OxBlog

Thursday, July 15, 2004

# Posted 3:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

SLATE'S THE FRAY HAS an insightful dissection of myths and false truisms in intelligence reform. A sampling:
First, however, it is essential to understand what is not wrong with the CIA or the IC -- and there are many pet complaints that don't add up. ...

6.It is not necessarily a problem that intelligence analyses are sometimes wrong or not quite right.

Intelligence work is mostly a matter of solving puzzles and making guesses about probabilities. It should go without saying that much intel is going to be wrong, at least in part. But we have a tendency to expect perfection and to call anything less than that an intelligence "failure." Take 9/11. The fact is that we had for years mountains of "intelligence" – most of it in the newspaper – telling us that al Qaeda was a deadly threat and would attack us anyway it could. Plus, we had a lot of solid intel from the IC about who was doing what, where and how. But it is the USERS of intel who failed to draw the right conclusions from the intel. Even near-perfect intel does not automatically mean that military commanders or policy makers will make the best use of it. Prior to the pivotal naval battle at Midway in 1942, Naval intelligence knew the size and composition of the Japanese force and the timing of the attack. Nonetheless, the battle was nip and tuck and won largely due to dumb luck. On the other hand, the supposedly "massive failure" of CIA to forecast the Soviet collapse had almost no effect, since such a forecast doubtless would have been met with derision and the US responded to the changes in the USSR and East Europe with highly successful policies anyway....

I believe the following are real problems:

1)The process for developing the "national intelligence budget," should be focused on allocating funds among the three intelligence collection functions – human, communications and imaging – since only by doing so can the impact of resources be evaluated.

Now, Congress demands a budget divided by operations, R&D and procurement. This is what made it possible for the NRO to obtain and salt away a huge sum for future investments never made. More important, we want to be able to tell what we get out for each dollar we put in....

4)The IC needs centralized doctrine, training and management development.

Intelligence officers in various agencies have no common understanding of their mission or common doctrine about how it should be carried out or shared training in how to manage its various components. ...

6)The FBI should be taken out of the counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism business, except insofar as it is the proper law enforcement agency to be called upon when someone should be arrested. It's intelligence functions need to be placed in a new counter-intelligence agency patterned along the lines of the British MI-5.

The FBI has always been a disaster – or a joke – in this line of work. That's not because FBI agents are stupid; it's because they are cops, and intelligence is not police work. Since 9/11, they may have got better at it, but the true extent of any gains will be forever obscured by the fact that the Bureau has reportedly put as many as 40% of its employees on counter-terrorism duties (compared to about 5% before 9/11).
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

Comments: Post a Comment


Home