US intelligence and its future: aligning with a new and complex environment

When then Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger remarked at the end of the Cold War that at some point we’d all feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that may have been taken as humorous. Amusing or not, American national security remains in transition when it comes to dealing with non-state actors and non-peer states. The Trump administration’s reset of the national security balance back toward emerging peers or near-peers is perhaps a reflection of how the world has shifted from the immediate post-9/11 view. It may also reflect an institutional tendency to wish to confront adversaries or potential adversaries we are more comfortable confronting. The last major events forcing review and reform of American national security were, respectively, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The former led to some significant changes in the military instruments of American security and several studies of the intelligence instrument. In retrospect, the period between 1991 and 2001 produced on the intelligence side little more than budget cuts and some rearrangement of the administrative architecture of the intelligence community. American intelligence in 2001 closely – too closely – resembled a trimmed down version of its Cold War self. September 2001 produced significant changes in such areas as homeland security and the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI). The Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Act, and the Intelligence Reform and Prevention Act promised a new look at significant aspects of national security, but all suffered from the post-crisis, ‘we need to do something!’ climate in which they were enacted. In the nearly two decades since, the Congress has provided some course corrections to the Patriot Act, but on the whole it has chosen not to review the other components of the post-9/11 legislative package. Homeland security remains a partially digested, partially accepted phenomenon for a nation with a congenital (and understandable) aversion to application of national power to ‘domestic’ security issues. As for the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) and its signature feature, the DNI, a decade and a half of experience strongly suggests it has underachieved. The projected trade in which the director central intelligence transferred his or her community leadership role to the DNI but which left the DNI without control of the Central Intelligence Agency does not seem to have produced the enhanced role the new office was to have over the several agencies of US intelligence. At the time of the IRTPA’s passage, it was fashionable to speculate on how much greater authority over the intelligence community the DNI would have. It is at least now reasonable to conclude that the DNI has, for most of its existence, exerted less authority over the community than did the DCI in the pre-IRTPA era. In fact, it may well be that the DNI is in the worst possible position for an executive in any organization, especially a bureaucratic organization. That is, the DNI appears to have more responsibility than authority. Even a first-tour branch chief in a local office of parks and recreation would recognize this as a situation to be escaped from at the first opportunity. The post-9/11/2011 American intelligence establishment has not experienced anything as dramatic as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the attacks of September 2001, but the years since 2001 have nevertheless provided equally fundamental changes in the external environments