget.
The resolution creating the new intelligence committee structure should grant
subpoena authority to the committee or committees. The majority party's
representation on this committee should never exceed the minority's
representation by more than one.
Four of the members appointed to this committee or committees should be a
member who also serves on each of the following additional committees: Armed
Services, Judiciary, Foreign Affairs, and the Defense Appropriations
subcommittee. In this way the other major congressional interests can be brought
together in the new committee's work.
Members should serve indefinitely on the intelligence committees, without set
terms, thereby letting them accumulate expertise.
The committees should be smaller-perhaps seven or nine members in each
house-so that each member feels a greater sense of responsibility, and
accountability, for the quality of the committee's work.
The leaders of the Department of Homeland Security now appear before 88 committees
and subcommittees of Congress. One expert witness (not a member of the
administration) told us that this is perhaps the single largest obstacle impeding
the department's successful development. The one attempt to consolidate such
committee authority, the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, may be
eliminated. The Senate does not have even this. Congress needs to establish for the
Department of Homeland Security the kind of clear authority and responsibility that
exist to enable the Justice Department to deal with crime and the Defense Department
to deal with threats to national security. Through not more than one authorizing
committee and one appropriating subcommittee in each house, Congress should be able
to ask the secretary of homeland security whether he or she has the resources to
provide reasonable security against major terrorist acts within the United States
and to hold the secretary accountable for the department's performance.
Recommendation: Congress should create a single, principal point of
oversight and review for homeland security. Congressional leaders are best able
to judge what committee should have jurisdiction over this department and its
duties. But we believe that Congress does have the obligation to choose one in
the House and one in the Senate, and that this committee should be a permanent
standing committee with a nonpartisan staff.
Improve the Transitions between Administrations
In chapter 6, we described the transition of 2000-2001. Beyond the policy issues we
described, the new administration did not have its deputy cabinet officers in place
until the spring of 2001, and the critical subcabinet officials were not confirmed
until the summer-if then. In other words, the new administration- like others before
it-did not have its team on the job until at least six months after it took office.
Recommendation: Since a catastrophic attack could occur with little
or no notice, we should minimize as much as possible the disruption of national
security policymaking during the change of administrations by accelerating the
process for national security appointments. We think the process could be
improved significantly so transitions can work more effectively and allow new
officials to assume their new responsibilities as quickly as possible.
Before the election, candidates should submit the names of selected members of
their prospective transition teams to the FBI so that, if necessary, those team
members can obtain security clearances immediately after the election is over.
A president-elect should submit lists of possible candidates for national
security positions to begin obtaining security clearances immediately after the
election, so that their background investigations can be complete before January
20.
A single federal agency should be responsible for providing and maintaining
security clearances, ensuring uniform standards-including uniform security
questionnaires and financial report requirements, and maintaining a single
database. This agency can also be responsible for administering polygraph tests
on behalf of organizations that require them.
A president-elect should submit the nominations of the entire new national
security team, through the level of under secretary of cabinet departments, not
later than January 20. The Senate, in return, should adopt special rules
requiring hearings and votes to confirm or reject national security nominees
within 30 days of their submission. The Senate should not require confirmation
of such executive appointees below Executive Level 3.
The outgoing administration should provide the president-elect, as soon as
possible after election day, with a classified, compartmented list that
catalogues specific, operational threats to national security; major military or
covert operations; and pending decisions on the possible use of force. Such a
document could provide both notice and a checklist, inviting a president-elect
to inquire and learn more.
ORGANIZING AMERICA'S DEFENSES IN THE UNITED STATES
The Future Role of the FBI
We have considered proposals for a new agency dedicated to intelligence collection in
the United States. Some call this a proposal for an "American MI- 5," although the
analogy is weak-the actual British Security Service is a relatively small worldwide
agency that combines duties assigned in the U.S. government to the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center, the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The concern about the FBI is that it has long favored its criminal justice mission
over its national security mission. Part of the reason for this is the demand around
the country for FBI help on criminal matters. The FBI was criticized, rightly, for
the overzealous domestic intelligence investigations disclosed during the 1970s. The
pendulum swung away from those types of investigations during the 1980s and 1990s,
though the FBI maintained an active counterintelligence function and was the lead
agency for the investigation of foreign terrorist groups operating inside the United
States.
We do not recommend the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency. It is not
needed if our other recommendations are adopted-to establish a strong national
intelligence center, part of the NCTC, that will oversee counterterrorism
intelligence work, foreign and domestic, and to create a National Intelligence
Director who can set and enforce standards for the collection, processing, and
reporting of information.
Under the structures we recommend, the FBI's role is focused, but still vital. The
FBI does need to be able to direct its thousands of agents and other employees to
collect intelligence in America's cities and towns-interviewing informants,
conducting surveillance and searches, tracking individuals, working collaboratively
with local authorities, and doing so with meticulous attention to detail and
compliance with the law. The FBI's job in the streets of the United States would
thus be a domestic equivalent, operating under the U.S. Constitution and quite
different laws and rules, to the job of the CIA's operations officers abroad.
Creating a new domestic intelligence agency has other drawbacks.
The FBI is accustomed to carrying out sensitive intelligence collection
operations in compliance with the law. If a new domestic intelligence agency
were outside of the Department of Justice, the process of legal oversight-never
easy-could become even more difficult. Abuses of civil liberties could create a
backlash that would impair the collection of needed intelligence.
Creating a new domestic intelligence agency would divert attention of the
officials most responsible for current counterterrorism efforts while the threat
remains high. Putting a new player into the mix of federal agencies with
counterterrorism responsibilities would exacerbate existing information-sharing
problems.
A new domestic intelligence agency would need to acquire assets and personnel.
The FBI already has 28,000 employees; 56 field offices, 400 satellite offices,
and 47 legal attach� offices; a laboratory, operations center, and training
facility; an existing network of informants, cooperating defendants, and other
sources; and relationships with state and local law enforcement, the CIA, and
foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Counterterrorism investigations in the United States very quickly become
matters that involve violations of criminal law and possible law enforcement
action. Because the FBI can have agents working criminal matters and agents
working intelligence investigations concerning the same international terrorism
target, the full range of investigative tools against a suspected terrorist can
be considered within one agency. The removal of "the wall" that existed before
9/11 between intelligence and law enforcement has opened up new opportunities
for cooperative action within the FBI.
Counterterrorism investigations often overlap or are cued by other criminal
investigations, such as money laundering or the smuggling of contraband. In the
field, the close connection to criminal work has many benefits.
Our recommendation to leave counterterrorism intelligence collection in the United
States with the FBI still depends on an assessment that the FBI-if it makes an
all-out effort to institutionalize change-can do the job. As we mentioned in chapter
3, we have been impressed by the determination that agents display in tracking down
details, patiently going the extra mile and working the extra month, to put facts in
the place of speculation. In our report we have shown how agents in Phoenix,
Minneapolis, and New York displayed initiative in pressing their investigations.
FBI agents and analysts in the field need to have sustained support and dedicated
resources to become stronger intelligence officers. They need to be rewarded for
acquiring informants and for gathering and disseminating information differently and
more broadly than usual in a traditional criminal invetigation. FBI employees need
to report and analyze what they have learned in ways the Bureau has never done
before.
Under Director Robert Mueller, the Bureau has made significant progress in improving
its intelligence capabilities. It now has an Office of Intelligence, overseen by the
top tier of FBI management. Field intelligence groups have been created in all field
offices to put FBI priorities and the emphasis on intelligence into practice.
Advances have been made in improving the Bureau's information technology systems and
in increasing connectivity and information sharing with intelligence community
agencies.
Director Mueller has also recognized that the FBI's reforms are far from complete. He
has outlined a number of areas where added measures may be necessary. Specifically,
he has recognized that the FBI needs to recruit from a broader pool of candidates,
that agents and analysts working on national security matters require specialized
training, and that agents should specialize within programs after obtaining a
generalist foundation. The FBI is developing career tracks for agents to specialize
in counterterrorism/counterintelligence, cyber crimes, criminal investigations, or
intelligence. It is establishing a program for certifying agents as intelligence
officers, a certification that will be a prerequisite for promotion to the senior
ranks of the Bureau. New training programs have been instituted for
intelligence-related subjects.
The Director of the FBI has proposed creating an Intelligence Directorate as a
further refinement of the FBI intelligence program. This directorate would include
units for intelligence planning and policy and for the direction of analysts and
linguists.
We want to ensure that the Bureau's shift to a preventive counterterrorism posture is
more fully institutionalized so that it survives beyond Director Mueller's tenure.
We have found that in the past the Bureau has announced its willingness to reform
and restructure itself to address transnational security threats, but has fallen
short-failing to effect the necessary institutional and cultural changes
organization-wide. We want to ensure that this does not happen again. Despite having
found acceptance of the Director's clear message that counterterrorism is now the
FBI's top priority, two years after 9/11 we also found gaps between some of the
announced reforms and the reality in the field. We are concerned that management in
the field offices still can allocate people and resources to local concerns that
diverge from the national security mission. This system could revert to a focus on
lower-priority criminal justice cases over national security requirements.
Recommendation: A specialized and integrated national security
workforce should be established at the FBI consisting of agents, analysts,
linguists, and surveillance specialists who are recruited, trained, rewarded,
and retained to ensure the development of an institutional culture imbued with a
deep expertise in intelligence and national security.
The president, by executive order or directive, should direct the FBI to
develop this intelligence cadre.
Recognizing that cross-fertilization between the criminal justice and national
security disciplines is vital to the success of both missions, all new agents
should receive basic training in both areas. Furthermore, new agents should
begin their careers with meaningful assignments in both areas.
Agents and analysts should then specialize in one of these disciplines and
have the option to work such matters for their entire career with the Bureau.
Certain advanced training courses and assignments to other intelligence agencies
should be required to advance within the national security discipline.
In the interest of cross-fertilization, all senior FBI managers, including
those working on law enforcement matters, should be certified intelligence
officers.
The FBI should fully implement a recruiting, hiring, and selection process for
agents and analysts that enhances its ability to target and attract individuals
with educational and professional backgrounds in intelligence, international
relations, language, technology, and other relevant skills.
The FBI should institute the integration of analysts, agents, linguists, and
surveillance personnel in the field so that a dedicated team approach is brought
to bear on national security intelligence operations.
Each field office should have an official at the field office's deputy level
for national security matters. This individual would have management oversight
and ensure that the national priorities are carried out in the field.
The FBI should align its budget structure according to its four main
programs-intelligence, counterterrorism and counterintelligence, criminal, and
criminal justice services-to ensure better transparency on program costs,
management of resources, and protection of the intelligence program.
The FBI should report regularly to Congress in its semiannual program reviews
designed to identify whether each field office is appropriately addressing FBI
and national program priorities.
The FBI should report regularly to Congress in detail on the qualifications,
status, and roles of analysts in the field and at headquarters. Congress should
ensure that analysts are afforded training and career opportunities on a par
with those offered analysts in other intelligence community agencies.
The Congress should make sure funding is available to accelerate the expansion
of secure facilities in FBI field offices so as to increase their ability to use
secure email systems and classified intelligence product exchanges. The Congress
should monitor whether the FBI's information-sharing principles are implemented
in practice.
The FBI is just a small fraction of the national law enforcement community in the
United States, a community comprised mainly of state and local agencies. The network
designed for sharing information, and the work of the FBI through local Joint
Terrorism Task Forces, should build a reciprocal relationship, in which state and
local agents understand what information they are looking for and, in return,
receive some of the information being developed about what is happening, or may
happen, in their communities. In this relationship, the Department of Homeland
Security also will play an important part.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 gave the under secretary for information analysis
and infrastructure protection broad responsibilities. In practice, this directorate
has the job to map "terrorist threats to the homeland against our assessed
vulnerabilities in order to drive our efforts to protect against terrorist
threats." These capabilities are still embryonic. The
directorate has not yet developed the capacity to perform one of its assigned jobs,
which is to assimilate and analyze information from Homeland Security's own
component agencies, such as the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Transportation Security
Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border
Protection. The secretary of homeland security must ensure that these components
work with the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate so that
this office can perform its mission.
Homeland Defense
At several points in our inquiry, we asked, "Who is responsible for defending us at
home?" Our national defense at home is the responsibility, first, of the Department
of Defense and, second, of the Department of Homeland Security. They must have clear
delineations of responsibility and authority.
We found that NORAD, which had been given the responsibility for defending U.S.
airspace, had construed that mission to focus on threats coming from outside
America's borders. It did not adjust its focus even though the intelligence
community had gathered intelligence on the possibility that terrorists might turn to
hijacking and even use of planes as missiles. We have been assured that NORAD has
now embraced the full mission. Northern Command has been established to assume
responsibility for the defense of the domestic United States.
Recommendation: The Department of Defense and its oversight
committees should regularly assess the adequacy of Northern Command's strategies
and planning to defend the United States against military threats to the
homeland.
The Department of Homeland Security was established to consolidate all of the
domestic agencies responsible for securing America's borders and national
infrastructure, most of which is in private hands. It should identify those elements
of our transportation, energy, communications, financial, and other institutions
that need to be protected, develop plans to protect that infrastructure, and
exercise the mechanisms to enhance preparedness. This means going well beyond the
preexisting jobs of the agencies that have been brought together inside the
department.
Recommendation: The Department of Homeland Security and its
oversight committees should regularly assess the types of threats the country
faces to determine (a) the adequacy of the government's plans-and the progress
against those plans-to protect America's critical infrastructure and (b) the
readiness of the government to respond to the threats that the United States
might face.
We look forward to a national debate on the merits of what we have recommended, and
we will participate vigorously in that debate.
