Old-School Academy in Post-9/11 World

But the majority of the 701.5 hours is devoted, as it has been for decades, to traditional law enforcement skills, a fact that is underscored by the constant sound of gunfire from more than a dozen firing ranges. In all, 114.5 hours of training are devoted to learning to shoot.

Additionally, 78 hours are dedicated to teaching arrest techniques and defensive tactics, and 36 hours to forensics. Recruits also undergo rigorous physical fitness tests, study law and ethics, learn to identify drugs, hone computer skills, and investigate a practice criminal case and present the evidence in moot court.

FBI officials say the academy is "minting" new agents who need basic skills to enforce more than 200 federal statutes covering such diverse topics as public corruption, bank robberies and the protection of bald eagles.

"We've got to do the same things the FBI has been doing forever and does very well," said Supervisory Special Agent John Kerr, chief of Quantico's physical training unit. "Look at the cases being made across the country, the same old-fashioned way. Interviews and informants on the street. Some of the rules have changed, but it's the same investigative strategy. . . . It's really the same bureau. The same FBI."

To bureau critics, the approach is more appropriate for chasing John Dillinger than Osama bin Laden. They say the training shows that the FBI culture is still too focused on solving crimes after they occur and collecting evidence to support prosecution rather than working to recruit informants or develop intelligence about a terrorist cell before it can attack.

"Chasing criminals, you have to be armed," said U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner, author of "Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11." Posner supports the idea of creating a separate domestic intelligence agency like Britain's MI5, which last week uncovered a plot to blow up as many as 10 planes bound for the United States.

"You also have to know about bank robbers. You have to know rules of evidence. But there's this completely different job called gathering intelligence. That's snooping, not chasing criminals."

The FBI's new intelligence mission is similar to the CIA's, but at "The Farm," as the CIA's operations training center near Williamsburg is known, agents-in-the-making train for a year, focusing on how to identify, recruit and manage foreign informants with access to intelligence the agency wants. A separate track for operatives assigned to penetrate terrorist organizations is heavy on language and cultural indoctrination.

Thomas J. Harrington, deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, called the anti-terrorism and intelligence training at Quantico "a work in progress."

"We are trying to upgrade it," he said. "But it takes time to get to the point where the instructors are as competent as we want them to be."

Daniel Coleman, until his retirement the FBI's foremost expert on bin Laden, said that counterterrorism is too complex a subject to be taught in much depth during basic training at Quantico, but that it should be taught by the FBI. "If they are going to be devoted to counterterrorism," he said, "there should be a basic counterterrorism school" after Quantico.

What additional training the FBI does provide is, as one official acknowledged, "somewhat ad hoc." Instructors from West Point help the FBI train some agents assigned to joint terrorism task forces, and there are conferences as well as some language training.