Taken from the NY Times:

The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 to continue the intelligence work carried out during World War II by the Office of Strategic Services. For the next 57 years, it was preeminent among the many intelligence-related services that sprung up and flourished across the government.

In April 2011, President Obama decided to move his first C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, to the Pentagon as defense secretary, and replace him with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander of American forces in Afghanistan. The moves were the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.

As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta hastened the transformation of the spy agency into a paramilitary organization, overseeing a sharp escalation of the C.I.A.’s bombing campaign in Pakistan using armed drone aircraft, and an increase in the number of secret bases and covert operatives in remote parts of Afghanistan.

General Petraeus, meanwhile, aggressively pushed the military deeper into the C.I.A.’s turf, using Special Operations troops and private security contractors to conduct secret intelligence missions. As commander of the United States Central Command in September 2009, he also signed a classified order authorizing American Special Operations troops to collect intelligence in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and other places outside of traditional war zones.

The result is that American military and intelligence operatives are at times virtually indistinguishable from each other as they carry out classified operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Some members of Congress have complained that this new way of war allows for scant debate about the scope and scale of military operations. In fact, the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.

MY TAKE

I highly recommend reading the whole article. It goes in depth about the relationship between the Military and the CIA, and how they have become more and more intertwined since the inception of this “great” organization.

As for just this introduction, it provides a lot of insight into what this move means for both the Military and the CIA. The separation of intelligence and the military was a great way to hold each department accountable on its own. Now that the line of separation is thinning, we may see more “freedom” for each department to perform illegal operations without repercussions.

In the past, the CIA has gotten in trouble for these types of things, usually a decade later, but still they ended up having to take accountability. Now it seems with this new military-intelligence complex, future CIA endeavors can we justified as Military operations. And of course, how many times in American history has the military been held accountable for its actions. I hope this is a figment of my imagination and my reasoning is incorrect, but I don’t really see any real advantages for this recombination.

(Source: The New York Times)