[FPSPACE] Eliminating CIA, reorganizing NRO, NSA, NGIA

[DwayneDay]

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Gottschalk <kgottschalk at uwc.ac.za>
Sent: Aug 23, 2004 5:50 PM

>Surely one of the reasons for the original founding of the CIA was precisely to act as a Pentagon outsider, which would impartially coordinate all information from the 4 armed forces, plus the FBI, Secret Service, etc. 

Give the man a cigar.

>These summaries give the impression of re-inventing the wheel, or of adding yet another bureaucracy onto the existing ones.   -  Keith

Give the man another cigar.

First, we should acknowledge that this latest proposal has a slim chance of being enacted, for lots of reasons.  For one thing, this is a proposal from one half of one committee.  In order to push through such massive reorganization, the plan would require a lot of support and probably a lot of hearings.  And there will be a lot of opposition to it from many sides.  Plus, well, this is an election year.  Will this proposal really be alive in January 2005?

But one wonders what the justification is for such massive reorganization.  I'll admit to not having read the formal justification for this proposal (I'm guessing it is on the Web somewhere, hopefully at the committee's website).  Former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre recently proposed placing all of the "technical" intelligence agencies--NSA, NRO and NGIA--under the new intelligence czar.  I don't quite get his reasoning either.  He claimed that he was putting the "collectors" in one place, but NRO is not a "collector" (it manages spysats, not their data), and the CIA also has its collection aspects as well.

But the fix to problems--even major problems--is not automatically reorganization.  There are other ways to fix things, including firing people (which, admittedly, rarely happens in a democracy), better training, and other methods.  Major reorganizations can have some seriously negative effects.  Back in the mid-1990s the civilian NPIC (National Photographic Interpretation Center) and the military DMA (Defense Mapping Agency) were combined.  One of the immediate results was to drive out a lot of experienced civilian imagery intelligence analysts.  As I heard it, a lot of these people realized that they would lose a lot of benefits and seniority under the new agency--the National Imagery and Mapping Agency--and so they quit.  I have not heard of any independent reviews of this merger, but the anecdotal things I've heard are that it seriously disrupted the workforce for several years.  Nobody really considered the Law of Unintended Consequences when they undertook that effort.  (NIMA is now the NGIA.)

You have pointed out an important issue, which is the balance between civilian and military intelligence agencies.  The new intelligence czar position is a civilian post, but this proposal tears apart the biggest and most powerful civilian intelligence agency, which would possibly tilt the balance of power to the military intelligence agencies.

And some of this proposal appears to be motivated by a desire to eliminate duplication in these agencies.  But duplication is itself not a bad thing.  Competition can produce better analyses.  Competition in the National Reconnaissance Office during the 1960s produced better satellites.

This afternoon I heard a Democratic Senator talking about this proposal on the radio (remember that it is a Republican proposal).  He said that in his opinion this is not really a serious proposal.  It is more an effort by the committee chairman to make it look like he has a proposal and is therefore "doing something."  I don't know what is really going on here, but I hope that the people involved consider this stuff carefully.  They can do a lot of damage if they're not careful.




DDAY