Which department was created after 9/11

Bush commissioned the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Sept. Twenty years after the attacks, DHS is now the third-largest federal agency, with nearly , employees, and is most visible for its role in enforcing immigration laws at the southern border. He arrived less than two years after the creation of DHS and shortly before Hurricane Katrina would expose the shortcomings of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which had just become part of the newly formed agency.

Under Chertoff, DHS was still mainly focused on foreign threats. He was responsible for imposing the liquid limits on airplanes in response to intelligence DHS gathered about foreign terrorists plotting to blow up planes with what would be made to look like sports drinks.

Under the Bush administration, the size of Customs and Border Protection doubled, reaching 20,, about one-third of what it is today. We are sharing information and we are monitoring the overall security environment for possible threats.

In part, that is because the statute did not give DHS the authority to investigate and prosecute Americans inside the country; that still falls to the FBI and Justice Department. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device.

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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.

These are often characterized as problems of "watchlisting," of "information sharing," or of "connecting the dots. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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 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 , based at the CIA headquarters but staffed with representatives of many agencies, reporting directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. 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. 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.

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.

Second, the problem of joint operational planning is often passed to the White House, where the NSC staff tries to play this role. 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 s when a White House staff, constitutionally insulated from the usual mechanisms of oversight, became involved in direct operations. During the s 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 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 , 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.

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 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.

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.

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. It should also provide warning.

It should task collection requirements both inside and outside the United States. NCTC- Operations. The NCTC should perform joint planning. 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 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 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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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 s and s, 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. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost.

We hope another commission, writing in the future about another attack, does not again find this quotation to be so apt. 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. National intelligence is still organized around the collection disciplines of the home agencies, not the joint mission.

The importance of integrated, all-source analysis cannot be overstated. Without it, it is not possible to "connect the dots. By contrast, in organizing national defense, the Goldwater-Nichols legislation of 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. 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.

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.

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 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.

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.