The U.S. Government has a long history of dealing with interagency challenges—a legacy filled with epic successes, monumental failures, and everything in between. Washington has gotten more wrong than right when it comes to instituting a feasible, suitable, and acceptable whole-of-government approach. This article discusses five major missteps and recommendations for improvement. One misstep is that Washington has no professional historical foundation on which to build whole-of-government activities.

Computers, cell phones, other digital devices, and the systems that knit them together have altered how many on the planet do almost everything—especially how they share with each other. With over 1 billion people—some of them enemies of freedom—on the Internet, there is much more on the information superhighway these days than information.