Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [229]
The reports of the 9/11 Commission (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States) and the WMD Commission also focused attention on how best to organize analysts across the community. The 9/11 Commission recommended organizing all analysts by regional or functional national intelligence centers. In the commission’s concept, the centers would carry out all-source analysis and plan intelligence operations and “would be housed in whatever department or agency is best suited for them.” The center concept arose during the late 1980s and early 1990s as the community put increased emphasis on transnational issues that—by definition—crossed national borders. The centers allowed analysts from various agencies to be brought together to focus on an issue, although the centers have always been dominated by the CIA. The commission’s idea would do the same for other functional and, now, regional issues.
The 2004 reform law only mandated one center, the NCTC, but also stipulated that the DNI report to Congress on creating a center for nonproliferation, which has been done. A clear expectation is presented in the legislation that other centers will be created as well. The main advantage of the centers is, in theory, the ability to get cross-cutting analysis on an issue, assuming that they are true community centers and not dominated by one agency. But centers also have disadvantages.
• To date, centers have been primarily functional in nature. Although analysts in centers do consult with their regional colleagues, this does require some effort. Centers have an occasional tendency to focus on their functional topic and to be less able to bring in the regional or national context in which these issues occur. Organizing by centers—either regional or functional—could exacerbate this tendency. Also, some of the issues handled by centers have close relationships, such as terrorism and narcotics. Sharing analyses across these boundaries can also be difficult. In other words, centers may create analytical stovepipes of their own.
• Getting resources out of or away from centers has proven difficult once they are established. Although a DNI should be able to effect changes, past performance indicates that centers do run counter to the desire for greater analytic agility.
• Centers tend to focus on the most pressing issues. In a center-based community, devoting some level of resources to those issues or regions that have lower priorities may prove even more difficult than it has been.
The WMD Commission recommended the creation of one new center, the National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC), although it would not function like the other intelligence centers. As established by the DNI in 2005, the NCPC serves “to identify critical intelligence gaps or shortfalls in collection, analysis or exploitation, and develop solutions to ameliorate or close these gaps.” Thus, it is not an intelligence production center. Its ability to carry out its mandate depends on knowing exactly what the intelligence community is doing concerning proliferation, and the DNI’s ability to then make changes. The commission also recommended the creation of mission managers to oversee both collection and analysis for the more important topics or issues. The commission’s report was vague on who would decide among the mission managers when it came to resources. Presumably the DNI or someone on the DNI’s staff would be designated. But it is important to understand that the two major resource decisions—collection assets and analysts—tend not to occur within similar time frames. Decisions about analysts tend to be