Washington insiders question federal role in homeland security.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Homeland Security

The giant federal agency that emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has helped the nation cope with countless security crises over the past decade. But times have changed, and the Department of Homeland Security has not adjusted to the challenges of the new century, contend former DHS officials and analysts in a new book.

DHS' federal-centric governance is an outdated hierarchical model that is ill-suited to the post-industrial digital age, says John Fass Morton, a national security analyst and author of a soon-to-be-released book titled "Next-Generation Homeland Security: Network Federalism and the Course to National Preparedness," published by the U.S. Naval Institute.

DHS was a "quick fix" that Congress and the public demanded after the 9/11 attacks, says Morton. But national emergencies during the past decade, such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, exposed the weaknesses of the DHS horizontal interagency organization, which does not blend well with the entities that do the heavy lifting in homeland security: state and local governments, the private sector and non-governmental organizations, he argues.

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Tom Ridge, the nation's first secretary of homeland security, endorses this view. In the book's foreword, Ridge calls for a decentralization of homeland security policy making. The current Beltway-centric model, he says, does not work. "To whatever degree some might think, the federal government in Washington cannot manage a response to a regional catastrophe," Ridge says. During his three-year tenure as head of DHS, Ridge says he tried, unsuccessfully, to "regionalize" the agency in order to be close to the communities that it would have to serve.

"We were proposing to break too many rice bowls," he says. His plan "died a death of a thousand cuts."

The concept of "next-generation" homeland security that Morton proposes is not an indictment of big government, Ridge says. It simply is a call for the federal government to allow state and local players, as well as the private sector, to make decisions that could help improve emergency response and disaster preparedness. "We make America less resilient, less secure, if we allow Washington to remain her single point of failure," Ridge contends.

In a statement in response to questions from National Defense, Ridge elaborates:

"We need to ensure that homeland security is not viewed as a federal 'entity' or an inside-the-beltway institution," he says...