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December 10, 2006

Cats and Dogs, Living Together

In which I agree with Alec Baldwin.

There is an answer to this problem. There is a way to defeat terrorism while building new and better alliances in the Arab world. It will be an enormously complex and difficult diplomatic puzzle. But the first step might be oddly simple. Get rid of the CIA, which has outlived its usefulness and is an embarrassment to this great country, and rebuild and reform US intelligence capabilities to fight this new type of threat. I think our hopes must begin there.

Of course, that's about all Baldwin has to offer, but he's on to something. He and I probably disagree about why the CIA is an embarrassment, but we're agreed that it is, and that it's past time to tear it down and start over.

The CIA dates back to the mid-1940s, built after the Second World War to provide for all of America's intelligence needs. It shouldn't surprise anyone that an organization built some 60 years ago may not be optimally-designed for the requirements we have of it now. That (along with political infighting) has been part of the impetus for the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies the U.S. now has that helped ensure that the September 11 attacks could slip through without anyone connecting the dots. Given the importance of intelligence in an information-age war, perhaps it's time we tried something different.

Tearing down the CIA (and I'd tear all the intelligence agencies down and start over with a single agency) is a radical idea, but I don't think it's as crazy as it sounds. Attempts to reform bureaucracies are fraught with difficulties, as nobody wants to give up the power they've accumulated and it is relatively easy for agencies to delay or even ignore attempts to restructure their organization. Remember that Presidents last only eight years at most, but bureaucrats are forever, and it's child's play for them to hold out until the annoying guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is on the speaking circuit. Furthermore, even when they agree that there is a need for change, people who have been doing things for a very long time tend to have a difficult time changing their ways, preferring to return to what they already know works. Attempts to rebuild an effective institution from the inside are iffy at best.

Starting from scratch, while admittedly posing its own set of challenges, eliminates a vast number of roadblocks and frees the new organization to optimize its form to meet its function. By tearing down the current structure of overlapping agencies, the new organization would reduce or possibly even eliminate the problem of information now flowing to the right people. A new organization would also be free to borrow from the best of those leaving the defunct agencies, while allowing fresh blood and new ideas to enter the business. It would take a very good team of senior leaders to build such a new agency, which tends to militate against letting the Bush administration do this, but with the right people in charge, I think we'd see a major improvement in our intelligence capabilities, albeit after an initial dropoff while the new agency spun up.

It's risky, but the potential payoff is high. And given how poorly we've done in this war thus far, maybe it's time to take a little risk.

Hat tip: Winds of Change.