Help Wanted
On Friday, it will be two weeks since Dennis Blair resigned as Director of National Intelligence. Is it wise to leave the nation's top intelligence job vacant?
It's true that there remain serious problems with the US intelligence community's structure. It's also true that Dennis Blair, cut out of many important national security conversations over the past several months, was not a fully functioning DNI. And, yes, it's true that the confirmation process will take some time and that Republicans may slow it down with aggressive questioning of President Obama's nominee.
But Iran is racing toward nuclear capability, North Korean behavior is increasingly provocative and increasingly unpredictable, and there are, once again, raised tensions in the Middle East. All of this, and the US has seen three attacks on the US homeland in the past seven months -- two of them the result of the greater ambitions of what had been regional terrorist groups.
It's not a great time for a vacancy at the top of the US intelligence community.
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Comments:
May '10
Re: Help Wanted
I nominate Aaron Rodgers for the job.
It didn't exist till just a few years ago, it doesn't gather intel, rather, mostly just sorts it, and the problems we face deal with making smart decisions to act, not whether the DNI put out a good, bureaucracy-approved (e.g., Paul Pillar) report last week that will be proven wrong in a couple of months.
Arguably, the position has been open for several years.
Re: Help Wanted
A question, Steve, that might sound sardonic but isn't: Why replace Blair at all? As Judge Richard Posner has argued, the Bush administration's creation of the new post of the Director of National Intelligence did a lot more harm than good, replacing the useful competition among more than a dozen intelligence agencies with direction from a new, centralized bureaucracy. If the Obama administration simply let the post sit empty, wouldn't some of that inter-agency competition return? And wouldn't CIA director Leon Panetta, one of the few truly serious and truly competent members of the administration, become what CIA directors always used to be--namely, the nation's chief intelligence officer? Heck. Let Blair's desk gather dust.
May '10
Re: Help Wanted
Duane Oyen: the problems we face deal with making smart decisions to act, not whether the DNI put out a good, bureaucracy-approved (e.g., Paul Pillar) report last week that will be proven wrong in a couple of months. · Jun 1 at 10:19am
Duane, I've found Pillar to be an impressive thinker who has little tolerance for BS. Does this not jive with your experience?
Re: Help Wanted
Peter, when I wrote: "It's true that there remain serious problems with the US intelligence community's structure," I meant precisely what you're saying about the DNI job. (I can't possibly understand how that wasn't clear!)
So the answer might be eliminating that position and the redundant bureaucracy underneath it and once again making the CIA director the top intelligence official in the country.
But the answer is not, in my view, leaving the DNI position open indefinitely. One of the most significant problems with the US intelligence community is the lack of definition and direct accountability -- and that's true with a DNI in place. The lines of responsibility would be even less clear with a prolonged vacancy or an acting DNI.
So either eliminate it altogether (my preference) or fill it with dispatch and make it a real job.
Re: Help Wanted
I'm not sure there was much "useful competition" in our intelligence-gathering services that the installation of the DNI pre-empted. The sorry history of our intelligence service, from the fall of Cuba to 9/11 to the totally absent WMD in Iraq is awfully hard to ignore. I'll never understand why we're so tough on the Department of Education and so easy on the catastrophic failures of Central Intelligence.
I think the purpose of the DNI was to create a kind of intelligence cardinal -- someone above the petty inter-bureau squabbles (like between NSA and CIA), someone neutral, to whom all data might be shared.
Of course, that was a silly idea. You can't battle bureaucratic inertia by creating a higher layer of bureaucracy. Unless the post of DNI is someone independent, smart, and willing to dissent. Which I understand was the case (mostly) with Blair. Which I also understand is a big reason he left.
May '10
Re: Help Wanted
Harlech
Duane Oyen: the problems we face deal with making smart decisions to act, not whether the DNI put out a good, bureaucracy-approved (e.g., Paul Pillar) report last week that will be proven wrong in a couple of months. · Jun 1 at 10:19am
Duane, I've found Pillar to be an impressive thinker who has little tolerance for BS. Does this not jive with your experience? · Jun 1 at 1:16pm
No. He is definitely smart, but he inserts his worldview into his analyses and he has a history of releasing things at the time necessary to torpedo policy decisions he doesn't like. That makes him an insubordinate employee who should have been cashiered long before he was. I don't know him, of course, but he was Paul Mirengoff's roommate at Dartmouth and I saw a lot of his work through those eyes.
Last I saw, Pillar was the guiding spirit behind the report on Iran that concluded that they had ended their nuclear program. Which report, of course, was superseded in the past year now that The Threat Of Bush Acting was no longer around.