You would think that in the four years since the 9/11 attacks the US homeland would have been made close to invulnerable.

But, you would be wrong.

True, we are safer than before 9/11 -- partly because the enormous American attention and funds devoted to security have made terrorists cautious -- but also due to our military forces taking the fight overseas to terrorists and their supporters.

But, we are not as safe as we should be, and that is because two of the other three federal institutions bearing the brunt of the war against terror -- US intelligence and homeland security -- have faltered.

The Defense Department and military services are blessed with strong and determined leadership. They focus their operations largely outside the toxic political Washington environment, sparing the military from the politics-as-usual, nonstop finger pointing, misplaced priorities, and maddening lack of common sense that have plagued homeland security and US intelligence.

As for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we didn't need the human and national tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to show us that it hasn't worked out.

The sad struggles of a once independent and now overly bureaucratized FEMA are only a metaphor for many of the other 22 similarly struggling legacy agencies stuffed under the DHS umbrella following 9/11.

Ironically, Katrina may have done the country a service in shaking the complacency that has overtaken us while critical institutions fell short.

Almost as important, Katrina has starkly illustrated the shortfalls in our response and recovery capabilities, as well as the consequences had the New Orleans/Delta region been attacked by terrorists. Home to significant transportation, industrial and energy infrastructure, this region was likely among the top al Qaeda targets. A terrorist attack on the scale of Katrina on similar targets elsewhere in the country could cripple the US for months.

So, it's clear that we cannot afford to overlook DHS deficiencies even while we recover from Katrina. Among these deficiencies are:

--The massive under-investment in maritime security (by a factor of 15 to 1 in comparison to commercial aviation security).

--DHS management of grants and first responder appropriations, both of which have become pork barrel programs almost completely disconnected from the threats and vulnerabilities they are supposed to address.

--Failure of DHS to develop a formula to address almost 90 percent of US infrastructure in the hands of the private sector and under state and municipal authority.

--Illegal immigration, which is sapping the energies of federal and state border security personnel while undermining respect for law and DHS authority.

While these national security problems fester, DHS is distracted with monumental internal organizational and integration issues. For example, when the premium should be on execution, the agency focuses on creating an over-arching planning capability.

DHS is not exclusively at fault. Since its inception, DHS has been striving to develop a unified personnel management system, including incentives and performance standards for its 180,000 personnel. But, it has had to contend with opposition and litigation by unions representing fully one-third of its personnel quietly encouraged by pro-union politicians. Amazingly, a federal judge ruled this summer that the personnel system didn't sufficiently facilitate collective bargaining and had to be scrapped.

Collective bargaining in an agency charged with protecting the US homeland?

No wonder DHS was overmatched by Katrina.

I would respectfully submit that we have run out of time to make DHS work and, at a time of threat and vulnerability, the skills and energies of its component agencies should be focused on protecting the homeland; not organizing themselves and certainly not union politics.

Let's unleash the component agencies from DHS, let them return untrammeled to their very serious substantive missions, and live with whatever coordination problems ensue. As a model, we can use the Coast Guard, which has retained its independence and unique institutional culture and thrived even while nominally part of DHS. It is better to be safe than coordinated, and it looks at this juncture that these two objectives are mutually exclusive.

As for intelligence, which is the indispensable front line in identifying and defeating the terrorist threat, we have not only not solved obvious performance problems related to 9/11 and WMD, but arguably made them worse while placing the new and very serious responsibility for domestic intelligence in the hands of a bureaucracy manifestly incapable of doing the job.

Failures in the intelligence community (about both 9/11 and Iraq's WMD capabilities) were bound to happen for a variety of reasons:

-- Hostility and indifference by its political masters during the 70's and 90's (poor leadership by some White House appointees along with ham-handed and politicized congressional oversight).

-- Never-ending and agenda-driven congressional and IG investigations that punished the competent and daring, and left untouched the mediocre and cautious -- battalions of intrusive lawyers and bureaucrats obstructing risky endeavors and risk-taking officers.

-- And finally, in the case of terrorism, a poorly thought-out national strategy that gave the FBI primacy in what was viewed as a law enforcement problem.

It is no wonder that the CIA and many of its brother agencies became risk averse, or victim to what the military calls the zero-defect mentality.   

How could this crippled institution succeed against the ruthless and determined terrorist target and the world's most repressive, closed and murderous nations?

And in the wake of 9/11 what did we do? Instead of unshackling our intelligence as we did our military, we let grieving families, a carping press and cowed politicians eager for political advantage “reform” intelligence under the stewardship of the dilettante 9/11 commission.

Now we have the Director of National Intelligence-- yet another intelligence bureaucracy recently authorized a staff of almost 900 -- reorganizing intelligence structures, coordinating bewildered and shell-shocked agencies, writing memos, searching for office space, fighting turf battles, and the like. Small wonder the remaining operatives in the CIA and elsewhere are quietly slipping away into retirement or other pursuits, either in the private sector or mentally at their desks.

High risk; high rewards.  Most Americans clearly understand this; Washington's bureaucracies, politicians and heavy thinkers clearly don't.

And that's not all. Faced with the obvious and urgent need for a domestic intelligence capability to ferret out the terrorists in the US, we turned to the FBI, who failed at precisely this task prior to 9/11. Its effort to “transform” into a world-class counterterrorism domestic agency since 9/11 similarly has fallen short. FBI Director Mueller himself admitted in congressional testimony earlier this year that the Bureau really didn't know what was afoot in the US.

Congress, the Justice Department and GAO have produced overwhelming evidence that the FBI simply isn't up to this task: it has faltered in hiring intelligence analysts and translators to fill its ranks, and those brought on board are leaving far earlier than expected. Even after spending $178 million in its latest effort to develop an integrated information management system essential in counterterrorism intelligence, the Bureau has had to admit failure and return to the drawing board; and other federal and state and local law enforcement continue to grumble about the FBI's legendary aversion to collaborate.

We...