The Leviathan wants to keep its defense intelligence agencies
Tuesday, November 2, 2004 at 4:30AM ■"Pentagon's objections block overhaul of U.S. intelligence: Wide support not enough to overcome military concerns,"," by John Diamond, USA Today, 2 November 2004, p. 12A.
Eighty percent of the Intelligence Community's budget is taken up by the defense intelligence and service agencies plus the 600-pound gorillas of the highly technical "overhead" agencies that use vast amounts of technology to look down upon and listen to the rest of the world. Guess what? The Pentagon will fight to not lose budgetary control over those assets, and I don't blame them.
The vast bulk of the IC's budget does go to agencies that essentially serve the Leviathan (aka, combat support agencies), when in reality the desire to have a National Intelligence Director isn't so much about reining in the Leviathan-related intell agencies as it is gathering up the rest of them, most notably the CIA. So a struggle naturally ensues that could be avoided if we admitted that the Leviathan needs its own version of intell, but so does the everything else of the U.S. government.
That's why I have stated in the past that we need to bifurcate the intelligence community just like the Pentagon: one group of agencies to serve the Leviathan in secrecy and whose budget should be under its firm grip, and another to serve the System Administrator force (which, frankly, the Department of Homeland Security should serve as well with its many disaster-relief skill setsóas a colleague of mine Bruce Elleman recently observed). Pretending that a NID ruling over all these intell agencies is the answer is just plain stupid and goes against the bureaucratic reality that says we already have a warfighting force, but what we really need is a peacekeeping force to augment it if we're ever going to get serious about winning real and permanent victories in this war on terror.
Fighting the Pentagon over the budgetary control over the Leviathan's intell agencies is a waste of time and effort. But just watch it drag on for months.
Reader Comments