President Bush Calls for Creation of New Intelligence Post
 

I'm not happy.

Isn't this redundant? Who has priority? The NSA or this new director?
Am I missing something?

POTUS
 

I wish POTUS had someone to help him. I think all he needs to do is get on TV, and talk to Americans like he's talking to his neighbor. Just be honest and forthright. Explain to everyone what is going on, and speak from the heart.

I believe he is an honest and good man, but he always seems to take the high road and avoid his naysayers comments and accusations. A cetain amount of that is great, he is after all the president, and deserves a great deal of respect. But he may have to dumb down his rhetoric for the average american to get whats going on.

People want a leader, he has got to be more visible and more outspoken. He (and the rest of us) are in great danger of losing this election.

Who's it going to be?

Only person I can think of is Rudy Giuliani.

I still don't see a reason for the new director.

You have Rudy's picture in your notebook with little hearts drawn around it, don't you?

You know we have enormous problems just within the DOD determining who needs what in terms of intelligence. It took me the better part of six months to sit down just with the intelligence center and school who had the proponency for all military intelligence doctrine and work thru just the unique needs for SF and get it put into a FM just to give everyone the same point of reference. If I had any, I could honestly say that it made my hair hurt. Now project that to a national level and start to look at tactical, operational and strategic requirements and then figure out who is going to be tasked to do what and I can honest say my scalp hurts. They are going to have to put together one hell of an organization to ensure everyone's requirements are met and then the turf battles for who gets what for funding will be extremely bloody. This has all the makings of a disaster in the making.

Jack Moroney

I agree sir. IMO, all they had to do was give the DCI the tools to do his job. Like budget authority. They can call this position whatever they like - there's no way the military is going to give over all their intelligence capabilities.

Very funny - obviously still sore from the ass kicking I gave you earlier. :p

Seriously, what will this national intelligence director accomplish that is not already covered by the NSA?

Since I'm sure everyone here has already read it, I won't bore you with a summary, but I highly recommend any policy makers reading this forum revisit Amy Zegart' s'Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC'.


* actually, I just revisited it and noticed that the author thanks one "Condi Rice' for her help in wrinting the book.

I don't think the question is so much as to what he will accomplish vice what is already being accomplished but what will not be accomplished due to turf wars and budget allocations. When one guy is in charge of the overall effort and the development of tasking priorities and collection agencies begins those areas of less interest to the agency head are going to fall by wayside. In addition, the knowledge base needed by someone at that echelon to make those decisions will be enormous. Do you really think that an agency head is going to understand the requirement an A-Team is going to have on what to him is some obscure target requirement that makes no sense in terms of what he feels is important at the moment. While to him this is just simply a tactical requirement because after all we are just talking about an A-Team, the mission could very well have operational or strategic implications if it fails. It is the old, "for want of a nail" epic.

Jack Moroney

so what does the DCI do?

what was the DHS created for?


hmmmm.... silly politicians.

Everyone is screaming "oversite, where's the oversite??" So I guess they figured that they would create a posistion that could be viewed as oversite for all of the agencies. Seems crazy to me.

When you have multiple agencies with multiple heads, you often have different agencies assigning themselves to different objectives. They will all follow a nationally assigned objective, but at the same time they can persue that which they feel is relevant. While sometimes, with the GWOT, for example, agencies might not have focused enough on terrorism. This may have had detrimental effects, it is unclear how much funding cuts etcetera have effected intelligence gathering capabilities. However, having a 'head of intelligence' will mean that one objective, as the Colonel says, is persued. All other objectives fall by the way-side and as a result, new emerging threats may be over looked, much like parts of the government alledge the threat of terror was over looked.
How do you allow agencies to persue individual interests, therefore creating a broad range of intelligence, but also persue key interests in depth, as a team?

Food for thought,

Solid