In Look Back, a prominent policymaker, historian, or participant reflects upon a major event or phenomenon in recent history, drawing on both their expertise and their first-hand experience. With articles that have addressed such important issues such as reforming the US intelligence sector or dealing with the aftermath of genocide, this section looks back in order to look forward and make sound recommendations for dealing with current international policy dilemmas.

Lessons in Intelligence Reform

By Barry M Blechman

The Department of Defense (DOD) was created in 1947 but the beginnings of an integrated military command system were not genuinely established until President Dwight Eisenhower and his national security advisor, General Andrew Goodpaster, inspired several legislative initiatives in the mid- 1950s. And it was not until the 1960s that an integrated planning and budgeting system was created following the reforms of Robert McNamara. Nonetheless, even after these reforms, the individual armed services that comprised the Department of Defense remained largely autonomous and dominant in their respective land, sea, and aerospace spheres. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), consisting of the heads of each service and a separate chairman, who came from one of the services himself, together with unified and specified commanders, who reported through the chairman to the president, were supposed to integrate the services’ preferences and ensure smoothly running joint operations. In fact, the JCS was a very weak organization and its chairman had virtually no indepen dent powers. The Joint Chiefs spent most of their time bro kering deals among the services on trivial matters and almost always deferred to individual service preferences. Moreover, recognizing the weakness of joint institutions, up and coming military officers shunned joint assignments as best they could and, when given such undesirable assignments, worked first and foremost to protect their home service’s interests. more...