One point not (I think) appropriate for inclusion in the written talking
points is the specter of an intelligence czar with a separate chain of
command and tentacles throughout the government. Shades of J. Edgar
Hoover! Another point, perhaps only implicit in the attachment, is that,
after being the President’s principal substantive intelligence adviser,
the DCI’s next most important
responsibility should (arguably) be to prevent abuses in CIA—rather than assuming large and
distracting management functions.
The talking points are attached.
Attachment
Talking Points Prepared in the Department of
Defense4
Washington, undated
TALKING PAPER FOR (SecDef’s
Meeting with the President, 2 June 1997)
SUBJECT
A. The most critical needs to be served by the intelligence community
are:
(1) Production of sound intelligence judgments for senior policy
makers. This suggests the desirability of organizational diversity
in order to keep everyone honest and give room for constructive
dissent.
(2) Provision of needed information (current intelligence) and
analysis to a variety of types and levels of users—from top policy
makers to tactical commanders in the field. This suggests
arrangements which link user’s needs with tasking and disseminating
mechanisms.
(3) Assurance of smooth transition from peace to crisis to war. This
suggests that those organizations which will have the responsibility
in crisis and wartime ought, as well, to have substantial peacetime
involvement in tasking, line operations, and resource
management.
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(4) Prevention of abuse. This suggests oversight mechanisms as well
as checks afforded by plurality in organization.
(5) Efficient management of high dollar collection assets. This
suggests a centralized approach to planning, programming, and
budgeting of collection programs.
(6) A balance between the funds devoted to intelligence and the funds
devoted to other programs. This suggests arrangements to promote
cost/benefit trade-offs between intelligence and non-intelligence
programs as occurs where intelligence budgeting is not
centralized.
B. These objectives inherently conflict to some degree. (One of the
frustrations of the current PRM–11
exercise is the assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes wishful—by
many that they do not conflict.) For example, to centralize
everything in the DCI may prejudice
transition from peace to crisis to war or disrupt the needs of
military intelligence even in peacetime. To centralize everything in
DoD may overemphasize the needs
of tactical commanders at the expense of national users. Therefore
the first question must be which, if any, of these (at least six)
objectives should have priority.
C. In my judgment, the two overriding goals must be: in war and peace, (1) the production of
reliable judgments for the President, and (2) the timely provision
of intelligence to the other various levels of users. I would put
(4) higher in the list except that I think it can be handled in a
way that does not conflict with the two I have listed.
D. To the extent these central goals are not being achieved, the
problem is not structural. The DCI
has adequate authority already to task pertinent collection assets
and set collection priorities. The centralization which you (the
President) are being pressed to endorse has to do with resource
management. It might produce more cost-effective management of
collection resources—although this is by no means clear given the
current mechanisms for eliminating redundancy and making trade-offs.
But in the process such centralization is likely to make achievement
of the overriding goals—reliable judgments and timely provision of
intelligence to all users—more difficult.
(1) Centralization tends to erode the diversity of analysis which
keeps judgments honest. No President can afford to have this happen.
Without the TRW contract advice to
CIA as well as the Aerospace
Corp advice to the AF, the
controversy over Soviet warhead weights would have been suppressed.
Without similar diversity, so would that over BACKFIRE range, and
Soviet ICBM accuracy, and the
fraction of Soviet GNP devoted to
military expenditures. In some of these, CIA was correct; in others, it was incorrect; in still
others, the correct answer is not yet known but, without diversity,
the right answer is much less likely to emerge until a painfully
later time.
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(2) The more management responsibilities any DCI has, the less he can concentrate on his
preeminently important function of providing sound intelligence
judgments for senior policy makers. In some ways this is analogous
to the (now-resolved) problem of combining the offices of the
Secretary of State and Special Assistant for National Security
Affairs or any other line and staff jobs.
(3) Peacetime separation of intelligence collection assets from the
Department of Defense may compromise wartime operation, particularly
during the critical phase of initial hostilities. Absent
military-oriented career patterns and organizational arrangements,
how can these organizations retain military expertise so that SecDef or the Commander-in-Chief
can fulfill their wartime obligations? More generally, under the
Constitution and the National Security Act, the President and SecDef are rightly held responsible
for many operational matters in peace and war. These decisions
involve many other factors, but their execution depends critically
on intelligence collection, production, analysis, and judgments. How
can this be reconciled with control in DCI whose role is quite different? A reasonable analogy
is the difference in effectiveness between SACEUR, who has no command role in
peacetime, and the US
CINCs who do.
(4) Centralization would unrealistically complicate the provision of
resources supporting collection. DOD can more effectively run the submarines, launchers,
ranges, aircraft, etc., involved—assets which, moreover, ordinarily
perform non-intelligence functions as well. They fall within the
military chain of command from which DCI is by law excluded even if he is a serving
officer.
(5) Centralization tends to unbalance the system’s servicing of user
needs. The present organizational pluralism provides creative
tension in this regard and does not interfere
with the DCI’s exercise of his
existing authority to task DOD
collection assets to fulfill his needs. Although you (the President)
may hear generalized assertions that the DCI needs more tasking authority and/or line control, I
have asked for but not received concrete examples of how the absence
of such authority has prevented DCI
(as opposed to some analyst in CIA)
from getting the data he has wanted.
(6) Finally, centralization in the DCI would not solve the question of abuse. Indeed, it
has been in CIA where the most
damaging abuses have occurred. None of those scandals would have
been avoided by giving DCI control
over DOD and other intelligence
assets.
E. Even if the centralization being pressed on you was not likely to
make achievement of primary goals more difficult, there would be no
compelling case for change. The collegial arrangement established
only last year by EO 11905 gave the DCI more influence over DOD intelligence resource allocation. Its corollary
disadvantage from DOD’s
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point of view was to tend
to immunize the intelligence portion of the DOD budget from inspection in relation to other defense
functions. This disadvantage aside, the system seems to have worked
fairly well and is, in any event, too new to have had a fair
trial.
F. Recommendations
(1) We ought to give the system created by EO 11905 a more complete
trial, with perhaps greater flexibility for budget trade-offs
between defense intelligence and non-intelligence functions.
(2) If significant change nevertheless seems necessary, perhaps the
most sensible immediate step would be to give the DCI veto power over intelligence
portions of DOD, State, and other
agency budgets.
