November 8, 2001

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Defense

Today’s Washington Post reports (“Intelligence Shakeup Would Boost CIA”, p. A1) that a presidential panel headed by Brent Scowcroft, former NSC Advisor and now chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, is recommending a major restructuring of the U.S. intelligence community. Specifically, the panel is advocating that the National Reconnaissance Office (the organization tasked with building and operating intelligence-gathering satellites), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (the entity charged with producing images from overhead reconnaissance systems and sophisticated, digitalized maps), and the National Security Agency, (the agency tasked with collecting signals and communications intelligence worldwide), be taken from the Department of Defense and put under the direct control of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Given the failures of those intelligence elements headed by the DCI over the past months -- and indeed decade -- it seems ludicrous that we would now hand over even more responsibility to that office. If the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency can’t fix the serious problems that plague his home agency, it hardly makes sense to give him added duties. Rather than increasing the DCI’s authority we should be demanding that he first put his own house in order.

Moreover, in recommending that Congress and the president place these large agencies under the DCI’s control, the panel is proposing an even more centralized intelligence community – a sure recipe for creating an even more unresponsive and unwieldy bureaucratic entity. The reason the Department of Defense is currently in charge of these efforts is not only because they provide most of the personnel but because they are the principal customer of the intelligence being produced. Giving the NRO, NIMA and NSA to the DCI to run will just increase the distance between “the customer” and “the supplier.” Organizationally, this is precisely the opposite of what one should want.

In business terms, Scowcroft’s panel is pushing the U.S. intelligence community to adopt a management model that apes the corporations of the 1950s and 60s. Great then but a mistake now.