One of Ours

...When the commission releases its findings in late July, it is expected to conclude that both administrations failed on a wide array of military fronts, not just in the use of conventional force but in the sharing of intelligence and creation of special operations and technology to respond to the new threat posed by stateless terrorism.

Outright military action against terrorists would have to be ordered by the president. But critics fault military leaders for discouraging such actions and failing to present alternatives...

...It may call itself the Department of Defense, but the Pentagon really sees itself as the Department of Offense. It didn't used to be this way, of course. During the Cold War, the Pentagon poured resources into defensive programs like NORAD and the civil-defense system. But since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has adopted a near-exclusive focus on threats abroad, and devoted nearly nothing to domestic security efforts...The only time this changes is when Congress steps in to give the military specific direction to do something domestically, e.g. counter-drug exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act or authority to run the National Guard WMD-Civil Support Teams.

...I suppose it's probably a good thing to have the military so focused on the away game. As a civil liberties matter, we don't want our military getting too involved in the domestic intelligence or law enforcement area...Nonetheless, as a conceptual matter, we have a Department of Defense to protect the national security of the United States, and it seems somewhat odd that this department would play such a minimal role in domestic security operations. Especially when you consider that (1) more than half of the intelligence community agencies fall under DoD; (2) the bulk of the U.S. capability for chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological events resides in DoD; and (3) DoD agencies are leading the hunt for terrorists abroad, as well as the interrogations of captured terrorists, so they may have a lot of valuable information for the domestic anti-terrorism fight...