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.
Military specialists and some retired
military officers had been pressing for
serious reforms in the military command
system to correct these entrenched deficiencies
for years. But it was not until the
1980s that the serious shortcomings in
the system became evident to the
American public, when a series of mili
tary blunders showed the consequences
of continued inaction. The failed 1979
hostage rescue mission in Iran, the failure
and withdrawal of U.S. forces under
fire in Beirut in 1982, and the missteps
in the Grenada operation during the
same year finally led a majority of
Americans to believe that the nation’s
military establishment was deeply trou
bled and needed a major overhaul.
Even so, it took a concerted and protracted
effort by key legislators, retired
senior military officers, and former
civilian officials, along with the support
of thousands of concerned citizens, to
pass the Goldwater-Nichols Defense
Reorganization Act in 1986. This farreaching
legislation strengthened joint
military institutions at the expense of the
individual armed services and has proven
to be a huge success. The U.S. develop
ment and operation of superior integrated
military capabilities, as demonstrated
in the lightening operation that successfully
toppled the Saddam Hussein regime
in Iraq with only light U.S. casualties, is
widely attributed to the greater powers of
the chairman, the Joint Chiefs and the
Joint Staff, and other joint institutions
made possible by the legislation.
Today, there is broad agreement
among Americans that reform of the
intelligence community is necessary.
Again, a series of evident missteps—cul
minating in the failure to prevent al-
Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center—has crystallized
a consensus that something must be
done. But there are many contending
ideas about what exactly needs to be
accomplished. There is also the less obvious
but no less important question of
how to bring about meaningful change
despite the opposition of those powerful
organizations whose interests are being
challenged. The Congress’ inability to
pass even weak reform legislation during
2004, despite intense pressure to do so,
demonstrates the power of entrenched
bureaucracies and other vested interests.
How, then, might comprehensive
intelligence reforms be brought about?
There are lessons to be learned from the
success of the Goldwater-Nichols
reform effort; seven are sketched out in
this article.