911: Do We Need A Director of National Intelligence?

One of the major shifts in American intelligence after the terror attacks of 911 was the creation of the Director of National Intelligence and a whole new agency to serve him in his task of ensuring America’s 17 intelligence agencies (including the DNI) played well together, effectively shared information and didn’t waste too much in duplication. I asked Bob Butterworth to consider the question. Bob knows intelligence. He was deputy executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, served as professional staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee and worked in the Pentagon’s almost legendary Office of Net Assessment. On top of that he works on highly classified nuclear and space warfare issues as a consultant from his perch at Aries Analytics. Read on. The Editor.

The current Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the fourth person to hold that position since the agency’s creation four years after the 911 terror attacks. Should there be a fifth?

Saying yes might invite some critical questions, starting with, well, “why?” Why should that position, and the office it heads, be funded and maintained? There’s no critical intelligence capability — at least not in public view — that would be lost; the four operational centers (National Counterterrorism Center, National Counterproliferation Center, National Intelligence Centers, and Joint Intelligence Community Council) could easily be transferred. And that might be a good idea.

No essential function or process would disappear; planning, budgets, and operations could evolve or devolve to other offices. Eliminating the DNI might increase efficiency, removing an entire layer of bureaucratic overhead and recovering for productive activity a good portion of the innumerable hours now spent in meetings and coordination and duplicative review and oversight.

Saying “no” might also encounter objections. Why should that position, and the office it heads, be abolished? The DNI provides a public focal point for concerns about intelligence matters, a face that is called on to brief the president and testify to Congress. The policies, statements, and guidance prepared in his offices encourage interagency collaboration and provide words that sixteen different intelligence agencies can use to show consensus and cooperation. When it comes to critical capabilities and essential functions, the DNI has at least upheld the Hippocratic oath, doing little harm. Eliminating the position might encourage excessive independence by various agencies, destructively competitive actions that could reduce national capabilities and complicate cooperation with foreign governments.

The difficulty arises from a tacit but tenuous assumption that intelligence failures and triumphs are causally associated with the community’s organizational structure. The relationship, if any is found, can only be situational. Deciding that a single authority should be in charge of several different agencies because they were all somewhat in the same business—national security space, for example, as in a recent GAO report, or intelligence—might bring some benefits of increased cooperation. It might also bring increased costs, repeated delays, unresponsive management, and degraded performance. Consider, for example, the wreckage of Rumsfeld’s efforts to integrate the national intelligence and military elements of national security space programs, or the bizarre and oft-derided accumulations in the Department of Homeland Security.

But can the DNI structure at least be evaluated in terms of the purpose for which it was created? On 17 December 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act (IRTPA), one result of the dot-hunting-line-drawing mania that followed the tragic attacks of September 2001. The IRTPA created a new position, Director of National Intelligence. It is pleasant to explain this measure, like many others adopted in response to the attacks, as being the result of congressional and executive branch decisions based on extensive investigations that produced a tested, agreed, and detailed understanding of the problem at hand, followed by a wide-ranging identification of potential remedies and responses, a careful comparison of the costs and benefits of each alternative, and a prudent selection of the best way forward.

But is that what happened? Many of the organizations in government — congressional and executive — can be understood more accurately as “a garbage can, into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated,” where “a decision is an outcome or interpretation of several relatively independent streams [of problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities] within an organization” (Cohen, March, and Olsen, Admin Sci Qtrly 1972).

The report of the 9/11 Commission, which was the basis for the IRTPA and the creation of the DNI, looks to be just such a “decision,” describing problems of performance and administration as viewed by participants and evaluators determined to make structural changes to better “connect the dots,” and going much further to worry about the workload of the CIA director and also to suggest that paramilitary activity be controlled exclusively by the Defense Department and many other changes. Left aside were questions about the relative importance of structure to performance and about what might be done instead of drawing new organizational charts.

A dog’s breakfast? You bet. A rarity? Not at all.

Left unmentioned is organizational culture, arguably a far more important influence on mission success, and something that realistically emphasizes the power of circumstance and situation over abstraction and oversimplification. In plain words: leadership matters. Culture can be influenced by the outlook and personality of the DNI. In recent years the culture in the broad Intelligence Community generally resembled a managed competition among the intelligence agencies: a greater willingness to coordinate and cooperate while competing to increase collection and improve assessments. Whether that will continue depends heavily on what the next president wants the next director to do.

Stay tuned. The lid is still off this garbage can.