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September 1, 2006

Is There a Better Way?

Dave at The Glittering Eye commented (in a post containing much more) that he would rather consolidate our intelligence functions back into the military. (Dave also makes a mistake: the military and State Department both had intelligence offices before the CIA was formed, though the military's OSS was used as the basis of the CIA.) Mark at ZenPundit defended civilian intelligence agencies.

What I really have a problem with, and what the 9/11 Commission recommendations that created the DNI did not solve, was that there is no separation between gathering and evaluating intelligence. Let me start over, because this is something that's been bothering me for a long time.

At its root, we say "intelligence" to mean a process with many distinct parts: gathering raw data of many kinds from many sources (open source like magazines, electronic signal interception, overhead imaging, human spying, documents captured in military raids and so on); deciding what data to gather; evaluating the value of sources and methods; aggregating raw data into summary chunks; analyzing those summaries to identify useful information; and using that information to derive conclusions about the state of the world, and in particular, our enemies. Moreover, we seldom distinguish between the reliability of intelligence on capability (usually high) and intent (usually very, very low).

I divide these functions up into a few small categories: gathering data, evaluating the dependability of the data, using the data to create information, and using the information to make decisions. The last category is necessarily distributed throughout the government by its very nature: we have different people making decisions on different things. Right now, every other category is largely under the control of the DNI, and largely (with the exception of much of the data gathering) in the CIA. I would organize the intelligence community somewhat differently, but first, we need to understand why our intelligence agencies are structured as they are: Pearl Harbor.

The entire structure of our intelligence agencies — military and civilian, agency- (CIA, FBI) or department- (State, Defense) based — is structured to prevent an enemy from acquiring the capability, and acting on the intent, of using their military to attack an unprepared United States. At that function, our intelligence agencies are supremely good, probably unmatched except by the British and possibly the Israelis.

But our intelligence agencies are unable, due to the very structure that makes them good at preventing a Pearl Harbor repeat (think 9/11 with bombers instead of terrorists), from institutionally understanding non-state actors the way they can understand states. And since that is structural, nothing short of structural reform will fix it: Dave is absolutely correct there. But I do agree with Mark, also: we don't want this to be a purely military function.

What I would suggest as an organizational model is a broadly-distributed network with minimal bottlenecks and control nodes. There should be small agencies geared to particular methods of intelligence gathering (electronic intercept, covert spying, reading the newspapers of the world, etc) or particular types of information (military construction, equipment design, agricultural output, talking points in negotiations, etc). These agencies should feed the information and the source of the information into a single agency whose job it is to evaluate the intelligence's credibility based on past experience with that source or method rather than on how "believable" the intelligence is, and to sanitize the information to include the evaluation of reliability, but remove any information that would identify the source or method used. This evaluated information could then be used by analysis cells attached to every policy decision maker, as well as feeding into certain field operations (most notably, the military). Organizations with particular needs (battlefield and theater intelligence for the military, political intelligence for an embassy) would retain the ability to gather intelligence themselves, and use it directly, while also feeding it into the evaluation agency for the rest of the government to use.

Covert warfare should either be a military mission, be directed by the Congress through letters of marque and reprisal, or abandoned.

This structure would have several benefits: it would be more adaptive and quicker to respond to critical information; it would be less politicized, because policy makers couldn't bury intelligence that didn't fit their world view; since each agency would be small, they would be able to individually take larger risks in gathering information or making a call on what intelligence means, because they bureaucratically have much less to lose; it would be harder for the enemy to track what we are doing; it would be easier for us to track what the enemy is doing, even a non-state enemy (perhaps especially a non-state enemy); we would be less likely, due to redundancy, to miss critical information. There would be downsides, too, particularly competition between agencies if more than one has access to the same kind of intelligence gathering abilities (like more than one human spying agency, or more than one agency operating satellites), so care would have to be taken in that regard.

But overall, I think we would be far better served by such a set of organizations than by the set we have now.

Posted by jeff at September 1, 2006 6:57 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Dave Schuler at September 1, 2006 8:57 PM

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at September 1, 2006 10:57 PM