Legislation calling for the largest government reorganization
since World War II is a positive development, but much improvement
is needed before the United States can combat terrorism as
effectively as possible, two of UCLA’s top national security
experts said.
Both houses of Congress voted decisively last week to establish
a Homeland Security Department, which will combine 22 agencies to
deter terrorist threats and to respond to attacks. President Bush
called the legislation “landmark in its scope.”
But both Chancellor Albert Carnesale, a former advisor to
numerous presidents on national security issues, and Amy Zegart, an
assistant professor of policy studies at UCLA who served as a
foreign policy advisor to the Bush 2000 campaign, said there are
still fundamental flaws in the way the government works to deter
terrorism and that the new Cabinet-level department will take a few
years to really get going.
“This is a good bill,” Zegart said of the
legislation. “This is a necessary bill. But there are going
to be all sorts of problems. Let’s not kid
ourselves.”
“What we have now is much better than what we had a few
days ago, but is it as good as it could be? No way,” she
added.
Carnesale, in an interview last week, pointed out that the
primary mission of many of the agencies that will fall under the
Homeland Security umbrella, such as the Coast Guard and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, is not to combat terrorism.
It will be difficult to integrate these agencies into a broad,
anti-terror effort, Carnesale said.
“It’s a redesign nightmare,” he said.
Zegart said the legislation will help by “consolidating
the face of our border.” One department will be responsible
for many counterterrorism tasks ““Â everything from
determining who comes into the country to collecting intelligence
on suspected terror groups abroad and working to convict criminals
in the United States.
But Zegart points out that the way intelligence is collected
won’t really change with the new legislation. There will be a
new “customer” reading the intelligence, but that
doesn’t mean the intelligence will be gathered differently,
she said.
Before the country can most effectively fight terrorism, it
needs real intelligence reform, Zegart said.
Zegart’s primary area of research includes exploring why
intelligence agencies adapted poorly to new threats after the end
of the Cold War.
Many of the United States’ intelligence budgetary and
programmatic priorities changed little after the fall of the Soviet
Union, Zegart said, even as experts identified a new and different
threat to the United States.
Throughout the 1990s, the United States continued to spend about
90 percent of its intelligence budget on hardware, on items like
satellites, Zegart said.
“Satellites are really good at counting Soviet
warheads,” she said. “They’re really bad at
penetrating terrorist groups.”
In Zegart’s view, after the Cold War, an already poorly
organized intelligence community was even more ill-equipped to
protect the country from a new threat. She suggests giving the
director of the CIA control over nearly all of the intelligence
budget as one way to help the intelligence efforts. Currently, the
CIA director has control over about 15 percent of the budget while
the rest is controlled by the secretary of defense.
Additionally, she advocates the creation of a domestic
intelligence agency which would operate under the CIA. The FBI,
whose mission is to prosecute already-committed crimes, will never
be an effective counterterrorism agency, she said.
Though Zegart calls some of her ideas “radical,” she
said they are not without support from numerous other intelligence
experts. Still, these changes have not been implemented.
Zegart points out that bureaucratic agencies are not designed to
change but rather to perform routine tasks; that the separation of
powers in the U.S. government allows for people critical of an
agency’s task to have a voice in how that agency is created,
thereby limiting its ability; and that self-interested politicians
don’t put intelligence reform on the top of their agendas as
it won’t help them get re-elected. Because of these
“three enduring realities,” Zegart gives broad
intelligence reform “about a zero percent chance.”
“I hate to say this,” she said, “but I think
it will take another major catastrophic terrorist attack before we
will see reform in the intelligence community.”