Of Note: Intelligent Reform?

In the run-up to 9/11, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars to reproduce information that agencies already had but refused to share with others. These efforts included building antennae aimed to intercept phone calls of suspected terrorists and setting up a satellite phone booth in Kandahar for eavesdropping on suspected terrorists.¹ After 9/11, Congress created the office of the Director of National Intelligence to integrate intelligence collecting and analysis work, yet critics argue that nothing short of a change as drastic as the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act can reform such structural deficiencies.

The lack of a unifying authority in the intelligence community was mirrored in U.S. combat operations before the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act. several military disasters in the early 1980s prompted the passage of the act in 1986. These blunders resulted from the military's inability to coordinate planning, and included the botched 1980 rescue mission of U.S. hostages in Iran, the 1982 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and the clumsy intervention in Grenada in 1983. Before 1986, the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps were charged with forming and implementing an integrated defense policy, but were not forced to plan with other agencies, only to coordinate their plans.²

The Goldwater-Nichols Act, named for Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative Bill Nichols, created the Unified Command plan, which required different commands to command "jointly" together in the field. The four services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—must assign personnel to the joint combatant commander. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has budgetary authority and speaks with the authority of the President in important matters. In addition, as a prerequisite for promotion, officers must serve tours in different commands, both regional and functional.³

Much like the pre-reform defense structure, the pre-9/11 intelligence community was set up to satisfy post-World War II and Cold War demands. Each intelligence agency had a specific function, with the expectation that the agency would produce narrowly focused, thorough research.⁴ The community's current configuration resembles that of the disjointed military framework before the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was at its highest levels a committee that could act only with the consensus of all of its members. Inter-departmental rivalries and security fears lead to each agency acting in near-isolation. Serious reform is still needed to prevent additional terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately, intelligence reform has proven to be more difficult to complete than military reform. One problem is that U.S. intelligence agencies are spread between pure intelligence functions and defense-related functions. In 2004, Robert Gates, now the head of the Department of Defense (DOD), wrote in a New York Times editorial that "more than 80% of foreign intelligence dollars are spent by agencies under the control of the Secretary of Defense," and went on to explain that since these agencies perform other functions in addition to intelligence, Defense officials would never agree to relinquish control to an intelligence "czar" in the white house.⁵

Observers have noted continued struggles over jurisdiction between the CIA and DOD. The Defense Department has continued to develop multi-million dollar information-gathering units as well as enter into the territory previously held by the CIA in terms of collecting "human intelligence," or intelligence collecting through interpersonal contact as opposed to through wiretapping or other data mining.⁶ Also in November 2005, the Pentagon issued a directive in which it asserted control over the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which are all part of DOD. Then Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte received criticism for not resisting the DOD assertion of authority.⁷

The problem of isolated intelligence gatherers has persisted even since the time of the Cold War. The writers of a 1969 CIA report lamented the fact that "US intelligence activities are to be conducted as a coordinated rather than an integrated effort."⁸ Different agencies and departments still require more drastic overhaul in order to solve the problems of not...