Don’t take this the wrong way, but in my opinion you are getting too focused on the “org chart” without having slugged through the more relevant questions of what their mission should be. Once you can define that, then you align capabilities to achieve those objectives. An “org chart” would fall out of that at some point, but it is not where you start, it is where you end up. Capabilities are what are important, and there are many ways to achieve the same set of capabilities. Some may produce better results, some worse.
The capabilities the DHS is working to achieve right now are outlined in their five year strategic plan:
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/DHS_StratPlan_FINAL_spread.pdf
They define their charter as follows:
"We are a unified Department with a shared focus: strengthening our Nation – through a partnership with individual citizens, the private sector, state, local, and tribal governments, and our global partners. We must also coordinate across Federal agencies, while shaping homeland security policy and coordinating incident management.
"We seek continually to improve the operations of the Department, to discharge our duty of safeguarding the home front. This includes:
- Clarifying, defining, and communicating leadership roles, responsibilities, and lines of authority at all government levels;
- Strengthening accountability systems that balance the need for fast, flexible response with the need to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse;
- Consolidating efforts to integrate the Department’s critical mission of preparedness; and
- Enhancing our capabilities to respond to major disasters and emergencies, including catastrophic events, particularly in terms of situational assessment and awareness, emergency communications, evacuations, search and rescue, logistics, and mass care and sheltering."
In short, the DHS is about one thing: INTEGRATING all the critical functions necessary to prepare for or respond to any and all threats to security of the homeland. Integrate doesn’t mean “own”. Also note that the domain of this integration starts at the top with federal services: USCG, NG, BP, FBI, agencies, infrastructure, etc., but does not stop there. It goes on to include state and local agencies and functions, and even citizens themselves. It is not about creating a new federal bureaucracy, it is about integrating and coordinating across all the various functional silos that exist from the federal government down to the local level and the individual.
Because people are territorial and organizations are self promoting, this is not an easy task. Everyone wants to protect their authority and their budget. This is basic human nature, but contrary to what’s best for the country. It leaves us vulnerable. Let’s say a nuke goes off in a major U.S. city. Action is neccessary! Everyone on your list shows up, plus all the state and local entities to boot. There they are – sitting in their vehicles at the city limits. Who does what? Who knows who is SUPPOSED to do what? Who’s in charge? Who tells you what to do, and who should you be telling what to do? What is legal to tell someone to do? Who can you ask for help? What kind of help can anyone provide? How can you even communicate? Your radios don’t even operate in the same bandwidth! How can you share information? How can you work together to solve this problem? Right now is a really bad time to try to figure it out! In New Orleans, we didn’t figure it out. The sad part is we haven’t done much to improve this situation since then.
Breaking down silos and getting these functions to work together is one of the toughest jobs in the world. People have their piece of the pie, and the most common practice is to protect their turf. Throwing money at things is what the government does best, but that doesn’t solve the fundamental problems. It could help dramatically to spend money in certain areas once you got everyone headed in a unified direction. Other than that you will probably waste most of what you spend. It is hard to find any lasting value out of the billions and billions of dollars spent shortly after 9/11. You have to overcome basic human nature to get all these functions work together to develop integrated concepts of operations, common communications infrastructures, common information sharing systems, etc. That is what is going to make a difference.
