Since President Obama has now come out and blamed the
security breach that resulted in a near successful attack by underwear bomber Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab on "systemic failures," the question becomes: How do we go
about fixing that?
For some answers, The Cable turned to Jim Locher,
the president and CEO of the Project on National Security Reform, a nongovernmental organization with ties to
National Security Advisor Jim Jones that has been sounding the alarm about America's dysfunctional national
security infrastructure for years.
"While President Obama said there were systemic failures,
our problem has been that we haven't done systemic reform," said Locher. "We've
had lots of reforms in the past but they've been marginal adjustments, ad hoc in nature."
"Here we're seeing play out that lack of integration, that
lack of cooperation, that lack of collaboration."
Information sharing across the intelligence agencies is just
not occurring to the degree necessary, as evidenced by early reports on the
Obama administration's forthcoming review of the incident, which point the
finger somewhat at the CIA and the Office of the Director for National
Intelligence.
Some of the problem is cultural. For years the mantra has
been to move from a "need to know" to a "need to share" mentality, but many in
the intelligence community still operate from a risk-avoidance perspective. The
fact that the CIA
had information from Abdulmutallab's father that it failed to pass on is
suggestive of that. In the past, the CIA has been criticized for privileging the
protection of its sources and methods over sharing intelligence with other agencies.
But on a bureaucratic level, the reforms that Congress has
passed have fallen short and succumbed somewhat to the struggles between the
actors, Locher said. Meanwhile the Obama administration, which has yet to come
out with a National Security Strategy, hasn't matched its rhetoric with
results.
"The Obama administration came in and has been talking about
collaboration across the national security system, they've talked the need for
integrated effort, for the need to make use of all the instruments of national
power and influence, but that's not been translated into action," Locher said.
There aren't incentives for people in the system to get on
board with cooperation. Interagency mechanisms have been slow to materialize
and where they do exist there is confusion over roles and authorities, he added.
Prime examples are the recent conflict between CIA and ODNI
over responsibilities, as detailed in this
LA Times piece, as well as longstanding
conflict between the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center
(State sought
to shift blame this week to NCTC).
Perhaps not surprisingly, Locher is calling for more
authority over missions and budgets for the ODNI, which is headed by his ally Adm.
Dennis Blair. The 2004
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created ODNI, made
too many compromises and created confusion as a result, he said.
Overall, the underwear bomber incident "just proves why
national security reform is so important," Locher said.
Unfortunately, PNSR's work on the issue was significantly
complicated this month, when House Appropriations Defense subcommittee chairman
John Murtha, D-PA, moved
to completely defund the organization in a move to protect his own
bureaucratic turf.
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