About those “systemic failures” …

Since President Obama has now come out and blamed the security breach that resulted in a near successful attack by underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on "systemic failures," the question becomes: How do we go about fixing that?

For some answers, The Cable turned to Jim Locher, the president and CEO of the Project on National Security Reform, a nongovernmental organization with ties to National Security Advisor Jim Jones that has been sounding the alarm about America’s dysfunctional national security infrastructure for years.

"While President Obama said there were systemic failures, our problem has been that we haven’t done systemic reform," said Locher. "We’ve had lots of reforms in the past but they’ve been marginal adjustments, ad hoc in nature."

"Here we’re seeing play out that lack of integration, that lack of cooperation, that lack of collaboration."

Information sharing across the intelligence agencies is just not occurring to the degree necessary, as evidenced by early reports on the Obama administration’s forthcoming review of the incident, which point the finger somewhat at the CIA and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence.

Some of the problem is cultural. For years the mantra has been to move from a "need to know" to a "need to share" mentality, but many in the intelligence community still operate from a risk-avoidance perspective. The fact that the CIA had information from Abdulmutallab’s father that it failed to pass on is suggestive of that. In the past, the CIA has been criticized for privileging the protection of its sources and methods over sharing intelligence with other agencies.

But on a bureaucratic level, the reforms that Congress has passed have fallen short and succumbed somewhat to the struggles between the actors, Locher said. Meanwhile the Obama administration, which has yet to come out with a National Security Strategy, hasn’t matched its rhetoric with results.

"The Obama administration came in and has been talking about collaboration across the national security system, they’ve talked the need for integrated effort, for the need to make use of all the instruments of national power and influence, but that’s not been translated into action," Locher said.

There aren’t incentives for people in the system to get on board with cooperation. Interagency mechanisms have been slow to materialize and where they do exist there is confusion over roles and authorities, he added.

Prime examples are the recent conflict between CIA and ODNI over responsibilities, as detailed in this LA Times piece, as well as longstanding conflict between the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center (State sought to shift blame this week to NCTC).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Locher is calling for more authority over missions and budgets for the ODNI, which is headed by his ally Adm. Dennis Blair. The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created ODNI, made too many compromises and created confusion as a result, he said.

Overall, the underwear bomber incident "just proves why national security reform is so important," Locher said.

Unfortunately, PNSR’s work on the issue was significantly complicated this month, when House Appropriations Defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha, D-PA, moved to completely defund the organization in a move to protect his own bureaucratic turf.