Max Boot has a prescription for a "sclerotic" CIA:
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to shut down the CIA and start from scratch. But that would be expensive and wasteful. Failing that, why not let the CIA continue with its routine tasks while creating a small, elite outfit with only one mission: to eradicate the Islamist terror network.Call it OSS II. It would be free to recruit the best people from the CIA but also from the outside, whether from Wall Street investment banks or Muslim mosques in Detroit. It would seek the kind of people who don't want lifetime sinecures and offer them ample rewards — say $250,000 a year — to take risks that ordinary GS-10s won't.
And then it would unleash them with only one guideline: Get results.
Of course, it'll never happen.
The CIA may not know what's going on inTehran or Pyongyang, but it's all too plugged in to Washington. With its mastery of political infighting, the agency is well-placed to defeat any attempts at serious reform.
At least until the next 9/11.
Very similar comments have come in recent days from Belmont Club and Reuel Marc Gerecht. Both were equally dubious about whether such a bold development could come to pass.
Michael Ledeen says the 9-11 Commission's recommendations for changing the intelligence community are wrong-headed:
We need a smaller intelligence community, not a bigger one, because bigger means more homogenized. The Senate Intelligence Committee report complained about "group think," which is the inevitable outcome of a big community that has to agree on final language for finished intelligence. It would be far better, in my opinion, to let real specialists tell the policymakers what they think, and sign their names to their conclusions. That way, if an analyst successfully solved a problem, he could be rewarded. As things stand now — and the matter is even worse if the commission's recommendations are adopted — no one can be rewarded for original thinking, and bad analysis gets blamed on the whole organization.Posted by Alan at July 24, 2004 10:33 AMIn short, we should strive for competitive intelligence. Keep the boxes small, let them present their analyses and recommendations, and make the policymakers sort it out. The commission goes through the ritual pieties of keeping policy and analysis separate, but most of such talk is misleading, since every grownup knows that certain conclusions — say, that Iran supported the 9/11 operation — lead inevitably to certain policies — say, that "selective dialogue with Iran" is a joke.
Everyone in Washington is making policy all the time. Live with it.
At the end of the day, we need officials who are good enough to make the hard decisions, authorize risky actions, listen carefully to dissonance among the analysts and disagreement about proposed operations, and manage the whole thing while protecting civil liberties to the utmost. It won't be easy. If and when our guys get to that point, the structural changes they need to actuate are actually quite simple: They need a big-time purge, what the business world called "restructuring," leading to a smaller, leaner intelligence community where individuals are encouraged to think independently and act courageously.
It's leadership, stupid.