PublicOrgTheory

The incoming administration is adding more four-star power, this time at the putative top of the intel community:

Secret agendas have never been “Denny” Blair’s style. The reserved former four-star admiral, who is widely understood to be President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as director of national intelligence, is well known in Washington as an intellectual who values straightforwardness and has mastered the byzantine interagency process during his various government stints.

In choosing a man so steeped in Washington’s ways, the Obama administration is signaling its intention to streamline the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is widely seen as too large, too cumbersome and still too disjointed, according to transition officials.

Created by Congress in 2004 over the objections of most leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, the McLean-based ODNI today includes 1,500 employees and a hefty, although undisclosed, number of private contractors. It supervises the nation’s 16 other intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

Why “putative”?  The DNI was created in much the same way as the Director of Central Intelligence was originally intended; that is, to be the point of the intel spear.  “16 other intelligence agencies”, most of them within the Department of Defense, indicates how diffuse the community has become.  Budget authority for most of the intel community lies outside of the DNI’s scope, resulting in a role that is heavy on its need for influence, short on control, and highly susceptible to the caprices of a complex political environment.  Creating new organizational entities to compensate for dysfunction among other organizational entities often brings unintended consequences.  A “joined-up” intel community continues to be no more than a diluted aspiration hovering over a cluster of moribund silos.

That said, Blair just might bring the horsepower to begin the process of change among these agencies.  Streamlining seems like a good first step for ODNI, perhaps creating a level of focus and agility that could lead to a more unified intel community.