Homeland Security



Homeland Security

Question 1: Interagency

After 9/11 incidents, interagency relationships became of greater concern for the US authorities. The local, state and federal agencies all decided to have collaboration, in order to fight with the external terror attacks. Mainly, there is a gap of communication between various intelligence and security agencies of the country is the fact, that each of these agencies focus on different goals, while working on the same objective. For example, the law enforcement agency works for establishing and maintaining the laws and the intelligence agencies work for collecting and analyzing the current information. Clearly, it is not possible to achieve the long term security objectives without having excellent collaboration between all the agencies working for homeland security.

All the agencies working for the country's solidarity should distribute the responsibilities and should commit to communicate the timely information to each other. The Federal agencies should provide the local and state agencies with effective guidance and the private sector should also collaborate in achieving the overall objective of the homeland security (Yim, 2002). The Federal agencies must understand that the security threats for the country are highly complex and diverse; they need to develop the security strategies considering the interests, challenges and capabilities of all the intelligence strategies of the country.

More than 40 federal agencies worked for ensuring the nation's security. However, the close overlap in roles and responsibilities of these agencies created a lack of accountability. In addition to the lack of accountability, the overlapping of responsibilities in federal, state and local entities also create other problems, such as lack of cohesiveness and program duplications. The duplication of efforts particularly resulted in loss of time, money and human efforts.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the government has been engaged in reorganizing the security policies and effectively allocating the resources such as grants, human staff and technology infrastructure. Also, the federal, state and local agencies have been prepared to work in collaboration in order to fight against the external terrorist threats particularly and domestic terrorist threats generally. The private agencies, individual citizens and business groups are also more focused for analyzing the security situations of the country and fighting against any possible security threats.

There is yet a need to devise security strategies that could further improve the homeland security. For example, the state and local governments should work out for meeting the challenges of worsening country's economy by downsizing. For example, the country may put the overseas military operations to an immediate end, in order to save the much needed economic resources of the country and to focus more on fighting against the domestic terrorist activities, which have become a recent point of concern in US.

Question 2: Terrorism

America has yet to face multiple challenges from the perspective of terrorism (Smith, 2011). To the data, US have been actively involved in military operations against numerous countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia. If we take a look at nations history, war against Afghanistan has become the longest one, ...