Problems at the Pentagon

Andrew C. McCarthy has a good peice on some things wrong over at Defense. Its unfortunate that institutions operate this way, but as James Q Wilson and others have shown in their studies of bureaucracy, this kind of turf activity is as natural as breathing. I am not as familiar with the business literature, but I have seen the same kind of thing there too. Reasons can include glory seeking, empire building, worry that someone else will screw things up, or just being so accustomed to keeping secret information secret that telling someone, even another intelligence agency seems like the wrong thing to do. In business, refoming the old tired ways is so common that Dilbert makes sport of ridiculing the attempts to improve operations. Indeed the reforms are not a panacea, and often are as bad as the problem they are meant to solve. What one must keep in mind is that these shifts are not a question of better or worse, they are a question of shifting the costs around. Peter paying Paul. In its most general sense, one can choose to err on the side of keeping secrets, knowing that some analysis might fail because secrets were too secret; or one can choose to err on the side of analysis, knowing that some secrets might get out. Enter a new problem. When analysis fails, its normally never known to anyone. Does the CIA know where Vladimr Putin is right now? If they don't, the consequences are probabaly very small. Occassionally failures of this kind result in a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11. On the other end of the table is loose lips sinking ships. When secrets get out, its more likely to get noticed, and that means trouble for whoever should have been keeping that secret. So, under normal circumstances, there is a tendency to favor keeping secrets, because it avoids more routine and regular loss of secret information, even though it means occassional lapses in analysis that result in Pearl Harbors and 9-11's.

The US intelligence community used to have to operate with a very aggressive KGB attempting to winckle secrets out of it. The result was a tremendous emphasis on secrecy. Keep in mind all of this follows some spectacular examples of Soviet spies being discovered in American government. Al Qaeda doesn't have spies in the FBI or the CIA, but careless handling of information can still result in operational details or the names of moles (and one hopes we are developing them) getting into terrorists' hands. One example we may all remember is Geraldo Rivera drawing operational maps in the Iraqi sand. Ooops.

Nevertheless, it still appears that US intelligence is still too concerned with secrets at the expence of analysis, which means sharing intelligence with anyone who can help interpret it. This a cultural issue, because lessons have been learned in the intelligence community that go way back to before any of its current members were doing this kind of work. The CIA is over fifty years old, the FBI a few decades older, and Army intelligence, older still. Institutional memory makes an organization risk averse. Since there is more routine risk in sharing secrets than there is in keeping them, that's what intelligence organizations will default to, without strong leadership to do otherwise.