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Intelligence and National Security

ISSN: 0268-4527 (Print) 1743-9019 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fint20

US intelligence and its future: aligning with a new and complex environment

William Nolte

To cite this article: William Nolte (2019) US intelligence and its future: aligning with a new and complex environment, Intelligence and National Security, 34:4, 615-618, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2019.1600286

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2019.1600286

Published online: 05 Apr 2019.

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PERSPECTIVES ON INTELLIGENCE

US intelligence and its future: aligning with a new and complex environment William Nolte

When then Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger remarked at the end of the Cold War that at some point we’d all feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that may have been taken as humorous. Amusing or not, American national security remains in transition when it comes to dealing with non-state actors and non-peer states. The Trump administration’s reset of the national security balance back toward emerging peers or near-peers is perhaps a reflection of how the world has shifted from the immediate post-9/11 view. It may also reflect an institutional tendency to wish to confront adversaries or potential adversaries we are more comfortable confronting.

The last major events forcing review and reform of American national security were, respec- tively, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The former led to some significant changes in the military instruments of American security and several studies of the intelligence instrument. In retrospect, the period between 1991 and 2001 produced on the intelligence side little more than budget cuts and some rearrangement of the administrative architecture of the intelligence community. American intelligence in 2001 closely – too closely – resembled a trimmed down version of its Cold War self.

September 2001 produced significant changes in such areas as homeland security and the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI). The Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Act, and the Intelligence Reform and Prevention Act promised a new look at significant aspects of national security, but all suffered from the post-crisis, ‘we need to do something!’ climate in which they were enacted. In the nearly two decades since, the Congress has provided some course corrections to the Patriot Act, but on the whole it has chosen not to review the other components of the post-9/11 legislative package. Homeland security remains a partially digested, partially accepted phenomenon for a nation with a congenital (and under- standable) aversion to application of national power to ‘domestic’ security issues.

As for the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) and its signature feature, the DNI, a decade and a half of experience strongly suggests it has underachieved. The projected trade in which the director central intelligence transferred his or her community leadership role to the DNI but which left the DNI without control of the Central Intelligence Agency does not seem to have produced the enhanced role the new office was to have over the several agencies of US intelligence. At the time of the IRTPA’s passage, it was fashionable to speculate on how much greater authority over the intelligence community the DNI would have. It is at least now reasonable to conclude that the DNI has, for most of its existence, exerted less authority over the community than did the DCI in the pre-IRTPA era. In fact, it may well be that the DNI is in the worst possible position for an executive in any organization, especially a bureaucratic organization. That is, the DNI appears to have more responsibility than authority. Even a first-tour branch chief in a local office of parks and recreation would recognize this as a situation to be escaped from at the first opportunity.

The post-9/11/2011 American intelligence establishment has not experienced anything as dramatic as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the attacks of September 2001, but the years since 2001 have nevertheless provided equally fundamental changes in the external environments

CONTACT William Nolte [email protected]

INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 2019, VOL. 34, NO. 4, 615–618 https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2019.1600286

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

with which intelligence – American and other – must cope. Terrorism remains an issue of strategic importance. It can be argued that the focus on terrorism after September 2001 was to some degree excessive, albeit understandably so. Nevertheless, in such official documents as the DNI’s annual threat testimony to committees of Congress, terrorism in recent years has been placed amid a cluster of equally challenging issues in the operating environment, among them the reappear- ance of peer or potential peer adversaries, migration and its disruptive effects, and climate change, among others.

Then of course there are the continuing, rapid, and widespread changes in the information and communications technology environment, which represent both an operational challenge for intelligence and also a technological challenge. Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden used to describe the United States Air Force as the government’s participant in the American aerospace industry. In the same way, intelligence represents a (not the) federal government participant in the information and communications environment, or for convenience, cyberspace.

At least if not more centrally, the sequential iterations of information revolutions of the last four decades have provided and will continue to provide intelligence with a range of challenges. Stewart Brand said several years ago that the most important event of recent times has been the playing out of ‘Moore’s Law.’ That is a hard judgment to refute. It has transformed many if not all the fundamental aspects of our lives, from politics, to corporate structures and dominance, to the ways we communicate with business associates, family members, and friends. It has placed atop (in capital value) the American economy companies that did not exist until late in the 20th

century or early in the 21st, while forcing predecessors such as General Electric or the major auto manufacturers to struggle for their lives.

Can intelligence be any different? The author has contended for some years that ‘If 20th century intelligence was about secrets, 21st century intelligence will be about information.’ That formula- tion has met with resistance, and a fuller statement would include that secrets must always be a part of intelligence, as must the related but separate issue of confidentiality. Public organizations, including Intelligence agencies, despite all the inefficiencies attendant to belonging to the public sector rather than a (collectively) more agile corporate sector, have one great advantage: once established, bureaucracies are almost impossible to kill. Within a short time of their creation, they develop capacities to survive as established institutions if not effective instruments of policy. Over time, they trade on established measurements of their value, for example, the number of jobs they sustain, over instrumental metrics such as successes achieved. They become adept at relying on internal metrics of performance (amount of information collected or quantity of intelligence ‘product.’ These have their value, but they are at best intermediate assessments of real value. The latter must rely on measurement against external data, such as the extent and pace of change taking place in external environments, operational or technical. The ultimate reality is that improvements in internal metrics are wholly or relatively meaningless if they do not reflect alignment with external considerations.

Which leaves the important question of who assesses how well intelligence services or any other public agency are dealing with and aligning their external environment. In the corporate world, the market place determines outcomes. Cheery quarterly statements could not save Pan American World Airways or any of several once prominent firms that have disappeared in recent decades. Even acknowledging a changed external market cannot, in the private sector, promise success in the development of strategies to align with new realities. In the public sector, however, failure does not necessarily mean that an agency or department will go away, to be replaced by some more efficient instrument for achieving the older institutions policy objectives. In fact, history suggests that the response to failure by public institutions can be an infusion of additional resources, with or without needed changes in strategy or structure. Sears should have been so lucky.

Change, some management consultant once wrote, costs a fortune and takes forever. That can be especially true in the public sector. Every new American presidential administration takes office promising to streamline the public sector, make government ‘more business like,’ etc., etc., etc.

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Most acts of every Congress promise to reform some function of government. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, passed in 2005, proposed to fix the problems that led, in some measure or another, to the attacks of September 2001. In so doing, it was offered as a solution to the long desired goal of closer integration of the American intelligence services. Without question, the IRTPA has produced some good effects. The intelligence services arguably are better integrated. Given the enhancements in information technology, it is difficult to imagine they could have become less integrated. (Would Dell even know how to produce a slower computer?)

But has the IRTPA achieved the goals its authors hoped for? Who would know? When in the period since 2005 has the Congress taken a serious look at the IRTPA? Without question, individual agencies have undertaken their own internal reforms or reorganizations, and these efforts should not be ignored. But anyone who has worked in one of these agencies – or the Department of Agriculture, for that matter – should understand that the learned response of employees in these agencies to news that a reorganization is about to happen is not generally positive. ‘Been there, lived through that, haven’t noticed a difference’ is a more likely response among the workforce. And with significant justification. Moreover, the issue the United States faced in 2001 or 2005 went beyond the effectiveness or efficiency of individual components of the intelligence establishment; the issue was with the whole.

The reality is that large corporate institutions struggle to reform themselves, but at least have their minds concentrated by thoughts of bankruptcy. That incentive is not there in the public sector. Effective reform of public structures must be driven from outside those structures. For one thing, no internal, institutionally driven reform effort is ever going to end with the recommenda- tion that the institution has outlived its purpose and should go away or have its mission funda- mentally reshaped.

Inside an organization, the late Peter Drucker noted, change often signals only costs. The benefits of change are more likely to reside outside. The individual agencies of the US intelligence establishment may review themselves. But they will not recommend their own curtailment. Nor will they be quick to recognize the likelihood that in the information environment of the 21st century the components of the existing ‘Intelligence Community’ represent only part of a needed, larger ‘intelligence establishment,’ one that includes, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many other institutions within and beyond government. This will be true even absent the word intelligence in an organization’s title, no matter what color badges – if any – their employees wear, and even absent security clearances as we have known them. It is the information and expertise these organizations and their resources possess, not their bureaucratic accessories, that will require their presence in such an intelligence establishment, properly understood.

My longtime associate Mark Lowenthal has written a thoughtful book on The Future of Intelligence. It represents a worthy effort, but it is in no way the engine that can move American intelligence toward effective alignment with environments significantly unlike any it has known and at least potentially incompatible with established structures, processes, and systems. Smart, dedicated, and innovative professionals (and they are legion) may to a degree achieve results that surmount institutional limitations, but even congenital overachievers must deal with limits. If the United States is to benefit from an intelligence instrument aligned with and even outstripping the operational and technological environments of 2035 or 2040, some engine must be found to spur needed rethinking of a national capability of critical importance.

Some readers may note the recent speech by Alex Younger, ‘C,’ the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, on the need for British intelligence to innovate faster than its rivals, as an indication of the thrust created by a single agency leader. Keep in mind, however, that MI6 occupies a much larger portion of the British intelligence effort than does any single US agency. The Congress provided much of the direction for ‘reform’ efforts in the 1990s and the period after September 2001, in both instances augmented by official and unofficial study efforts. What is the

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prospect for a similar effort as we close the second decade of the century? Who will lead such an effort, absent which one alternative is to hope the existing structures and processes survive – and succeed – into the indefinite future? A less attractive alternative is to await another post-crisis effort at reform after a September 2001-like experience.

Notes on contributor

William Nolte is Research Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was formerly director of education and training in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and chancellor of the National Intelligence University. He is a former Deputy Assistant Director of Central Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency. He was Director of Training, Chief of Legislative Affairs and Senior Intelligence Advisor at the National Security Agency. He also served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia during the Gulf War. He has taught at several Washington area universities, is on the board of CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, and directed the Intelligence Fellows Program.

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