DHS Needs to Recognize the Obvious

The Department of Homeland Security’s first order of business was to identify all the vulnerabilities to terrorism in the United States. As the list grows longer and longer, it has become increasingly apparent that there will never be sufficient resources to defend against all these potential threats, especially with the federal government’s mentality of throwing money at all problems.

Over the past year or so, more focus has been on figuring out how to use what is currently available to neutralize the most likely threats. The most obvious of the problems has been discovered to be not resources, but communication.

What can the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) do to capitalize on counter-terrorism efforts that work, and make them more efficient and effective?
The reliance on the mystically all-saving “technology” as a solution has become a “blind alley”. The real problems in providing truly effective homeland security are essentially communication issues.

As reported in March 2005, “First responders are not well aligned with each other, federal agencies are not well aligned with state agencies, and the armed forces are not well aligned with anyone.”

Many of these groups don’t have the ability to do a decent job by themselves in their own milieu. If DHS wants to protect the nation on a more encompassing scale, it needs to get everyone communicating and coordinating with each other, as well as creating at least one competent intelligence agency that the rest of the agencies and military can rely on for factual and timely information.

This has proven to be a very difficult concept to actually put into practice.
“Many of these bureaucracies equate communication with subordination. No one wants to become part of someone else’s empire. The FBI has long had those kinds of problems with state and local law enforcement agencies. Communication is more than exchanging phone numbers. Details like who must do what for who when there is a terrorism problem, have to be carefully worked out in advance.”

This kind of coordination has been very difficult to execute in the past.
“More futile and expensive efforts to develop hardware tools that vanquish terrorists, no doubt appear an easier path to pursue than getting everyone to communicate and cooperate.”

Sure, it always looks like an easy solution to throw money at some new device or computer program. But the real solution to our nation’s security in a time of war is the proper and complete coordination and communication of the existing agencies.

In other words, the concept of HUMINT has to be reasserted in our intelligence agencies on a management level as well as on a collection level. But, that seems obvious to anyone who isn’t impressed with expensive tools, toys, and gadgets.

But then, it is also obvious that the distribution of workload in the current web of federal agencies should be re-evaluated for reorganization.
Maybe even real change would come about if some of them were disbanded.