The 9/11 Commission Report: Wartime: Unity Of Effort In Sharing Information

As presently configured, the national security institutions of the U.S. government are still the institutions constructed to win the Cold War. The United States confronts a very different world today. Instead of facing a few very dangerous adversaries, the United States confronts a number of less visible challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states and call for quick, imaginative, and agile responses.

The men and women of the World War II generation rose to the challenges of the 1940s and 1950s.They restructured the government so that it could protect the country. That is now the job of the generation that experienced 9/11. Those attacks showed,emphatically,that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not good enough. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments.