UCLA School of Public Policy professor Amy Zegart is the author of “Flawed by Design” that examines the flawed national security process in the United States government. This earlier post on the 9/11 Commission hearings provided her astute insights into the problems that arise from failing to establish clear priorities in the intelligence gathering process.
In this Newsday op-ed, Professor Zegart — who had Condi Rice as her thesis adviser — examines how far we have come in terms fo homeland security since September 11, 2001, and she does not find the results encouraging:

Homeland security funds are flowing, but not to the right places. Since 9/11, Congress has distributed $13 billion to state governments with a formula only Washington could concoct: 40 percent was split evenly, regardless of a state’s population, targets or vulnerability to terrorist attack. The result: Safe places got safer. Rural states with fewer potential targets and low populations, such as Alaska and Wyoming, received more than $55 per resident. Target-rich and densely populated states like New York and California received $25 and $14 per person respectively. Osama bin Laden, beware: Wyoming is well fortified.
It gets worse. Over the past three years, the federal government has spent 20 times more on aviation security than on protecting America’s seaports, even though more than 90 percent of U.S. foreign trade moves by ship, but less than 5 percent of all shipping containers entering the country are inspected. One recent study showed the odds of detecting a nuclear bomb inside a heavy machinery container were close to zero. As the 9/11 Commission concluded, such a lopsided transportation strategy makes sense only if you intend to fight the last war.

And on the intelligence front — which is Professor Zegart’s area of expertise — the lack of progress is equally appalling:

Then there is our intelligence system, a dysfunctional family of agencies that have proven uniquely adept at resisting reform, getting the wrong information into the right hands and the right information into the wrong hands. The past three years have witnessed the two greatest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor. Yet Bush has held no one accountable for these results, and has avoided leading the charge for reform.
The president grudgingly embraced one of the 9/11 Commission’s key recommendations – creating a national intelligence director with “full budgetary authority” – only under strong pressure and finally, last Wednesday, after opposing the idea for weeks. There is urgency and boldness for you.

Not only has Bush shown tepid support for the 9/11 Commission’s ideas, he seems to have none of his own. For instance: How can we fix the cultural pathologies that cripple our intelligence system? Bush has said nothing about this and the Commission identified the problem but left it to the national intelligence director to solve.

While Bush has placed the biggest burden on his own record in the campaign, it’s important to note that Kerry has offered only a lackluster alternative that can be summed up as, “I’m for whatever the 9/11 Commission says.” This is like a diner who orders the entire menu because there’s nothing he really wants except to avoid making a choice. The commission’s recommendations are good, but far from perfect.

And Ms. Zegart is not one to criticize without providing constructive proposals on how to improve intelligence gathering in the federal government:

Building new organizational arrangements with more people and more power will not make us safer if intelligence officials still view the world through the same old lenses and hoard information in the same old stovepipes.
The FBI, for example, faces a daunting cultural challenge: transforming a crime-fighting culture that prizes slow and careful evidence gathering after-the-fact into an intelligence culture that takes fast action to prevent future tragedies. Training programs are crucial to this effort. Today, however, counter-terrorism training constitutes only two weeks out of the 17-week required course for all new agents. That’s less time than agents get for vacation.
Then there is the unspoken 11th Commandment operating inside the CIA, FBI and the other 13 intelligence agencies: Thou Shalt Not Share. Here, too, the core problem is cultural – the reluctance to pass information across agency lines is deeply engrained, based more on habit and values than policy or organization charts. And here, too, training is key.
Creating a “one-team” approach to intelligence requires developing trust and building informal networks between officials in different agencies. This is best done by requiring cross-agency training programs early in officials’ careers. By current policies, however, most intelligence professionals can spend 20 years or more without a single community-wide training experience. Dots will always be hard to connect when intelligence agencies do not trust or understand each other.

Read the entire piece.