Other senior military officers have expressed concern about how the new command will coordinate with Norad on crucial issues of domestic defense.

The halting efforts to plug the student visa system reflect the overall difficulty of improving domestic defense, most notably airline security.

But like other issues of domestic defense, it gets tangled in complexities.

In the last three months, he has immersed himself in three critical areas: national security, the economy and domestic defense.

Mr. Bush is proposing to combine no fewer than 22 federal agencies now housed in eight cabinet departments into a new department for domestic defense.

Mr. Bush said that the large number of agencies that deal with domestic defense had created a morass.

He had resisted the idea of a cabinet department focusing on domestic defense for nine months.

The administration plans to request more money for the military and domestic defenses while trying to hold the line on overall domestic spending.

He adopted the Democrats' calls for increased spending on domestic defense.

She also sees domestic defense in a larger context.