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· There are precedents for surrendering authority for joint planning

while preserving an agency's operational control. In the international
context, NATO commanders may get line authority over forces
assigned by other nations. In U.S. unified commands, commanders
plan operations that may involve units belonging to one of the serv-
ices. In each case, procedures are worked out, formal and informal, to
define the limits of the joint commander's authority.

The most serious disadvantage of the NCTC is the reverse of its greatest virtue.
The struggle against Islamist terrorism is so important that any clear-cut cen-
tralization of authority to manage and be accountable for it may concentrate
too much power in one place. The proposed NCTC would be given the
authority of planning the activities of other agencies. Law or executive order
must define the scope of such line authority.

The NCTC would not eliminate interagency policy disputes.These would

still go to the National Security Council.To improve coordination at the White
House, we believe the existing Homeland Security Council should soon be
merged into a single National Security Council. The creation of the NCTC
should help the NSC staff concentrate on its core duties of assisting the pres-
ident and supporting interdepartmental policymaking.

We recognize that this is a new and difficult idea precisely because the

authorities we recommend for the NCTC really would, as Secretary Rums-
feld foresaw, ask strong agencies to "give up some of their turf and authority in
exchange for a stronger, faster, more efficient government wide joint effort."
Countering transnational Islamist terrorism will test whether the U.S. govern-
ment can fashion more flexible models of management needed to deal with
the twenty-first-century world.

An argument against change is that the nation is at war, and cannot afford

to reorganize in midstream. But some of the main innovations of the 1940s and
1950s, including the creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even the construc-
tion of the Pentagon itself, were undertaken in the midst of war. Surely the
country cannot wait until the struggle against Islamist terrorism is over.

"Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated,

diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also respon-
sibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost."

That comment was made more than 40 years ago, about Pearl Harbor.We hope
another commission, writing in the future about another attack, does not again
find this quotation to be so apt.

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