A telling headline: Defense and foreign policy

There's a profile of Michele Flournoy, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in today's Washington Post. Reaction to the piece on Twitter has been universally positive, at least among the people I follow, and it's little surprise: Flournoy is a great defense policy mind and an effective leader, and her success sets a great example for the next generation of women in the field. I think she's generally done a good job, though I could come up with some inside-baseball complaints that wouldn't hold much significance for people outside the Pentagon.

But you know me: there's always a down-side. For this piece, it's the headline:

Michele Flournoy, Pentagon's highest-ranking woman, is making her mark on foreign policy

No one could quibble with the accuracy of the statement. But it may be worth reflecting for a moment on the fact that we've grown so accustomed to the modern Defense Department's coequal if not primary role in the formulation and execution of foreign policy that there's scarcely a mention of the fact that this isn't the way our government is designed to work.

This isn't a shot at Flournoy -- if she hadn't "made her mark on foreign policy," she'd probably have been fired by now for failing to do her job. No, it's but a wistful recollection of the days when the men and women who wanted to direct foreign policy -- the Nitzes and Kennans and Achesons -- did so at the State Department, when our national leaders recognized that armed force and the plentiful resources that backed it were but one of several tools that the country used to assure its interests around the world.

Open Thread: National security reform (UPDATED)

The comment thread on yesterday's SOF post is starting to morph into two separate lines of discussion thanks to a couple of comments about suggested re-organization of the government to optimize irregular warfare tasks. I think that's an interesting subject and one worthy of discussion, but national security reform is a HUGE topic that spans well beyond the scope of special operations. I've decided to create a new post to discuss those and other suggested structural or organizational changes, and I encourage you to comment on it with your own ideas. I'm going to reproduce the relevant comments from the other thread here to get us started.

Mike Few kicked things off:

I'll add one problem/radical solution.

Problem. USSOCOM is more akin to FORSCOM than CENTCOM.

Solution. Move SOF to the CIA and SF to the State Department.

How would that go over for reform?

And I responded like this:

I'd say "USSOCOM is more akin to" an entire MILDEP (like the Army), not just a component like FORSCOM, because of the doctrine and concepts development, the acquisition function, etc etc that goes beyond personnel management or sourcing of forces. But yeah, I agree. Of course, this is only a "problem" if you presume that USSOCOM should have primary responsibility for the operational employment of SOF (as opposed to the relevant GCC).

When you say "move" them, I assume you mean transfer OPCON and TACON to those organizations, not uproot the entire structure from the military and re-establish it in non-DOD Departments...? Because if you do that, you've suddenly lost the linkage to the basic military skills that are at the root of many SOF capabilities. You've basically just re-created the IC's paramilitary orgs (CIA SAD, etc.) and established an operational unit under SECSTATE "command." I'm not sure what's accomplished by that.

Then an anonymous commenter jumped in with an even more radical proposal:

The CIA is a failed organization that has proven resistant to reform. Therefore, the CIA should be broken up into its constituent parts, and those parts assigned to organizations that already have clear missions and defined chains of command, as follows:

1. Transfer CIA offices and personnel operating within the United States to the FBI. The CIA was never intended to be a domestic spy agency. The FBI is designed to handle domestic intelligence operations. The FBI is measured and held accountable by its ability to catch criminals, and this accountability provides the motivation for the FBI to perform.

2. Transfer all CIA embassy activities overseas to the US Department of State. The State Department is designed to handle diplomacy. Much of what the CIA now does in its embassies involves diplomacy, such as handling relationships with liaison services. State Department officers are able to make contacts with other foreign government representatives in diplomatic venues. The State Department handled these functions prior to the creation of the CIA in 1947.

3. Transfer overseas human intelligence collection efforts to the US military. Focus case officers exclusively on the gathering of human intelligence. The fundamental motivation of the American military—to win wars and to protect the lives of its soldiers—will provide the motivation to ensure that its case officers provide the necessary intelligence and do not become distracted by soft targets or by designing programs meant to look busy and spend money. The US military already has a large corps of trained case officers, graduates of the CIA’s own training course. The US military already has a better ability to place case officers overseas in non-State Department positions. The military’s command structure is clearly defined and much flatter than the Agency’s.

We should recognize the scope of the problem: The lack of human sources of intelligence has haunted American Presidents since the foundation of the CIA in 1947.

Look up Gen. Russ Howard (former SF)

To which Mike responded:

That's the most radical organizational structure change that I've seen that would require both restructuring and changing the law.

The premise was based on the close working relationship developed between SOF/CIA over the last ten years and the habitual CoC SF/State find themselves in in most FID efforts.

Other ideas include dismantling USSOCOM and elevating an SF position in the JCS.

I've got some thoughts of my own on this proposal, but I'll save them for the comments. Hope others will join in.

UPDATE: Anybody else having problems with comment functionality today? I'm having a hell of a time getting anything to post, so I'm just going to stick my first comment up here in the main text until this gets sorted.

So it turns out that what I identified as the thoughts of an anonymous commenter were actually recommendations from Ishmael Jones’s critical book about the CIA. (I read the book a couple years ago, but apparently it didn’t stick.) Intelligence reform isn’t really my thing, but let’s take a look at these ideas as they relate to broader restructuring of the national security apparatus.

1. Transfer CIA offices and personnel operating within the United States to the FBI. The CIA was never intended to be a domestic spy agency. The FBI is designed to handle domestic intelligence operations. The FBI is measured and held accountable by its ability to catch criminals, and this accountability provides the motivation for the FBI to perform.

Could not agree more strongly with this. In fact it seems clear to me that domestic investigation and counterintelligence has been (and should always have been) the responsibility of law enforcement.

2. Transfer all CIA embassy activities overseas to the US Department of State. The State Department is designed to handle diplomacy. Much of what the CIA now does in its embassies involves diplomacy, such as handling relationships with liaison services. State Department officers are able to make contacts with other foreign government representatives in diplomatic venues. The State Department handled these functions prior to the creation of the CIA in 1947.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what Jones means here. “CIA embassy activities overseas,” in my understanding, consist basically of collection management – that is, directing the activities of case officers (intelligence collectors) in the country in question and providing reachback to resources in the U.S. – plus a certain amount of liaison with the host nation government/intelligence service in those countries where this is appropriate and practicable. (It’s possible there’s something else that I’m missing here.)

I don’t have any problem with the idea of transferring these responsibilities to the State Department, but the station chief in each embassy is meant to coordinate his activities with the Chief of Mission (ambassador) already in the current system. And the intelligence competencies possessed by the CIA stations in each country would need to be reproduced in the State Department, likely at greater cost, effort, and administrative difficulty now that you’ve organizationally separated collection from collection management. (Shouldn’t the folks running case officers have experience as case officers themselves?)

3. Transfer overseas human intelligence collection efforts to the US military. Focus case officers exclusively on the gathering of human intelligence. The fundamental motivation of the American military—to win wars and to protect the lives of its soldiers—will provide the motivation to ensure that its case officers provide the necessary intelligence and do not become distracted by soft targets or by designing programs meant to look busy and spend money. The US military already has a large corps of trained case officers, graduates of the CIA’s own training course. The US military already has a better ability to place case officers overseas in non-State Department positions. The military’s command structure is clearly defined and much flatter than the Agency’s.

I think this is a terrible, terrible idea. Jones suggests that military personnel will be more motivated to do a good job because their “fundamental motivation” is “to win wars and protect the lives of its soldiers.” But isn’t the fundamental motivation of an intelligence officer to collect intelligence, detect threats, and protect Americans? It’s simply not serious to argue that the military interests are any less bureaucratic or parochial than those of intelligence officers. Furthermore, human intelligence collection is not a core competency of the armed forces and requires a dramatically different mindset than what’s demanded by most functional specializations in the military.And as for the DOD’s “ability to place case officers overseas in non-State Department positions,” I can only assume Jones means that military officers could operate under official cover as defense attaches (who are already intelligence collectors), liaisons, or security cooperation officers. But this flies in the face of the accumulated wisdom that resulted in DATTs being expressly differentiated from SCOs: if the host nation doesn’t know who is a collector and who isn’t, everyone gets treated that way. And that ends up hampering all the cooperative efforts that military personnel in foreign countries are there to execute.
Intelligence reform may be necessary, but further militarizing our overseas presence by putting operational military personnel in every country on the globe is a cure that’s worse than the disease.