Disaster after 9/11 The Department of Homeland Security and the Intelligence Reorganization

IntroductionSeptember 11, 2001 presented a challenge to our government that went way beyond any challenges that natural disasters had presented in decades. The terrorist attack suggested possible future ones that would involve more of society than a natural disaster might, and we had few institutional structures to cope with it. Our last major effort was President Jimmy Carter's amalgamation of agencies to form the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it was small and its terrorist concerns were limited to threats from domestic political radicals. 1 Something far beyond the recombination of disaster agencies that produced FEMA was needed.The first thing required was a change in the mental model that our top officials in the White House were using to address threats to the nation. Years of preoccupation with state-sponsored threats of nuclear missile attacks would be hard to set aside. Second, we needed a new institutional capacity for dealing with the new terrorist threat. Should this capacity reside primarily in the White House, or in Congress? Without a convincing change in its threat model, the White House, I argue, was unable to mobilize support for allowing it to control the effort, and control passed to Congress. But so many interests were impacted by such a huge project that it became unwieldy. Furthermore, the institutional framework chosen for protecting homeland security followed a cultural script that organizational designers such as Congress most easily revert to ? namely, centralized control ? even though the problem would be more amenable to the empowerment of diverse, decentralized units, with central coordination rather than central control. The many organizational difficulties we will examine that flowed from the central control format, coupled with distracting wars and lack of urgency, make the failure of the reorganization seem almost inevitable.Finally, the same format was used to attempt a restructuring of the intelligence agencies and once again powerful interests, this time in the Pentagon as well as Congress, appear to have thwarted this effort as well. Compared to our restructuring response to the 9/11 tragedy, the creation and shaky evolution of FEMA thirty-five years ago, for all its problems, begin to look like a piece of cake.The Threat ModelWhy was the administration of George W. Bush so unprepared for a terrorist attack upon our homeland? The answer to this question is one part of the explanation for the dismal performance of the Department of Homeland Security. (The other part of the answer is that we expect too much of our organizations and the matter of predictable organizational failures, which we will come to later.)It is a truism that the military is always prepared to fight the last war. Given the difficulty of predicting which adversary will strike next and how it will strike, this may be the best the military can do. There are many conditions that will reinforce a similar mind set, or world view, in other areas of life, when we live for decades under the threat of foreign attack. All our major institutions, not just the military and diplomatic corps, become firmly configured to meet this threat. The political area develops scripts and slogans to mobilize defense; a candidate or party cannot be weak on defense. Parts of business and industry thrive on defense expenditures and gain more power than those parts that are hurt by defense expenditures. The media builds appropriate images of heroes and villains; the judicial system and social institutions such as education are altered to reflect the world view. (Early in the Cold War university Russian Studies programs were quickly staffed with faculty without PhDs, contrary to university policy; Black Studies programs had a hard time getting started when they came along because they recruited faculty without PhDs, which was declared to be contrary to university policy. …