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CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Lessons in Intelligence Reform
by Barry M Blechman
The Department of Defense (DOD) was created in 1947 but the beginnings of an integrated military command system were not genuinely established until President Dwight Eisenhower and his national security advisor, General Andrew Goodpaster, inspired several legislative initiatives in the mid- 1950s. And it was not until the 1960s that an integrated planning and budgeting system was created following the reforms of Robert McNamara. Nonetheless, even after these reforms, the individual armed services that comprised the Department of Defense remained largely autonomous and dominant in their respective land, sea, and aerospace spheres. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), consisting of the heads of each service and a separate chairman, who came from one of the services himself, together with unified and specified commanders, who reported through the chairman to the president, were supposed to integrate the services’ preferences and ensure smoothly running joint operations. In fact, the JCS was a very weak organization and its chairman had virtually no independent powers. The Joint Chiefs spent most of their time bro kering deals among the services on trivial matters and almost always deferred to individual service preferences. Moreover, recognizing the weakness of joint institutions, up and coming military officers shunned joint assignments as best they could and, when given such undesirable assignments, worked first and foremost to protect their home service’s interests.
Military specialists and some retired military officers had been pressing for serious reforms in the military command system to correct these entrenched deficiencies for years. But it was not until the 1980s that the serious shortcomings in the system became evident to the American public, when a series of mili tary blunders showed the consequences of continued inaction. The failed 1979 hostage rescue mission in Iran, the failure and withdrawal of U.S. forces under fire in Beirut in 1982, and the missteps in the Grenada operation during the same year finally led a majority of Americans to believe that the nation’s military establishment was deeply trou bled and needed a major overhaul.
Even so, it took a concerted and protracted effort by key legislators, retired senior military officers, and former civilian officials, along with the support of thousands of concerned citizens, to pass the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act in 1986. This farreaching legislation strengthened joint military institutions at the expense of the individual armed services and has proven to be a huge success. The U.S. develop ment and operation of superior integrated military capabilities, as demonstrated in the lightening operation that successfully toppled the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq with only light U.S. casualties, is widely attributed to the greater powers of the chairman, the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff, and other joint institutions made possible by the legislation.
Today, there is broad agreement among Americans that reform of the intelligence community is necessary. Again, a series of evident missteps—cul minating in the failure to prevent al- Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center—has crystallized a consensus that something must be done. But there are many contending ideas about what exactly needs to be accomplished. There is also the less obvious but no less important question of how to bring about meaningful change despite the opposition of those powerful organizations whose interests are being challenged. The Congress’ inability to pass even weak reform legislation during 2004, despite intense pressure to do so, demonstrates the power of entrenched bureaucracies and other vested interests.
How, then, might comprehensive intelligence reforms be brought about? There are lessons to be learned from the success of the Goldwater-Nichols reform effort; seven are sketched out in this article.
Barry M. Blechman is Founder and CEO of DFI International and is a member of the Defense Policy Board.