OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE!! FREE AT LAST!!
Err... now I come to think of it, YOU dragged me into that F#@?%! Asia forum!! so I got pushed around by these ADL stooges! I'll get you for that! <g>
Anyway, back to topic --here's an interesting paper highlighting the NSA/CIA tug-of-love I hinted at a coupla weeks ago:
Unite NSA and CIA
The National Security Agency and CIA should be unified under one head--the DCI. There are some reasons as well to integrate the organizations more formally into a single agency. These have performance as well as efficiency elements.
First, NSA serves national intelligence needs--just as CIA does. There is no reason for NSA to be formally part of the Department of Defense and to have as its head a serving military flag officer. NSA ought to be headed by a civilian and be part of the Executive Office of the President, just as CIA long has been. Such a reorganization would in no way diminish NSA's role in serving the intelligence needs of combat commanders. Military personnel could continue to work in many NSA positions, just as they now also serve in CIA and with the NIC.
Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and related technical collection is a significant complement to the HUMINT effort housed mainly at CIA. National-oriented collection is resource constrained and needs better coordination. Reorganization of the Intelligence Community could help accomplish this by integrating NSA's SIGINT and other capabilities better with the DO's HUMINT collection. These include, for example, joint targeting and better use of one agency's assets to pinpoint areas for exploitation by the other's capabilities. The current organizational fragmentation and bureaucratic competition work to reduce mutually beneficial joint work. Analysts working directly with both collection services could help improve the efficiency of overall collection. For example, co-location of NSA's collection with CIA's analytical strengths would foster better NSA targeting and better NSA understanding of future targeting needs--and thus improve its technical development. This coordination could become still more important if technological changes--possibly including failure to employ clipper chips, growing use of encrypted Internet communications, and more widespread use of fiber optics, for example--inhibit NSA's ability to collect information and ultimately threaten its viability as a collection agency.
Linking CIA's analyst corps more closely to NSA would improve CIA's understanding of SIGINT--and thus also its ability to judge the value and reliability of NSA's information. It would improve the requirements process, which is now so formalistic and complex that many CIA analysts do not bother to task NSA (65).
Unification of the DI and NSA's more modest analytic staff would tend to improve the analysis of SIGINT, while freeing NSA analysts of the needless fetters that now restrict them to assessment of world events based only on NSA's collection--that is, which prohibits them from all-source analysis. It also would allow assessment of the mass of data that NSA has collected but long has been unable to adequately process.
Unification would tend to reduce, if not eliminate, the petty bureaucratic squabbling between NSA and CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, in particular, which have some overlapping responsibilities. This is a serious problem that warrants high-level evaluation in a classified context.
[snip]
fas.org
Well, needless to say that I find the above memo SHEER FOLLY! Obviously such a damfool proposal could only be plotted by a former CIA guy, namely John A. Gentry. Not only is it wiser for the overall security of the USA to rely on several, autonomous intelligence outfits but to merge them all under the command of the CIA would likely be the worst re-engineering of all! It's much better to have both agencies working on their own, within a checks-and-balances framework. And ultimately, the NSA could operate as an auditor of the other intelligence services (CIA, DEA,...). |
