Competitive Adaptation Counter-Terrorism Style 16
and dozens of military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. Many of these
agencies are bureaucratic behemoths featuring thousands of employees organized in
numerous administrative divisions containing multiple management layers and byzantine
decision-making protocols. Post-9/11 administrative reforms by the U.S. government
have made this bureaucratic apparatus even larger and more convoluted with the creation
of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and the National Counter-Terrorism
Intelligence Center and National Intelligence Director in 2004.
Department of Homeland Security
Formed in direct response to Washington’s inability to prevent the planes
operation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consolidates 180,000 employees
from twenty-two separate agencies containing distinct organizational histories, missions,
and administrative authorities under the roof of a single department with an expansive
mission: to protect the U.S. against terrorist threats. While the Bush administration’s
bureaucratic reorganization is designed to streamline the institutional structure of the new
department, top-down decision-making hierarchies and abundant management layers
remain, as is inevitable in any federal bureaucracy with such a sweeping mandate. In
addition, a “cumbersome retooling process” is underway as numerous agencies involved
in the homeland security shuffle, including the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service reconfigure their missions, operations, and organizational cultures to fight the
war on terrorism, without surrendering their original missions.
One important aspect of
19
Peter Andreas, “Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-first Century,” International
Security Vol. 28, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 92.
Convention