"Clearly, in the case of a terrorist attack, that would be the case," he said at Randolph Air Force Base here, surrounded by the military commanders of a joint task force steering search and rescue efforts in Rita's wake.

"Is there a natural disaster which -- of a certain size -- that would then enable the defense department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort?" he asked.

"That's going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about," said the president, who paid a steep political price for the widely criticized government response to Katrina.

That killer storm struck New Orleans on August 29 and left most of the city of a half-a-million people under water, stunning the world with images of Americans begging for water from the rooftops of their submerged homes.

"That was a train wreck that we saw in New Orleans," said one of Bush's briefers, Major General John White, referring to the lack of coordination in search and rescue efforts there.

Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead in Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi and the government under fire for failing to quickly mobilize relief efforts for beleagured residents of New Orleans.

Bush first suggested that the Pentagon ought to have a much broader role in the event of major natural disasters when he gave a prime-time speech in a deserted New Orleans square on September 15.

White and the other officers asked Bush for a "national plan" -- a blueprint for handling massive search and rescue operations.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush greenlighted the largest overhaul of the US government in 60 years for the purpose of handling a possible future attack, creating the umbrella Department of Homeland Security.

Critics, pointing to Katrina as a possible dress rehearsal for a terrorist strike, have said that the reorganization has flunked its first major test and questioned Bush's appointment of inexperienced officials to top disaster jobs.

The president, who was on his third straight day of military briefings on Rita, attended church on the base before flying to Baton Rouge, Louisiana's capital, for a first-hand look at response efforts there.

Bush visited a department store being used as a makeshift headquarters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, talking to emergency workers as well as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco.

The president said he had received "an optimistic appraisal" of efforts to repair New Orleans' overwhelmed levees and urged evacuees not to return home until Blanco gives the all-clear.

"I'm sorry that we brought you back under another stressful event," she said. "But we do appreciate your support. And I do want to tell you how much we appreciated watching all of the integrated forces at work as one."

On Friday, Bush traveled to the Colorado headquarters of the Pentagon's Northern Command, which was created after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to protect the US territory.

"Part of the reason I've come down here, and part of the reason I went to Northcom, is to better understand how the federal government can plan and surge equipment to mitigate natural disasters," he said in San Antonio.

Bush said the briefing here had given him "precisely the kind of information that I'll take back to Washington to help all of us understand how we can do a better job in coordinating federal, state, and local response."

Hurricane Rita hammered Texas and Louisiana early Saturday, downing trees and power lines and causing widespread flooding but failing to match the catastrophic damage done by Katrina nearly a month ago.

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