SOME THOUGHTS ON INTELLIGENCE FAILURES: Andrew Hofer agrees that the real problem was a systemic breakdown –as he puts it, the inability of agencies with part of the picture to share information laterally so that the whole picture could be put together. Meanwhile, David Rothkopf writes in Foreign Policy that the business community has the expertise to solve these, and similar, problems in the war on terrorism if allowed.

As best I can tell, the evidence indicates that people had figured out that something was going to happen, and the rather slow and kludgey national security apparatus was starting to move toward doing something about it — but the terrorists were inside our decision curve, and thus able to strike before we were able to act even though we had access (somewhere in the system) to all the information that would have been needed to anticipate the attacks.

In this, as I’ve said before, the learning curve, and the ability to learn and act faster than the enemy, is the key. American civilians, using civilian technology and their own inherent ability to self-organize, were able to neutralize the terrorist plan in 109 minutes, as Flight 93 demonstrates. The national security bureaucracy, on the other hand, still hasn’t fully gotten its act together. This is what we ought to be asking tough questions about. Unfortunately, that threatens the whole feedlot, meaning that very few people in Washington — in either party — have any incentive to ask the right questions.