Chapter 13 "How to Do It" Summary and Analysis

America's national security apparatus was organized to fight the Cold War. The government must be reorganized for the challenges of confronting nebulous, non-state actors (terrorist organizations).

The Commission recommends: Creating a National Counterterrorism Center that will unify intelligence on terrorism and bridge the foreign-domestic divide; creating the position of National Intelligence Director (now known as Director of National Intelligence) that will unify all the disparate intelligence agencies across the government; redesigning the government's computer information systems on a network model rather than the current hub-and-spoke model; improving congressional oversight to increase accountability; and strengthening all agencies involved in homeland defense.

A National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) would solve the problem of different agencies acting on the same problem with no one clearly in charge. Opportunities to uncover the 9/11 plot were lost because...