WASHINGTON—The only place where tribal feuds are more rampant
than Afghanistan is Washington.

As the federal warlords here continue to stumble over and undermine
each other, some have wondered if the president should reach beyond
the Beltway and summon the best minds in the country, as Roosevelt did
with the Manhattan Project and his Wall Street conscripts. Draft a
Yankees team of business egomaniacs, political tough guys and science
brainiacs to help us slam terrorists on health, intelligence, the
economy, security, cyberspace and communications.

We need to get out of our psychological crouch — not easy given the
rolling high alerts — and begin anticipating the terrorists' next
moves. Big ideas will quell big fears. As F.D.R. secretly wrote to
Robert Oppenheimer in 1943, "Whatever the enemy may be planning,
American science will be equal to the challenge."

Our institutions are lumbering as they try to keep up with the simple,
supple, clever paladins of Islam.

We're sophisticated; they're crude.
We're millennial; they're medieval.
We ride B-52's; they ride horses.
And yet they're outmaneuvering us.

We spend $300 billion a year on planes and bombs and military marvels
but still can't faze Taliban warriors who pop up out of the charred
earth and mock us as ineffectual. (Our limp allies in the Northern
Alliance also criticize our aim even as they refuse to fight in the
rain. Next they'll balk if they split a nail.)

We spend $30 billion a year on the C.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and D.I.A.
but still can't find O.B.L., his sleepers or the anthrax killers.
(Robert Mueller begs us to help the F.B.I. find clues. Was it Colonel
Mustard in the library with the spores on the candlestick?)

We spend $50 billion a year on public health, but are woefully unprepared for
an onslaught of germs or viruses. Four people have died while health officials
stumble around trying to fathom the way anthrax spreads, but several anthrax
experts said they didn't even get a call from the government.

Then there is the Bay of Mules, the slaughter of Abdul Haq, a man with 1 foot,
1 mule and 19 men, which vividly showed once more how risibly incompetent
our C.I.A. is. Mr. Haq's friend, Reagan N.S.C. director Robert McFarlane,
bitterly complained afterward that the agency was more Clouseau than Clancy:
"They spend $30 billion and do not have anybody out there who speaks Dari
or who understands who these players are."

The agency slept while the Soviet Union fell and Osama rose.

David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma and former chairman of
Senate Intelligence (where George Tenet was his staff director), agreed that the
C.I.A. must retool so it can be energized by "small teams with very carefully
targeted objectives, moving very rapidly and not be part of such a big,
moribund, slow-moving, dinosaur structure."

He thinks President Bush should ask stars from various fields to convene here
regularly as "a quasi-independent think tank," devising bold solutions to brazen threats.

I called a business star to see what he thought, but he bluntly
predicted that such a brain trust would get lost in the fat folds of
the bureaucracy. "Everything is so fuzzy and slow there," he said.
"You need somebody with hiring, firing and budget authority, to break
all the rules and crack heads, make sure the F.B.I. and C.I.A. are
sharing every ounce of information, get rid of all the layers,
establish simple lines of communication."

He noted that the homeland czar is already drowning in his own flow
chart: "Tom Ridge has got nothing except his friendship with Bush. You
think some guy two levels down in the C.I.A. gives a damn about that?"

Like his dad, George W. Bush likes to be surrounded by a comfort zone
of unquestionably loyal old reliables.

He kept on Mr. Tenet, despite his Clinton connection and all the C.I.A. debacles,
because he felt comfortable around him. But Mr. Bush needs a wartime C.I.A.
consigliere to crack heads, not a go-along-get-along guy.

America's crisis has spurred the president to rise above the familiar, trying things
that he was not good at before — news conferences, Congressional addresses,
staying on top of his briefing books. He has reached inside himself and succeeded.
What about reaching outside?

Forget the New Normalcy. Bring on that Old Yankee Ingenuity.