(2004-07-28) Lind Intelligence Reform

William Lind on the needs for true reform of the intelligence system, and why the recommendations of the World Trade Center commission won't help. When bureaucracies fail, one of their favorite ways to deflect demands for reform is to offer ReOrg instead. That appears to be what has happened in the report of the 9/11 commission and Washington's response to that report. Worse, the reorganization envisioned is to further centralize intelligence by establishing a national intelligence director and creating a counterterrorism center. One is tempted to ask, if centralization improves performance, why didn't the Soviet Union ("democratic centralism") win the Cold War? What American military and national intelligence really require is that bureaucratic anathema, reform. And reform in turn means not centralization and unification, but DeCentralization and internal competition.

Bill Christison (ex-CIA) is also a skeptic, and places the challenges in the greater Foreign Policy Context. Nothing we could do in expanding or reorganizing the US intelligence apparatus would have as much effect on reducing the terrorism threat as would changing policies that intensify hatred of the US around the world. But the striking similarities between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy issues work to prevent change.

Duncan Watts makes a similar argument for DeCentralization. So, some other kind of connectivity, along with a more creative approach, is required - one that incorporates not only the sharing of information across agency boundaries (a recommendation of the commission's that has received relatively little attention), but active collaboration, joint training, and the development of long term personal relationships between agencies as well. Creative intelligence analysis has a lot in common with other kinds of problem-solving activities: thinking outside the box, challenging deeply held assumptions, and combining different, often seemingly unrelated, kinds of expertise and knowledge.