While most of us are concentrating on the most important events
of the summer, such as the Olympic women’s beach volleyball
competition, others are wondering how Congress will manage to mess
up the reform of our intelligence agencies. It’s predictable that
they will, and it’s not even a question of how. They’ll do what the
9/11 Commission told them to do: add more bureaucracy. The intel
community needs another layer of bosses about as much as Custer
needed more Indians. Congress would do better to remember the
Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.
If we listen to Mr. Kerry, the recommendations of the 9/11
Commission are to be held in considerably higher esteem than the
Bible. Mr. Kerry — his knowledge refreshed by prolonged absences
from the meetings of the Senate Intelligence Committee — has
concluded that the Commission’s recommendations should be adopted
forthwith, without any serious debate. Mr. Bush seems content to
let the intelligence community totter along nicely until after the
election, but also says that the 9/11 Commission’s work should —
at least mostly — be turned into law and practice. Congress seems
to be intent on using the Commission’s recommendations to denude
the Defense Department of its essential intelligence capabilities.
Like all other political battles, it’s about money and power.
Unlike others, it should be about improving the product of our
intelligence community.
Of the 15 intelligence agencies, most — and most of the budget
for them — are either owned or controlled by DoD. This is not some
accident, or the result of an anti-CIA coup d’état
by Mr. Rumsfeld and his team. It’s the result of the DoD, over the
course of about two decades, being the single agency that was
willing to devote the time and the money to getting intelligence
that can actually be used to make better decisions.
Mr. Kerry and his congressional cohort will use the fall debate
to attack Messrs. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for the failure to find
Saddam’s WMD, for failing to quell the insurgency that is still
tearing up Iraq, and for everything else up to and including the
rising price of oil. The fact that they are not responsible for all
the world’s ills will not matter. What will matter to the Dems is
their opportunity to emasculate the DoD’s considerable intelligence
capabilities in favor of another useless bureaucracy, namely the
“national intelligence director” recommended by the Commission to
oversee all the intel agencies.
AS I’VE WRITTEN AGAIN and again, the problems with the intel
community are the result of decades of interference, decay, and
failed leadership. The problem is that our intelligence assets —
everything from spies on the ground to satellites in space — are
not required by law and presidential mandate to operate jointly
like the armed services do. Though the 9/11 Commission recommends
reform of the intel agencies to create jointness, its other
recommendations conflict directly with that goal. Former Commission
chiefs Kean and Hamilton are issuing apocalyptic warnings to
Congress, the president, and everyone else: if you don’t do what we
recommended right now, history will forever condemn you for
allowing the next attack. Balderdash. Before we break what little
remains unbroken, we need to sort the Commission’s recommendations.
Throw out those that conflict with jointness, and adopt those that
support it. Whatever we do, the process that will take years to
complete. If the 9/11 Commission recommendations were all enacted
tomorrow, nothing much would improve for four or five years. And —
as we know from what has happened since 9/11/01 — considerable
harm will be done.
Creating a national intelligence director solves precisely
nothing. It doesn’t drive the intel community toward improving its
product, only toward satisfying another layer of bureaucracy. The
best evidence that this approach fails is the Department of
Homeland Security.
When the Simpsonian D’OHS was created, it was placed in charge
of collecting and compiling the intelligence information about
possible attacks against the American mainland. The CIA, FBI and
other agencies are supposed to be sharing all the information they
gather with Ridge’s crew, theoretically enabling them to warn us of
impending attacks. But that’s not what’s happening. Neither
intelligence gathering nor analysis was improved by this
consolidation.
All of our intelligence assets — from the CIA to the FBI to DoD
— are now supposedly coordinated by the Department of Homeland
Security. Tactical assets — people in dangerous places, including
both civilian and military — are also supposed to be funneling
information into the DHS and the CIA’s “TTIC,” the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center. This is failing for a host of reasons. Most
importantly, as I pointed out two years
ago, intelligence analysts need to be closer to those who use
their products, not distanced farther from them by more
bureaucratic layers. If we do what the 9/11 Commission said, and
take away the Defense Department’s authority over agencies such as
DIA and NRO, and place it under the NID, we’ll make the same error
again, with the same result.
BY TAKING THE INTEL agencies away from DoD, we will reduce
significantly the armed forces’ ability to plan for and function in
war. As imperfect as the DoD’s intelligence arms are (they, like
all bureaucrats, wait for their bosses to ask for something rather
than generate their own entrepreneurial and imaginative tasks),
they now work in the manner the warfighters need them. Raiding the
DoD budget and jurisdiction to build up the new “NID” is an idea
worthy of our worst enemy.
The pressures on Mr. Bush and Congress — by Mr. Kerry and the
9/11 Commission — are enormous. But they need to be resisted. We
need to focus reforms on improving the intelligence community’s
product. What information it gives the president and lower-ranking
officials is the stuff that wars and peace are made of. Yes, we
need to train more spies as quickly as we can, and operate them in
places where our spies have never been before. Yes, we need to
instill a culture in our analysts of imagination and openness to
their peers. And, yes, we will need to spend an enormous amount of
money improving our satellite and aircraft reconnaissance
capabilities. But this will take a lot of time. We shouldn’t —
whatever threats to our place in history that Messrs. Kean and
Hamilton warn of — impose reforms that will do more harm than
good.
Few outside the defense community even know what “jointness”
means. The complete enmeshing of every service’s assets, tactics,
and strategy with those of the others is a culture that is still
being forced upon some defense organizations almost 20 years after
its mandate by the “Goldwater-Nichols” legislation. If it takes two
decades to do it in Defense, it will take no less time in
intelligence, where the people are mostly civilians and not under
the discipline of the military. We must do everything possible to
push them in that direction, and nothing that will do otherwise.
For that reason alone, much of what the 9-/11 Commission recommends
— especially the absurdity of the “NDI” — should be ignored.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse
Than You Think (Regnery Publishing).
