The need for intel reform is constant: "These agencies always need to be reformed," Former SecDef Bob Gates wrote. "Bureaucracies always have a way of reverting to the mean, which is inertia. They fall back on old ways of doing things, instead of looking to the future.” (Thread)

Lately, I've reflected on the calls for reform in the 1990s. We often characterize this era as a missed opportunity (it was); that the fall of the USSR should have caused a great reckoning in the IC. People then did see the need for change, however -they just weren't listened to.

In 1991, Stansfield Turner wrote an article called "Intelligence for a New World Order," and endorsed the creation of a DNI. He proclaimed that in the 1990s, information, especially information from technical collection systems, was more crucial than ever.

“Information always has been power," Turner wrote, "but today there is more opportunity to obtain good information, and the United States has more capability to do that than any other nation.”

The admiral argued that the greatest threats posed to the US in the new world order were economic rather than military, in the guise of technological innovations, market instability, or shortages of raw materials.

He said intelligence was too hesitant to ‘go out on a limb’ to positively affect policy decisions. It performed better with simple military analysis, but that would be less important in the future as the difficult problems of economic & political stability would come to the fore.

Admiral Turner wrote that “Analysis must make better use of open sources and must be more interdisciplinary, with more use made of reports from commercial and political officers overseas.”

Now *there* was an accurate intelligence forecast.

In 1992, SSCI Chairman Senator David Boren said the time for boldness in IC reform had come. "Changes in the world have made the current intelligence structure outdated. The world has changed, and the intelligence community must change with it," he said.

“If the intelligence community fails to make these changes,” he said, “it will become an expensive and irrelevant dinosaur just when America most needs information and insight into the complex new challenges that it faces.”

Also in 1992, Harvard historian Ernest May, who directed the Kennedy School’s Intelligence and Policy program, reviewed Senator Boren’s proposals in “Intelligence – Backing into the Future."

Neither analysts nor "operators," he judged, “may successfully adapt to a world more like that of a Washington news reporter, challenged not to find information but to avoid being inundated by it.”

Further, he reminded, “In business corporations, attempts to change cultures usually fail. They may fail in the CIA. It may prove better to create a *new* clandestine service and a new corps of analysts, bringing in veterans only as and if they meet newly defined needs.”

He concurred with Boren and others, however, that the IC must shift away from military issues to take a more holistic approach to analysis, incorporating expertise on issues like banking, immigration, disease, & climate. And, get this:

He even recommended placing intelligence officers directly on the staffs of decision-makers. Now there's an idea.

The Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the US Intelligence Community, better known under the names of its two chairmen, the Aspin-Brown Commission, was a joint effort established by Congress in law in 1994.

With nine commissioners appointed by the President and eight by Congress, it “came along at a time when intelligence was on the defensive. The name of the game was not beefing up the function…but rather preserving it in the face of mounting attacks.”

Its purpose “was to determine how best to adapt the Intelligence Community to the challenging new world that had emerged following the end of the Cold War,” and also to give credence and legitimacy to the mission of intelligence in the wake of flagging morale."

Parallel to the Aspin-Brown Commission, the lower chamber established its own extensive investigation. The HPSCI’s staff study “IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st-Century” was in its own words about “opportunity, not reform.”

IC21 recognized that the community, fragmented, should be more synergistic and unified. It also recommended increased authority to the DCI, but focused on collection rather than analysis, recommending the merger of existing technical collection agencies into a single entity.

That of course didn't happen, but it did result in the creation of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA, the predecessor of today's NGA).

Overall, the 1990s were a schizophrenic decade—on the one hand, the country was elated as the Cold War was over and the economy boomed. On the other, there was widespread confusion within the government about what it wanted from its intelligence apparatus in the new era.

@AmyZegart documented “six bipartisan blue-ribbon commissions, three major unclassified governmental initiatives, & three think-tank task forces” addressing the role & purpose of the IC in the wake of the Cold War. “The common theme was the need for major change."

But by the turn of the century, hardly any of these reforms were adopted though, and the ‘peace dividend’ mentality encouraged Congress to justify the reduction of intelligence budgets even as expectations rose in the afterglow of the Persian Gulf War.

Intelligence budgets took their largest absolute reductions in four decades in1993 & remained flat for several more years. Personnel totals at IC agencies dropped by more than 20% between 1989 and 2001, resulting in the "hollowing out" that many greybeards today speak of.

There were lots of others. The point of this sampling is just to show that smart people have always recognized the need for change and that the status quo is insufficient to the magnitude of the task at hand.

Thus, the IC found itself at the dawn of the 21st-c looking remarkably the same as it had in 1947. Though the names of some offices had changed, the division of labor between function and region swapped over many times, and some lines of direct reporting re-drawn...

...it was structurally the same confederation of agencies doing the same sorts of things that it had been doing then if
only marginally more of those things and marginally better at doing them.

I might do another thread on the post-9/11 reforms, but they were all essentially re-treads of the same arguments the community had been having with itself from the outset.

Those thinking then about the business of intelligence were rightly consumed with the failures of 2001 and 2003, but there would be many more failures to come.

Then, there was yet no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. People still used Blackberries and watched movies on battery-draining portable DVD players; there was no concept of streaming video. Intelligence, then, was still about finding & keeping secrets, because secrecy still existed.

They knew change was coming but couldn’t grasp the enormous consequences of the information revolution. Now, well into the 21st-century, we have a somewhat better perspective—but what we see gives us reason for pause, and deep concern.

The information environment of the early aughts - let alone the early 1990s - was orders of magnitude different from that of today. Yet we failed to make the necessary changes to modernize in either 1991 or in 2001 or 2003.

At best, we resurrected the cadaver of an idea from the 1970s - the establishment of a DNI - and changed a few words to make the line between "foreign" and "domestic" intelligence a little more blurry. Is that really the best we could do, even in the aftermath of 9/11 and WMD?

In 2005, Deborah Barger called for nothing short of a "Revolution in Intelligence Affairs" before taking a role at the newly-established ODNI. In 2008, @milouness wrote that there was nothing wrong with the IC so much as its "essential design."

Perceptive leaders have been calling out the need for systemic reform quite literally for decades, now, and yet the best we can get from some of our most prominent think tanks is a reheated recommendations from the 1990s?