All the news about the intelligence reform bill reminds me of this old joke. You can rearrange the branches, but unless you change the monkeys in the tree it won't make much difference.
The reform won’t do much good without the basic disciplines of spirituality in the workplace . Here is how the two are connected.
" In late 1944, as the German Wehrmacht prepared to launch its last counteroffensive at the Battle of the Bulge, several pieces of intelligence suggested it was coming. The top American generals couldn't agree on the value of the intelligence. Montgomery and his obedient intelligence officer (known as his G-2) stubbornly rejected the facts; Bradley and his G-2 remained skeptical and passive. Eisenhower and his G-2 were somewhat quicker to sense the danger but slower than Patton, whose G-2 saw it coming several weeks beforehand, prompting Patton to get his divisions ready to meet the offensive.
So four commanders with essentially the same intelligence turned in different performances. Though slightly disadvantaged by being at a lower echelon than all the others, Patton was far ahead of them in his appreciation of the impending assault. .
It takes personal and institutional integrity to get the right answers to the top, get them there on time and in sufficient detail. Without institutional integrity, the new Director of National Intelligence will direct another national intelligence failure. In this regard, I’m disturbed to read this WaPo story about a CIA operative who could not get dissenting information passed up the chain. If this story is true, the CIA might have warned the Administration that there was no immediate WMD threat from the Iraqi military. I’ve argued before that the intelligence community failed to ask the right question about WMD programs. If they had asked how mature these programs were, they would have recognized that they years from completion, and would have focused attention on the possibility of a low level terrorist threat.
As author Gregory F. A. Pierce has written, some times people just have to take risks and tell unpleasant truths. It would help if the new DNI would work to foster a corporate culture of integrity. Maybe the proposed cultural change program at NASA can serve as a guide.
Comments