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| The CIA Loses a Major Customer |
| 2006-05-25 |
| May 25, 2006: Without much publicity, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have gotten a divorce. For over half a century, the Department of Defense depended on the CIA for a lot of the intelligence it needed. No more, or at least less-and-less. DoD recently created the post of undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and made it one of the top four positions in the department. DoD is being coy about exactly what the new arrangements are, given the new Director of National Intelligence and plans for "making intelligence more efficient." For DoD, plans aren't enough, as the major issue is that the troops are out there fighting the war on terror, and they need good intel now. So DoD is grabbing as much raw intel (from NRO satellites) as they can, and whatever else the CIA will give up. In the meantime, DoD has its own growing force of agents on the ground, many of them from the Special Forces. This sort of thing isn't new for the Special Forces, they have been going in to foreign regions, dressed as civilians, for decades. Some of this was in cooperation with the CIA, which still hires lots of retired Special Forces troopers, for another career as CIA operatives. DoD is overhauling its entire intelligence apparatus, right down to the individual soldier on patrol in Iraq and Afghanistan. The plans are pretty ambitious, and are partially implemented. The basic idea is to take advantage of abundant computer power, and affordable networking, to tie together as many troops, vehicles and warships as possible into one giant information gathering system. Computer software is used to do an initial filtering of lots of the data, leaving human analysts to deal with a much smaller amount of relevant information identified by the software. DoD has, for years, been aghast at the huge amounts of data that NRO, CIA and NSA collected, but never had the analyst resources to do anything with. The new DoD system is much more oriented towards solving immediate intel problems with all possible dispatch. No more waiting days for satellite photos, when the information was needed in hours, or minutes, to be useful. DoD is buying billions of dollars worth of UAVs, and installing communications equipment that will allow troops in combat to get the images when they are needed, not much later, after they have been "analyzed and cleared." |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #17 The 9/11 Commission farce became most evident when they concluded that all the Intel Commmunity needed was an intel czar. This too is common in corporate America. Board directors through the C-level thinks they are expert org. architects. You create more chaos, not less, with org. restructures. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-05-25 19:06 |
| #16 Old Spook, Fully agree you see the same "silo building" all over corporate America. As one inept, but funny CEO I served did put well, however, when he said "...there are no watertight compartments on this submarine". Same goes for the Intel biz, me thinks. |
| Posted by: Capsu 78 2006-05-25 18:28 |
| #15 Ditto Syber Sarge and Spook! Excellent analysis. DoD has had those low risk-no risk mother may I, diplo-donks up it's arss for far too many years. Too damn bad it took 9/11 failures and a GWOT to finally ferret the worthless kaks out. Too damn bad. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-05-25 17:47 |
| #14 CIA must now have to earn respect |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-05-25 17:18 |
| #13 Considering the DoD has the folks with their asses on the frontline, and that the CIA is completely inept, blame Darwin. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-05-25 17:17 |
| #12 49Pan - let me be very clear that I have *never* run into a problem op-to-op. If you are a field op, then you have to be straight up with others in your line, no matter which "A", "D" or "COM" you nominally work for: you cannot afford to not be anything other than that without putting your life and others at risk (the backstabbing/doublecrossing stuff is best left for the fantasy worlds of James Bond movies and TV's Jack Bauer or Sydney Bristow). I've not heard of interagency squablling being a problem analyst-to-analyst either, as long as they are not overmanaged, and are allowed to work independantly together in a true joint environment. The problem comes when stuff has to go up the food chain, and the supervisory ass-covering with management & budget fiefdoms come into play. Its not an IC specific thing - I see it in corporate America a lot too. I think its a result of human nature if you let an ogranization get ossified and never bother to shake it and its leadership up to keep things dynamic. At the places in question, its probably a result of having so many decades with an institutional opponent (KGB/GRU) who seldom changed anything at its core - so dealing with change became an exception instead of the norm. And we all know how well any govt b-cracy works delaing with unexpected changes... |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-05-25 16:49 |
| #11 OS, CS, This type of talk always gives me a sour taste. But I guess thats whats needed for change at the upper levels, wish it was not so. From 01 to 04 I had the pleasure of working with the ops guys and I found at the ground level the guys were straight, interdependancy helps, action oriented, and were as equally frustrated with their leaders as both of you talk of. But at our level we shared most everything and they were dedicated to working as a team. Hayden, if he is going to save the agency and its reputation, must spotlight these young honorable members and promote them past the bureacrats if he is coung to instatute change. The CIA is too important to scrap. DOD might be able to replicate a lot of the functions but we will never be able to replace the capabilities of the CIA. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2006-05-25 14:07 |
| #10 Cybersarge: thanks. I been in the IC forever too. And the layers and entanglements between ops and analysis and all the "silo kingdoms" built to protect jobs by CYA management at Langley have made the "product" coming out of there so imprecise and hedged with political language as to be un-actionable. And don't get me started on tasking or operational flexibility (or politically motivated leaks)! Hopefully Gen Hayden will bring in the same kinds of changes he made at Ft Meade. If the rumors are true, decoupling Analysis from Ops is a fantastic first step. If I were him, I'd next decouple Ops-covert-action from Ops-humint-development. Thsoe 2 areas would seem to fall at cross purposes. this would get the action guys to work more with SOCOM, let the HUMINT guys go a little more free wheeling and be more responsive to tasking from wherever, not just internal analysis or action groups. And the analysis guys could respond and interoperate better with analysis from other agencies, since they woudl no longer be wedded to the CIA-centric point of view. Pipe dream - but we can always hope. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-05-25 13:43 |
| #9 LOL John. I hope that Hayden will invite the Senior CIA staff into his office and have them justify their existence. Two things that he didnÂ’t like were busy work and duplicity of effort. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-05-25 13:40 |
| #8 Wonder how long it will take before the CIA realizes the NYT is their only customer? |
| Posted by: john 2006-05-25 13:31 |
| #7 Good. I was getting tired of hearing about soldiers getting in trouble 'cus the intel was just plain wrong from the agency. DoD can do a much better job for military intel. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2006-05-25 12:40 |
| #6 I retired six plus years ago and was a member of the Intelligence community for twenty years. Even back then everyone thought the CIA was too bloated and bureaucratic to be efficient. Most of their “operatives” had some many layers of rules that it was impossible to gather actionable intelligence. So instead of providing intelligence they became customers of other agencies intelligence and simply drew conclusion from that. The military has been pulling this cart for a long time honestly doesn’t need the CIA to perform its mission. A clear example would be the WMD intelligence about Iraq. We had a know quantity that Iraq had manufactured and used WMD of various flavors. The CIA supposedly had assets to monitor/track WMDs, because that was THEIR JOB. NOBODY in the CIA had any clue about where, when, who, or how much about WMDs prior to the Military capturing Iraq. It used to be that you would like to have intelligence PRIOR to rolling into a hostile area, not afterwards. Dismantle and start over. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-05-25 12:11 |
| #5 DOD is going to "Walmart" the CIA out of intel market share. |
| Posted by: Capsu 78 2006-05-25 11:45 |
| #4 Sounds like the Bush Admin is tired of getting screwed by the CIA and decided it's time to pull their teeth. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2006-05-25 11:38 |
| #3 It's the basic conflict of "actual" data vs. "theoretical" data. That is, the CIA can offer only cocktail-party assurances; whereas DOD has operatives who can tell the differnce between it and Shinola(tm). |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-05-25 10:57 |
| #2 Oh, and expect the DoD office to have a current telephone book for Belgrade. |
| Posted by: Elmomble Throgum1567 2006-05-25 09:29 |
| #1 Sounds like Chloe is going to get a new job offer. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-05-25 09:17 |