Defense Clandestine Service - Pentagon creates (another) new espionage unit

[Bill Moore]

Actually the jury is still out on this one. Amy is qualified to comment on this, but I'm surprised at her superficial assessment on the topic.

so bad in fact, that two former defense secretaries had recommended transferring recruitment and management of DOD's spooks to the CIA. Stay tuned. The Pentagon is designed to take and deny territory.

The CIA has a long track record of clownish operations and incompetence interspersed with moments of super natural performance (the exception, not the rule). To state that DOD is more incompetent, if true, implies DOD intelligence is in deep trouble. However, the part of the sentence I bolded is where I take issue. DOD's role is broader than taking and denying territory, but even for that limited role DOD is responsible for collecting its own tactical and operational level intelligence to support that mission. That isn't the CIA's focus.

If the history books are accurate the KGB ran circles around the CIA, yet we still won the Cold War indicating that intelligence operations were not decisive. Not down playing the critical role intelligence "should" play, like preventing the attack that happened on 9/11, simply pointing out that we prevailed despite multiple intelligence failures over the years. Doesn't mean that will always be the case, especially if a terrorist manages to acquire a WMD. We need to get the problems fixed, but that doesn't mean fighting turf wars.

https://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2012_cr/sasc-dcs.html

The committee notes that President Bush authorized 50
percent growth in the CIA's case officer workforce, which
followed significant growth under President Clinton. Since 9/
11, DOD's case officer ranks have grown substantially as well.
The committee is concerned that, despite this expansion and the
winding down of two overseas conflicts that required large
HUMINT resources, DOD believes that its needs are not being
met.
The committee concludes that DOD needs to demonstrate that
it can improve the management of clandestine HUMINT before
undertaking any further expansion. Furthermore, if DOD is able
to utilize existing resources much more effectively, the case
could be made that investment in this area could decline,
rather than remain steady or grow, to assist the Department in
managing its fiscal and personnel challenges.

Bad management must be addressed, but my concern with this bean counter logic is they're missing the lesson learned over the years is always paid a serious price when we underresourced our intelligence capacity over the years, then react by surging money into it to fix it. When you rapidly expand you are obviously going to lose a degree of professionalism. Also while we may have needed to expand to our capacity to support the war efforts, in a more perfect world having adequate intelligence capability would better enable us to prevent future wars.

Amy wrote: Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community

http://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Spies-Int.../dp/0817912843

In Eyes on Spies, Amy Zegart argues that many of Congress's biggest oversight problems lie with Congress itself. Although acknowledging that intelligence policy making has undoubtedly become more partisan and rancorous in recent years, and that individual personalities matter, she shows that the root causes of dysfunctional intelligence oversight cross party lines, presidential administrations, individual congressional leaders, and eras. The author first attempts to define what good oversight looks like—and concludes that, however one defines good oversight, Congress has not been doing it in intelligence for a very long time.

This could explain the comments in the link I provided above. I suspect her book is interesting (anyone read it yet?), but also depressing for those of us who have to live in this world of dysfunction.

[wm]

If the history books are accurate the KGB ran circles around the CIA, yet we still won the Cold War indicating that intelligence operations were not decisive. Not down playing the critical role intelligence "should" play, like preventing the attack that happened on 9/11, simply pointing out that we prevailed despite multiple intelligence failures over the years. Doesn't mean that will always be the case, especially if a terrorist manages to acquire a WMD. We need to get the problems fixed, but that doesn't mean fighting turf wars.

. . .

Bad management must be addressed, but my concern with this bean counter logic is they're missing the lesson learned over the years is always paid a serious price when we underresourced our intelligence capacity over the years, then react by surging money into it to fix it. When you rapidly expand you are obviously going to lose a degree of professionalism. Also while we may have needed to expand to our capacity to support the war efforts, in a more perfect world having adequate intelligence capability would better enable us to prevent future wars.

Good and bad in the quoted material above.
The good is that Bill points out the problems with trying to "flex" a clandestine human intelligence collection service. Similar issues have been discussed by SWC memebers with regard to keeping a large standing military or trying to grow an armed force quickly to meet a significant threat. The difference is that intelligence operations usually require a long term presence with both collection and analysis efforts to establish a baseline of normalcy, both in terms of the target's activities and in terms of the collector. A case officer cannot simply appear suddenly in some distant location and start to recruit sources that provide quality information.
I am reminded of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Marcus Brody, the bumbling museum director, is at a total loss trying to "blend in" after we have seen the following ironic exchange:

Professor Henry Jones: Marcus? You didn't drag poor Marcus along did you? He's not up to the challenge.
Walter Donovan: He sticks out like a sore thumb. We'll find him.
Indiana Jones: The hell you will. He's got a two day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already.

And analysis usually requires a significant amount of prior knowledge of what constitutes normalacy in order to be able to distinguish the kinds of changes that signal something imporfant is about to happen.

Perhaps the reason that US intelligence agencies are not as good as one might wish when it comes to HUMINT operations is related to the impatience characteristic to Americans that has been identified often in other threads on this board

The bad is what I bolded in the quotation. I suspect that more often than not what are called intelligence failings are leadership failings instead. Leaders are presented with intelligence and then either make a bad decision
fail to make any decison at all. The reasons for the apparent leadership failure would make for some interesting research and analysis. BTW the switch from my initial strong claim about leadership failures to the weaker claim about apparent failures is because what, from an ant's eye view of the world or a biased representation of the facts, is considered a failure may well be a triumph when viewed from the perspective of an eagle.