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· Today the CIA is still central. But the FBI is much more active, along
with other parts of the Justice Department.
· The Defense Department effort is now enormous.Three of its uni-
fied commands, each headed by a four-star general, have counterter-
rorism as a primary mission: Special Operations Command, Central
Command (both headquartered in Florida), and Northern Command
(headquartered in Colorado).
· A new Department of Homeland Security combines formidable
resources in border and transportation security, along with analysis of
domestic vulnerability and other tasks.
· The State Department has the lead on many of the foreign policy tasks
we described in chapter 12.
· At the White House, the National Security Council (NSC) now is
joined by a parallel presidential advisory structure, the Homeland
Security Council.
So far we have mentioned two reasons for joint action--the virtue of joint
planning and the advantage of having someone in charge to ensure a unified
effort.There is a third: the simple shortage of experts with sufficient skills.The
limited pool of critical experts--for example, skilled counterterrorism analysts
and linguists--is being depleted. Expanding these capabilities will require not
just money, but time.
Primary responsibility for terrorism analysis has been assigned to the Ter-
rorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), created in 2003, based at the CIA
headquarters but staffed with representatives of many agencies, reporting
directly to the Director of Central Intelligence.Yet the CIA houses another
intelligence "fusion" center: the Counterterrorist Center that played such a
key role before 9/11.A third major analytic unit is at Defense, in the Defense
Intelligence Agency. A fourth, concentrating more on homeland vulnerabili-
ties, is at the Department of Homeland Security.The FBI is in the process of
building the analytic capability it has long lacked, and it also has the Terrorist
Screening Center.
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The U.S. government cannot afford so much duplication of effort.There are
not enough experienced experts to go around.The duplication also places extra
demands on already hard-pressed single-source national technical intelligence
collectors like the National Security Agency.
Combining Joint Intelligence and Joint Action
A "smart"government would integrate all sources of information to see the enemy
as a whole. Integrated all-source analysis should also inform and shape strategies
to collect more intelligence.Yet the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, while it
has primary responsibility for terrorism analysis, is formally proscribed from hav-
HOW TO DO IT?
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