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HOW TO DO IT? A DIFFERENT WAY OF

ORGANIZING THE GOVERNMENT

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A s p re se nt ly conf i g ure d, the national security institutions of the U.S.
government are still the institutions constructed to win the Cold War. The
United States confronts a very different world today. Instead of facing a few
very dangerous adversaries, the United States confronts a number of less visi-
ble challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states and call
for quick, imaginative, and agile responses.

The men and women of the World War II generation rose to the challenges of

the 1940s and 1950s. They restructured the government so that it could protect
the country. That is now the job of the generation that experienced 9/11.
Those attacks showed, emphatically, that ways of doing business rooted in a dif-
ferent era are just not good enough. Americans should not settle for incremen-
tal, ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago for a world that no
longer exists.

We recommend significant changes in the organization of the government.

We know that the quality of the people is more important than the quality of
the wiring diagrams. Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the out-
standing efforts of so many individual officials straining, often without success,
against the boundaries of the possible. Good people can overcome bad struc-
tures.They should not have to.

The United States has the resources and the people.The government should

combine them more effectively, achieving unity of effort.We offer five major
recommendations to do that:

· unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against

Islamist terrorists across the foreign-domestic divide with a National
Counterterrorism Center;

· unifying the intelligence community with a new National Intelli-

gence Director;

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