The War At Home

om Ridge may have the toughest job in America. The newly appointed director of the White House Office of Homeland Security is expected to craft a "coordinated, integrated and comprehensive national strategy to combat domestic terrorism," according to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. To do so, he will need to harmonize the activities of more than 40 federal offices and agencies-and hundreds of state, local and private organizations-to deal with one of the most dangerous, unpredictable and complex threats the nation has ever faced.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington gave the nation a visceral reminder that national security depends on more than maintaining a robust military. Over the course of one dreadful morning that left thousands dead and caused billions of dollars in damage, federal agencies in border control, aviation security, law enforcement, financial regulation and a host of other nonmilitary functions were proven central to national security. Government management failings that were formerly the purview of auditors, academics and watchdog groups now haunt the minds of ordinary Americans, who wonder if they are safe in their homes and workplaces.

It will fall to Ridge to sort through a glut of legal, regulatory, technological and bureaucratic impediments to create an effective strategy for preventing and coping with terrorism. While it is likely Ridge will have both an ample budget and the sustained backing of President Bush, the former combat veteran, prosecutor, seven-term congressman and, most recently, governor of Pennsylvania will need all the tactical, political and intellectual skill he possesses and more if he is to succeed, say national security experts.

"Will he be able to look the FBI director and the Secretary of Defense in the eye and say 'I need this' and be sure that he'll get it? That's what Ridge will need to be able to do," says Randall Larsen, who teaches a course on domestic security at the National War College and is the director of the Institute for Homeland Security at ANSER, a nonprofit think tank in Arlington, Va. To be effective, Ridge will have to have budget authority over federal terrorism and security programs as well as authority over the planning process, Larsen says.

At the very least, Ridge needs to create a national command center in a secure location to operate as a clearinghouse for monitoring terrorist activity and, in the event of an attack, as an operations center for managing the government's response, Larsen says. Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served as White House drug czar during the Clinton administration, agrees and says Bush made a wise decision when he tapped the widely popular Ridge for the position. At a minimum, Ridge will need a substantial, capable staff, and the authority to approve the budgets of all agency counterterrorism programs, McCaffrey argues. "If he ends up with a small staff and a secretary and simply generates ideas, he will be nothing but a speakers' bureau on terrorism. This will be a huge missed opportunity. Ridge has the stature to be effective, but this is a huge challenge. All of us ought to be grateful that he agreed to take this on," says McCaffrey.

National Insecurity

The challenge for Ridge will be much broader than developing a unified strategy to deal with terrorism. Without a more highly trained, expertly equipped and better-managed federal workforce, even the most comprehensive plan will fall short. Ridge will need to shine a spotlight on the many long-neglected agency failures that have left the country vulnerable to terrorists. Just as Army Gen. George Marshall swept poorly performing officers from the War Department at the beginning of World War II, Ridge will need to do some housecleaning. And to do that, he will need to galvanize support in Congress and among citizens for revitalizing the management capacity of federal agencies.

At least for now, as the administration and Congress seek to shore up the country's defenses against terrorism, official Washington is united behind Ridge. But the challenges he faces within the bureaucracy will require sustained attention. Consider the following failures at agencies that play a direct role in protecting Americans from terrorism:

• Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants enter the country every year. The tens of thousands who get past the Border Patrol and make their way to the interior are unlikely to be detected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is responsible for finding and deporting undocumented foreigners. Congress has focused most of its attention on the thousands of illegal migrants who annually cross the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, where more than 9,000 INS agents are posted. By contrast, only 334 agents are assigned to patrol the 4,000-mile border with Canada.
• State Department consular officers, who issue visas to foreign travelers to the United States, don't have adequate access to FBI databases on suspected criminals. And once foreigners enter the country, the INS has virtually no way of tracking those who overstay their visas.
• The Customs Service, which is responsible for inspecting all goods entering the country, inspects fewer than 2 percent of the 340,000 vehicles and 58,000 cargo shipments that cross the country's borders or are unloaded in U.S. ports every day.
• The FBI, the lead law enforcement agency for investigating terrorism, is woefully short of analysts and agents who speak and read Arabic and other critical languages, resulting in a number of widely reported missed opportunities and leads in recent investigations of suspected terrorists.
• The General Accounting Office has issued dozens of audits that show federal computer systems are vulnerable to tampering and disruption by hackers, putting the privacy and security of Americans in peril.

To be sure, some federal offices operate with impressive competence and efficiency. But many others do not, and those are the ones over which any terrorism strategy would stumble.

Competing Visions

Improving federal management in the war on terrorism will depend heavily on actions by Congress, which is itself poorly structured to oversee such efforts. Roughly two dozen congressional committees have either authorization or appropriation authority over domestic anti-terrorism programs. Former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, co-chairmen of the bipartisan Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, concluded that Congress should replace its ad hoc oversight structure with two select committees focused on terrorism, one in the House and one in the Senate.

The "scattershot" way in which Congress directs efforts aimed at preventing and responding to terrorism is part of the problem, Rudman told members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at a Sept. 21 hearing on homeland security.

Virginia Gov. James Gilmore echoed that sentiment at the hearing. Gilmore is chairman of the Advisory Panel to Assess the Capabilities for Domestic Response to Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, a publicly funded panel established by the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act. Like the Hart-Rudman commission, Gilmore's panel recommended that Congress streamline its oversight of domestic terrorism programs. Additionally, members of both commissions stressed their support for Ridge and the new homeland security office in the White House-but they strongly recommended the Senate codify the position in law and give Ridge authority over all terrorism spending at federal agencies.

Both the Gilmore panel and the Hart-Rudman commission concluded that federal agencies were poorly organized to prevent terrorism or manage the aftermath of terrorist attacks. But they came to very different conclusions about how the federal government should be made more responsive. The Hart-Rudman commission strongly recommended that Congress create a new agency devoted to homeland security and border control; the Gilmore commission urged the White House to create an office to coordinate homeland security activities that cross various federal, state and local agencies.

The new National Homeland Security Agency envisioned by the Hart-Rudman commission would have Cabinet status. It would include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs, the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol. FEMA is currently an independent agency; Customs is part of the Treasury Department; the Border Patrol is part of INS, which is in the Justice Department; and the Coast Guard is located in the Transportation Department.

The new agency would be primarily responsible for controlling U.S. borders and coordinating homeland security with other federal, state and local agencies. Under the Hart-Rudman plan, FEMA, Customs, the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol all would retain their current missions and responsibilities, which go well beyond terrorism. Creating a single agency, however, would make a single federal official-the Secretary of the National Homeland Security Agency-accountable for controlling the people and goods that cross U.S. borders.

The Gilmore panel rejected such a proposal, believing that any new agency would only add to the bureaucratic confusion that already exists. The Gilmore panel, unlike the Hart-Rudman commission, includes state and local officials. It concluded in a report last December that the best way to coordinate the morass of federal, state and local players who must respond to any terrorist event would be through a strong coordinator in the White House who has budget authority over federal terrorism programs and is accountable for making them work.

"We called for a national strategy, not a federal strategy-a national strategy that absolutely incorporates the locals and the states," Gilmore told the Senate committee. "They are the cops on the beat. They are the state troopers. They are the local physicians in the local clinics. They are the people in the hospitals. They're going to be the responders who are going to see these issues first." Simply creating another agency would be "fairly fruitless," he argued, since Customs, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard all have other missions besides terrorism.

The recommendations of the Gilmore panel and the Hart-Rudman commission are not mutually exclusive, says Paul Bremer, former U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism and a member of the Gilmore panel. Bremer says a strong White House coordinator such as Ridge could provide the necessary interagency coordination, but that a new agency focused on homeland security could also streamline critical federal responsibilities now carried out across disparate agencies.

James Lee Witt, FEMA's highly respected former administrator, says Congress should resist creating a new agency or acting before Ridge has had a chance to get his bearings and determine for himself what he needs. Putting FEMA together in a separate agency with the Border Patrol, Customs and the Coast Guard would be very difficult, says Witt. "I don't think it's a good fit for FEMA. FEMA's role is to work with state and local governments."

Nonetheless, Witt believes Ridge should be given a chance to assess the tools he will need to combat terrorism, whether that means creating a new agency or not. "I don't think President Bush could have picked a better person for this job," says Witt, who worked closely with the former governor. "It's important that Congress give him some time."

'Lives Are At Stake'

Whether control is achieved through the creation of a new agency or through better coordination of existing agencies, the United States cannot hope to reduce its vulnerability to terrorists without more effectively controlling the people and property that enter the country.

Under the Hart-Rudman plan, Customs, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard would all receive an infusion of desperately needed resources, Hart said at the hearing. He described one scenario the commission discussed where terrorists might conceal a small nuclear warhead in a container ship arriving in Long Beach, Calif., from Singapore. The container could be off-loaded at Long Beach and put on a train to Chicago. Terrorists could then use global-positioning technology to detonate the warhead whenever it reached the desired destination.

"We've got to stop them at the borders," Hart said. "We've got to find a way to inspect more than 1 or 2 percent of the containers coming into this country." Any delay in creating an effective national homeland defense capacity would be "nothing less than a massive breach of the public trust and an act of national folly," Hart said.

The new agency proposed by the commission would not have military authority, nor would it collect intelligence. "There are thoroughly debated reasons of constitutional principle and practical effectiveness that caused us to strike the balance we did," Hart said. The agency would coordinate its activities with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but it would not hold those powers itself. "We don't want a Ministry of the Interior in this country," he said.

But merely having a homeland security "czar," as opposed to a new agency, would only perpetuate the bureaucratic confusion and diffusion of responsibility for protecting U.S. borders, Hart said. "No homeland czar can possibly hope to coordinate the almost hopeless dispersal of authority that currently characterizes the 40 or 50 agencies or elements of agencies with some piece of responsibility for protecting the homeland."

To leave the Border Patrol, the Coast Guard and Customs in their current departments and rely on someone in the White House to coordinate their activities is tantamount to saying the Army, Navy and Air Force could be as effective if they were in separate departments with their activities and services being coordinated out of the White House, Hart argued.

While critics have long advocated breaking up and reorganizing the agencies that make up the INS, those proposals have languished in Congress. In March, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, introduced legislation in the House (H.R. 1158) that would essentially implement the Hart-Rudman commission's recommendation for creating a new agency for homeland security. While the bill has gained support since Sept. 11, its prospects for passage were still unclear in early October.

Hart is adamant the time has arrived for major bureaucratic change. "I would like to hear the attorney general or the Secretary of Transportation or the Secretary of the Treasury explain to the President and the American people and the Congress why it is more important to keep that piece of bureaucratic turf in that department than to protect the people of the United States. Bureaucracy means nothing right now. The lives and safety of the American people are at stake," he said.

McCaffrey, the former drug czar, agrees that border control must be improved. "We have no central organizing effort on the border," he says. "It's ludicrous. Nobody is in charge." The federal agencies involved in controlling both human and commercial traffic at the border have different cultures, different union rules and different information management systems. "It is a giant problem," McCaffrey says.

One federal contractor who has worked with several agencies that have responsibility for managing traffic crossing the borders says if Americans had any idea how easy it would be to smuggle dangerous weapons-even a small nuclear weapon-into the country, they would be shocked. People from different agencies working side by side don't share information, and they often don't seem to understand the importance of what they do because their training is too narrow, the contractor says.

"Many of them wouldn't know a nuclear weapon if they saw one. No one has ever showed them what they ought to be looking for," he says.

A New Front Line

While the events of Sept. 11 created a sense of urgency about the country's vulnerability to terrorism, many officials have long recognized the challenge. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, which created programs to train and equip state and local officials to respond to terrorist attacks. State and local officials have heavily criticized the programs, saying they were not adequately consulted about how the programs would work. In addition, confusion about the respective roles of the Defense Department and the Justice Department have left some state and local officials wondering where to go for help.

"The issues here are so complex and the threat is so difficult to anticipate, nobody really wants to be responsible for the big picture. Instead, you have a very fragmented system with different people taking on bite-size pieces of the problem," says one Justice Department official who asked not to be named. "What are we preparing for? That's the real problem-nobody knows for sure. I can promise you nobody in this business anticipated the events of Sept. 11."

Preparing for the unexpected, and marshaling the strength of federal employees not accustomed to thinking of themselves on the front lines of national security, is exactly what agencies need to plan for.

Like many national security analysts, ANSER's Larsen was "shocked, but not surprised" by the September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "For a long time, many of us have been saying it's not matter of 'if' but 'when.' Now it's a matter of 'where next.' This is not a one-shot deal."