For those who wonder why British passengers lacked so much confidence in airport security that they boycotted a flight out of Malaga, this report on counterterrorism research here in the US provides an explanation. Spencer Hsu writes about the bureaucratic disaster behind the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, and it sounds like the first chapter in a future bipartisan report on the next catastrophic terrorist attack:

The federal research agency in charge of countering emerging terrorist threats such as liquid explosives is so hobbled by poor leadership, weak financial management and inadequate technology that Congress is on the verge of cutting its budget in half.

The Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate has struggled with turnover, reorganizations and raids on its budget since it was established in 2003, according to independent scientists, department officials and senior members of Congress.

At the same time, the Bush administration's overriding focus on nuclear and biological threats has delayed research on weapons aimed at aviation, a controversial choice that was questioned anew after a plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners from London was made public Aug. 10. ...

In a 2007 spending bill awaiting a vote after the August congressional recess, the Republican-led House would cut spending by the Science and Technology Directorate from $1.3 billion to $668 million. Congress noted about $250 million in unspent agency funds.

Republican and Democratic senators are offering the agency $712 million, but in a budget report cited the agency's lack of goals, mystifying accounting and unspent money, and called it a "rudderless ship."

Our technology should give us a significant advantage over the terrorists, as well as our native production capacity to implement it. In previous wars, this industrial potential proved the difference between victory and defeat, especially for our allies, who would have starved of the necessary materiel with which to fight the enemy. This report tells us that we are squandering perhaps our largest defensive advanatge, and we're losing it because no one can provide the necessary leadership to set priorities and then plan to meet them.

This failure gets spread between Congress and the Bush administration equally. Congress has played games with the budget and provided little oversight on this program, and the White House -- especially Michael Chertoff -- seems uninterested in pursuing technological solutions. In the meantime, billions of dollars have been wasted in an effort no one wants to own and no one seems interested in investigating.

I have argued that technological solutions alone will not stop terrorists, and the explosives detectors mentioned in this article would not have stopped the British conspiracy in any case. We need to focus on the terrorists, and not exclusively on the materiel they use in their fevered plans to commit mass murder on ghastly scales. The Israelis have had decades of success in this strategy. We need to perfect the methods for ourselves in the small-scale pilot programs currently in place and put them into wide use, and start catching terrorists instead of nail clippers.

However, that does not mean that we cannot pursue technological solutions in parallel to such efforts. Since Congress and the White House continues to spend money on these R&D efforts, they both have the responsibility to see that the funds get used efficiently and in some sort of strategic manner, rather than the chaotic and unproductive manner which Hsu describes here. When the situation deteriorates to the point where Congress feels it necessary to spend less, then we know that action must be taken to correct the breakdowns.

UPDATE: The first commenters on this story point out that criticizing a government agency for not spending money seems rather ... counterproductive to fiscal discipline. I'd agree if the Directorate had produced results and implemented them efficiently, providing better security for American travelers. That certainly does not appear to be the case, and the continuously shifting priorities and strategies that have stymied the Directorate shows a problem in mission definition and execution.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Rudderless Research At DHS:

» Rudderless Research At DHS from Old War Dogs
For those who wonder why British passengers lacked so much confidence in airport security that they boycotted a flight out of Malaga, this report on counterterrorism research here in the US provides an explanation. Spencer Hsu writes about the bureaucr... [Read More]

Tracked on August 20, 2006 10:30 AM