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60 chapter Seven Congressional August Congressman Duncan Hunter was beloved by his colleagues for his lack of pretension. In Washington, the Californian drove an old, beat-up taxi cab, a Mercury Marquis station wagon that he bought for $600 and repainted.A colleague put a sign on it that read,“Do not tow.I am not kidding,this car is still operative. ”He rarely donned a suit,preferring slacks,a blazer,and tie.Hunter did not drink, smoke, or curse. If someone uttered a four-letter word with a lady in the room, Hunter would let you know you had crossed the line. He had been an Army Ranger in Vietnam but never talked of his tours of duty, offering only,“I had a very ordinary experience there. ”Once when his staff saw Hunter wearing what seemed like a new pair of shoes, they were surprised and moved in for a closer look.The shoes weren’t new; he had worn his golf shoes to the office.As he entered his office,he frequently tossed his jacket like a banana peel across his messy desk and set about removing piles and stacks from the chairs so his visitors could sit down.The couch in his office looked as though he might have slept there the night before.There was a large map of the world on the wall and a picture of Hunter and Vice President Cheney with the inscription,“Duncan, when are we going hunting?” Some called Hunter’s support for the military“extreme.”1 Apart from his Vietnam service, he was the son of an artillery officer in the South Pacific during World War II and represented a congressional district that was home to retired military personnel and the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, featured in the movie Top Gun.2 Hunter believed that the Commission had done some good work in diagnosing the problem,“but when they made recommendations,they identified a problem here and shot the guy next door, and the guy next door was defense.”3 He was “concerned that some of the Commission’s recommendations,if not carefully implemented,may increase Congressional August 61 the gap between the war-fighters and the national intelligence capabilities they rely on to protect our forces and defeat our enemies.”4 Hunter’s son’s experiences in Iraq colored his views as well.5 In March 2004 four military contractors had been killed in Fallujah and their bodies burned, dragged through the streets, and hung from a bridge. The Marines were called in to take the city, which had become a lawless safe haven for insurgents. In house-to-house fighting in Fallujah, the best weapon the undermanned Marines had was the AC-130 Gunship. But while the Marines fighting on the ground in Fallujah could communicate with the aircraft and request air support, they did not “own” the AC-130s flying overhead. A different military command controlled the AC-130s and during the battle pulled them from the skies over Fallujah to provide support to another mission. Without their guns in the sky, the Marines were disadvantaged. Duncan Hunter’s son, Lt. Duncan Hunter, was livid and called his father to explain what had happened. To Chairman Hunter,the Marines’inability to keep the AC-130s in support of their mission “broke the code for me that ownership of assets was the most important part of military operations.” What Hunter had learned from his son was something that experts had also observed about the military: “Both the Army and Marines strongly believed that owning indigenous assets was the only way to ensure that necessary support would be available when required. This . . . illustrates a fundamental tenet in most organizations: direct control over supporting assets is nearly always preferable to reliance on cooperative efforts from an outside entity.”6 Hunter saw a more powerful DNI with increased control over the Pentagon ’s intelligence assets as a threat to the ability to fight and win wars. Hunter would seize on Hamilton’s admission that“our report takes no issue with tactical support. . . . We wrestled with this. This is not an easy question , and I don’t know that we’ve got it exactly right.”7 He said,“You want the assets enslaved to the war-fighting commander in a military operation; having an intelligence support structure serving another master is at the least inefficient and, worst, critical.”8 To Hunter, increased budget authority for the DNI would sever the military...

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