In the so-called war on terror, the United States is preparing a new bureaucratic playbook to make it appear as though it’s doing something about its ongoing intelligence failures.

The classified National Implementation Plan, written by the National Counterterrorism Center, runs 160 pages and assigns specific counterterrorism tasks to various agencies within the government. It’s classified, of course, to cover up the massive scope and extent of the intelligence community’s failure to get its act together.

Since September 11, 2001, much of the federal government has already been reorganized and expanded far beyond anything known in history.

Yet the counterterrorism infrastructure that resulted has become so immense and unwieldy that many looking at it from the outside, and even some on the inside, have trouble understanding how it works or how much safer it has made the country.

Huge amounts of money have been spent — $430 billion so far on overseas military and diplomatic counterterrorism operations, according to the U.S. comptroller general, a tripling of pre-9/11 expenditures for domestic security programs to an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion this year, and untallied billions more in state and local money. . . .

The proof that it is all working, White House officials often say, is that there has been no attack on U.S. soil since 2001.

But critics say that after nearly five years, the fight against terrorism often seems like a chaotic work in progress. — Washington Post

ThePost goes into great detail and it’s well worth reading, but I’ll try to hit a few high points:

The problem, of course, is that more bureaucracy has been added on top of bureaucracy, with hardly a thought as to how intelligence and counterterrorism functions might be integrated, and no thoughts at all about reducing the size of the bureaucracy.

This results in, of course, the primary mission of each bureaucracy being not to gather or analyze intelligence or catch terrorists, but to protect its turf from all of the other bureaucracies.

And the result is poor communication between the wide and varied intelligence agencies, and poor communication to the consumers of that intelligence.

Not to mention waste. Sixteen intelligence agencies all worked separately on a threat assessment for the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, earlier this year, rather than coordinating with each other. The result? Sixteen assessments that all said the same thing: the threat of terrorism was minimal.

“They posted them internally to their own organizations and sent them out to share” with other community members as the authoritative bottom line, the official said. “They would all argue, ‘We had to do it for our principal, our Cabinet member’ or whatever.” Watching the competing agencies, he said, “is like watching 7-year-olds play soccer — you’ve got 20 kids all following the ball.”

Avoiding such duplication and wasted effort, he said, “was the whole point” of setting up the NCTC as the sole provider of integrated intelligence analysis. Yet neither congressional mandates nor presidential directives have been enough to eliminate the overlap. — Ibid.

While some members of the administration are optimistic that the National Implementation Plan will finally put the bureaucratic turf wars to rest and get everyone on the same page and talking to each other, others believe that yet more deck chair rearranging is necessary.

The answer the National Counterterrorism Center is going with is to lock everyone in the same room until they work out their differences, hoping that “familiarity will breed cooperation.” I always heard that familiarity breeds contempt.

Not that that’s necessarily the answer either. Those assigned to the NCTC from other intelligence agencies are on temporary rotation, usually for two years. So they bring with them the institution they came from.

They’re all going to have to stay locked in that room for a long time before they manage to get much done.