We finally Have An Update That Likely Confirms That It Is Not Going To Happen
Reforming the ODNI and the National Intelligence Community (IC) is a strategic imperative for the 21st century.
In the previous six parts of this series I articulated a general plan as a starting point for reforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the intelligence community (IC,) provided a number of reasons it had failed to achieve the original objective of the 9-11 Commission (e.g., to unify the IC,) and articulated the reason I believe nothing is going to come of it.
For those skeptics, cynics and dewy-eyed optimists alike out there, we just had-once again-a spate of events that we in the intelligence business like to call evidence-but in keeping with modern vernacular trends are now more appropriately classified as “tells-” that explain two facts of life takeaways from this “strategic imperative for the 21st century of reforming the ODNI and IC” that confirm that nothing substantive is going to happen.
Fact of life number one was described in my previous article-part 6-and remains true that you simply “can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd”: not gonna happen, wouldn’t be prudent, nope-ain’t happening. The pace of play in the ODNI and IC is way too all-encompassing for leaders to spend time truly working on fixing it.
Marginalia: sure, we got that. Changes by noodling around the margins: absolutely. Firing the letter people, “pedo posse” that has been supporting doing aberrant things that was allowed in the government under the guise of diversity that infiltrated the personnel system-that often represents the back door to-depending on your inclination and bent of character-diversity, representation and goodness, sure: easy do. One off ideological leakers: of course.
Even those who have affirmed that-regardless of their oath-if they are given a lawful order that they don’t agree with, they will simply disregard it. Somewhat the definition of a disqualifying act.
A very easy thing to effect, a nice bumper sticker to talk about, but in the end a mostly feckless and useless gesture that won’t change the institution. Last I tracked these things the State Department Intelligence component-INR-personnel had an average of 23 years on account. Presidents come, presidents go but the team manning the switch is the team manning the switch…
Fact of life number two is simply the magnitude of the hole the IC dug itself over the last 3 decades where leaders seemingly became ever so much more political and their bosses became ever so much moreso risk averse and allergic to the consequences of spycraft at the nation state and strategic level that we seemingly lost the capability, will, sense of urgency and skills necessary to compete in the arena.
Consider this problem: if we dropped bunker busting bombs on targets with the intention of taking out a uranium refinement and processing capability far underground, yet our classic technique for determining damage (battle damage assessment-BDA) consists of imagery analysis of satellite imagery-which can’t see through the ground-how will we know what we accomplished?
The correct answer is that we paid for this already: and now it is time to reap the results. That is precisely why we are paying the big bucks->$60B a year-to fund the ODNI and the IC-particularly the two all source analysis agencies-CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA,) both of whom are statutorily chartered to do Human Intelligence collection (DIA as the DoD HUMINT Manager) by penetrating and reporting on overseas threats to our nation.
I see a hand in the back: If these two agencies led by the ODNI were doing their job, how do you explain the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack into Israel intel failure?
How do you explain our government believing that if Russia invaded Ukraine the fighting would most likely be over within 72 hours? I say our government but let’s put that frivolity in the in-box of the President, the ODNI, SECDEF, the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the entire IC.
Speaking of Monty Python operations, how do we account for the foolhardy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure to stage out of Bagram AFB, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of top notch US military equipment, and the incredulous belief that the US paid for and propped up Afghan government had any chance of enduring when we knew that nearly all major lines of communications (roads) into Kabul had checkpoints manned by the Taliban?
How far back can you stand to go? When the Obama administration schemed to chase duly elected Ukrainian president Yanukovych out of office via a state department sponsored color revolution, aka, a coup d’etat in 2014, how is it that our State INR and ODNI did not warn Obama that Putin might not take this action well, given his near trillion dollar plan to develop Arctic liquid natural gas capability destined to flow to Europe via undersea and overland pipelines, some of which pathed through Ukraine-to satiate the energy needs of-in particular-the Germans, whose former chancellor was a key advisor and member of team Putin?
How could any rookie analysis not consider that Putin might be angered enough that he might seek to take over Crimea, ensuring himself an alternate route to the middle east for shipping, a flank on NATO to base Navy assets and a little green man force along the Ukraine border in case pipelines needed to be protected?
Should I bring up Libya? We know what all the politicians thought, but did anyone from the ODNI-the IC-State INR-bring up the fact that the loss of Qaddafi might leave an ungoverned space in Northern Africa in a place that historically funded the equivalent of the Libyan foreign legion consisting of 100K Chad soldiers for hire? What was the worst that could happen, Libya turning into an ungoverned space for a dozen years and counting?
We could go through these events for the rest of this article and several more. I think the most important issue from the standpoint of leadership at the national level and accountability within the ODNI and the IC is the question of how many of the leaders responsible for these debacles have been held accountable for these failures?
All of the above have taken place since the ODNI was established in FY2005. None of these leaders were fired, and none have resigned because their advice was ignored, disregarded or not solicited.
To answer my own question that I somewhat begged the answer to up front, how would we go about doing BDA of what is perhaps the most important strategic bombing effort in consideration of the security of the free world since Israel took out the Syrian Nuclear Reactor in September 2007. My joke at the time was the BDA assessment was best done by Fred’s partner Barney, since we needed someone very familiar with Rubble (it all looks the same….)
What was the plan for the post-strike assessment? There are only so many options-one of which I’ve pretty much dismissed, which is assessing satellite imagery coverage of the sites.
A second alternative would be to replicate the effort followed during the Japan March 2011 Fukushima Daichii Nuclear Power Plant melt down caused by a tsunami resulting from earthquakes.
We did not have to rely on covert operations to assess the damage, with a variety of spectral equipped platforms flying SWIR and Hyperspectral Sensors mounted on the DIA ASPECT aircraft and the Global Hawk UAV which monitored core temperatures and emissive gases to determine whether-and estimate how much-radiation was leaking.
We can’t exactly fly one of these aircraft-manned or otherwise-into Iran to do such collection, although that would be a good way to see what type of contaminants were escaping from the site.
One of our last apparent forays in this regard didn’t turn out so well–and I’m not sure we-the US govt-the IC-the ODNI-ever bothered to find out what happened…
So-no-not a good idea. How about replicating the Fukushima effort from space? You would think that we would have good capability by 2025 considering that Hyperspectral collection capability and its somewhat less effective, but better than nothing kissing cousin SWIR has been pretty much an urgent need and required capability for the last 23 years or so.
In fact, the rumor has it that there were significant developments over a dozen years ago or so that were killed off by ODNI because of lingering concerns over atmospheric challenges, although risk reduction efforts with USAF spectrometers had already proven long ago that atmospheric challenges were greatly overexaggerated.
Seemingly resulting in either very hush-hush capabilities that one hopes we bought for >60B a year-or reliance on airborne and UAV capability-such as Saturn Arch-that while very capable, are permissive environment platforms that we are not going to fly into Iran airspace.
Where does that leave us? We have to rely on the Iranians or the Israelis.
Is it possible that ODNI-our CIA, DIA and state INR-are not clever enough to have developed reliable sources in these countries to provide information that can’t be obtained through mechanical, stand-off means?
Is the US government not funding enough for the ODNI to accomplish these requirements? Are they not priorities? Who is responsible for ensuring we can accomplish and follow-up on these efforts in order to feed our leadership the information necessary to make decisions?
I rest my case for now before going long. I hope I am totally wrong here and that we do have significant, magnificent capability that none of us should-nor has a right-to know about.
Cause if we can’t take care of the big, furry, most important POTUS and leadership demands and priorities that “we” think we are already funding in our bloated, constantly failing IC, is it really believable or credible that the same failing ODNI is going to take a wire brush to the community and get it squared away while all this “schtuff” is going on?
C’mon, man!
Max Dribbler
26 June 2025
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