Experts discuss the government's growing intelligence network: Is it too big?

Slade Gorton, a former U.S. senator and Washington State attorney general, served on the 9/11 Commission.

There are corporations as large and complex as our intelligence system that are very well managed. The problem is not size, but clear lines of authority, which are spectacularly missing in the intelligence community.

The 9/11 Commission's central recommendation was the creation of a Directorate of National Intelligence with wide authority over the entire community, including those elements in the Department of Defense and including budget authority.

The Senate pretty much agreed, but the House balked, as the Post story pointed out. The result was the creation of a directorate that simply added another layer of complexity to an already too complex system.

If the DNI had the authority of an efficient corporation's chief executive, intelligence gathering would be more efficient, shared better, and the budget and number of personnel could be reduced by 25 percent.

Former U.S. congressman Mickey Edwards is vice president of the Aspen Institute.

While it may sometimes seem as though organizations take on a life of their own -- spawning spinoffs, manufacturing redundancies, building layers and walls that are permeable when they shouldn't be and impermeable when flow is required, all of it a spawn of HAL, the malevolent computer -- the truth is somewhat more pedestrian: When that happens, management's focus is too narrow.

Managing an organization's structure to ensure that it functions properly is no less a managerial imperative than the ability to imagine a sleeker hood ornament or stickier tape. Creativity is great fun but real managing requires a lot of i-dotting and t-crossing. In building an organization, sometimes an axe is as important a tool as glue.

A Reagan-era ambassador and arms control director, Ken Adelman is co-founder and vice president of Movers and Shakespeares, which offers executive training and leadership development.

It's not primarily the size of the sprawling intelligence network that makes it flawed, though that's surely a problem; anything that big can't work all that well. But two other factors lead to expectation-inflation and the resulting feeling that the intelligence community doesn't yield results, i.e. to warn us of future threats.

First, many threats simply aren't predictable. There's a distinction between a mystery and a secret. Mysteries are inherently uncertain, not factual at all, often because they're uncertain to the actors themselves.

During the Reagan administration, we looked to the intelligence community to tell us what Mikhail Gorbachev would do and, more generally, what he had in mind. Well, that turned out to be less a secret than a mystery. Gorbachev himself didn't know what he'd do -- that depended on so many factors (themselves mostly mysteries). And what he had in mind one minute differed from that which sprang into his fertile mind the next.