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Deconstructing DHS

Terrorism is one kind of plague; some say bureaucracy is another. Can the Department of Homeland Security manage to overcome both?

As part of our coverage, we will profile one of the agencies absorbed by DHS, to help readers understand the continuing evolution of the DHS mission. While that mission might seem obvious on its face, much that some of the recombinant agencies formerly did (and may continue to do) doesn't entirely jibe with their new roles in DHS. How, then, do they reinvent themselves to satisfy their new agency parent while still carrying out some traditional missions?

There wasn't a lot of time to consider highly complex problems like that when DHS was catapulted into being. Nor was there time to straighten out the complex skein of federal, state and local money required to make DHS a success. Witness the formula for funding homeland security at the state and local levels, which initially would have allotted seven times as much money per capita to Wyoming as to New York. Thus, the economics of homeland defense will be the focus of another feature in our series.

We will round out the coverage with a look at DHS's approach to information security, where the poor overall quality of the infrastructure combined with a lack of controls create a vulnerable platform ripe for attack.

In addition to the unresolved questions, we'll also mark DHS's progress since 9/11. "Everybody agrees, airports are safer today than they were," says Michael Hershman, a veteran of military intelligence who now runs Civitas Group, a consultancy, with former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke.

We'll also delve into areas where DHS stands accused of failing to improve securityjust recently, for example, news reports described a DHS unable to uncover terrorist financing networks because of Washington bureaucratic wranglingthe very intelligence gridlock a massive, centralized security agency was supposed to sort out.

Accusations of failureslarge and smallare unavoidable for DHS, since it exists at the nexus between the mandate to ensure public safety and the task of creating the über-agency that will carry out the mandate. It's as if we've had to send a corps of basic training cadets on a U.N. peacekeeping mission. The task at hand is tricky at best, herculean and quixotic at worst.

That is where we start our series, at the crossroads of lowercase homeland security, which waits for no one, and uppercase Homeland Security, which will demand patience and require a significant amount of time to become the fully mature agency capable of protecting us. Senior Editor Todd Datz's history of Homeland Security grounds the entire series of articles with a clear explanationhow and why we find ourselves on this particular path toward improving homeland security, and where down the path the decisions we make now will take us.