Transcript of Speech Delivered by Richard A. Posner

I know there have been setbacks. The sudden departure of Captain Russack from his post as Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment, after several months of not even being able to assemble a staff, suggests that little progress has been made in solving the stubborn problem of the reluctance, at once technical and cultural, of intelligence agencies to share information with each other. Maybe there has been progress on other fronts, though this is unclear to an outsider such as myself, and it is, to repeat a point that cannot be repeated too often particularly unclear what if anything such improvements as have been made in the intelligence system owe to the reorganization. I have the sense that little progress has been made in exerting control over the intelligence activities of either the military or the FBI and DHS.

Before Russack left, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was planning that most of his staff would be detailees from other agencies rather than permanent employees of the DNI. I was surprised. I thought that detailees were a temporary expedient. I suspect that it would be a mistake for the DNI to make detailees a major permanent component of its staff. This is an area (there are others) in which the seductive analogy of the Goldwater-Nichols reorganization of the armed forces should be resisted. When officers are detailed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or otherwise assigned temporarily to joint positions, they are moving within the Defense Department and if they do not do their joint work well it will reflect adversely on their career prospects. But when the CIA details an officer to the Directorate of National Intelligence, his performance there will not directly affect his career prospects at the CIA, because the DNI is not the ultimate employer of CIA officers; the CIA is. So the DNI may find it difficult to obtain the complete loyalty of its detailees. That will undermine the effectiveness of the DNI.

It is tempting to think that, despite all the criticisms that I and others have made of the reorganization, the government must be doing something right because we haven't been attacked since 9/11. But haven't we? -- what exactly is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan? And the main thing we did right was to invade Afghanistan and scatter the leadership of al Qaeda, not to reorganize the intelligence community. Moreover, the 9/11 attacks made us hypervigilant about Islamic terrorism; that is a "benefit" that owes nothing to reorganization. A sure sign of the continuing though perhaps inevitable weakness of our counterterrorist intelligence is that we really have no good idea of the capabilities or plans of our terrorist enemies. And a steady drain of experienced intelligence officers to the private sector, whose demand for security personnel soared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has weakened the intelligence community, at least temporarily.

My guess, and it is only that, is that in the end the reorganization of the intelligence community will amount to rather little.

The continuing debacle that is the Department of Homeland Security, still floundering desperately despite the efforts of its able Secretary and his corps of excellent deputies, should make us all suspicious of ambitious reorganizations. Fortunately Congress has not tried to group the intelligence agencies into a single department. But that is only a small comfort. For as a practical matter the main result of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was to layer a new bureaucracy over 22 separate agencies with a total of 184,000 employees, and the main result of the intelligence reorganization may turn out to have been layering a new bureaucracy over 15 separate agencies with a total complement of some 100,000 employees -- though this is to exaggerate, since the DNI has no real control over the Defense Department, whose agencies comprise in the aggregate the largest segment of the intelligence community.

When a bureaucratic layer is added on top of a group of agencies, the result is delay and loss of information from the bottom up, delay and misunderstanding of commands from the top down, turf fights for the attention of the top layer (rival agencies have a single boss for whose favor they fight), demoralization of agencies that have been demoted by the insertion of a new layer of command between them and the President, and underspecialization, since the new top echelon can't be expected to be expert in all the diverse missions of the agencies below. That is one of the lessons of the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Placing FEMA in DHS inserted between the head of FEMA and the White House an official (the Secretary of

DHS) who, naturally because of the breadth of his responsibilities, was not an expert in emergency management. The result was needless delay and confusion.

There is an additional factor, which has been neglected because the people who design government reorganizations are not mindful of the lessons of organization theory. Business mergers often founder on incompatible firm cultures possessed by the merged and merging firms. Mergers of government mergers can founder for the same reason. DHS is the prime current example, but DNI may go the same way. Coordinating, let alone directing, the intelligence system is greatly complicated by the existence of three distinct and largely incompatible intelligence cultures that are poorly

balanced: military intelligence, civilian intelligence, and criminal-investigation intelligence. I disuss their distinctness first, and the imbalance second.

No one I think will deny that the military has a distinctive culture (due to many factors, prominently including its up-and-out promotion system, its discipline, and its strong mission orientation) and views a competing civilian agency such as the CIA with a degree of hostility and disdain, which the agency reciprocates. An aggravating factor is that the military and the CIA are competitors in strategic intelligence, and that the military, being at once the customer and the owner of the national intelligence agencies, has no wish to share their spy satellites and other facilities with the agency.

No one will deny that the FBI has a distinctive culture, and it happens to be inimical to intelligence gathering. The Bureau's conception of intelligence is of information that can be used to obtain a criminal conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses, and immediately the investigation is tightly focused and there is a high probability that the information gathered in the investigation will enable a successful prosecution. National security intelligence, especially counterterrorist intelligence, works differently.

The aim is to prevent the crime, not punish the criminals.