ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The intelligence community (IC) failed to predict the Arab Spring, the resurgence of al Qaeda, the vicious offensives of ISIS, the adventurism of Vladimir Putin, the aggressiveness of China and a number of terrorist attacks on the U.S. These shortcomings stem not from a lack of information, but from deeper cultural, analytical and organizational problems within the IC.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks sparked major IC reforms. In 2004 Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, creating the post of Director for National Intelligence (DNI) and the National Counterterrorism Center. Yet critics argued that many problems remained. They were right.

For starters, the DNI is a nearly powerless head. The IC comprises 17 diverse agencies; yet only one — the CIA — reports directly to him. Nor can the DNI dictate to the heads of the CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.

The DNI needs to be further empowered, and the IC better organized, to assure success.

What should this reorganization look like? The various agency heads should act more like a Joint Chiefs of Staff than as autonomous leaders of separate organizations. They would be charged with building their work forces and the future of their agencies, while “super-empowered” National Intelligence officers would oversee both information collection and analysis across the entire system.

Layers of bureaucracy that currently prevent the free flow of ideas and analysis throughout the community should be stripped away. And to ensure proper coordination of research and to speed important information through the bureaucratic maze, National Intelligence officers would meet regularly — as a National Intelligence Council chaired by the DNI.

Cultural reform is needed too. Currently, internal pressures to maintain consensus inhibit accurate analysis. Instead, analysts have been pressured to maintain a preferred “narrative.”

To help fix this problem, serving on the NIC staff should be made a prerequisite for upper-level leadership positions. By working side by side with peers from the various intelligence agencies, young analysts would come to understand the viewpoints of other institutions and the biases existing in their own agencies. Managers would also be encouraged to incentivize dissent and differing viewpoints, giving policymakers more information and options for making decisions.

All too often, policymakers and political leadership have blamed their errors of judgment and policy on the IC rather than take responsibility for their own failings. As a result, the entire IC has developed a well-founded fear of failure, lest they once again be made a whipping boy for national security mistakes.

This fear can lead to a number of serious problems. Most importantly, the IC as a whole has great difficulty looking at failures objectively, learning from them and making adjustments to prevent future mistakes.

To help protect the analytical branch from political blame for errors, the IC as a whole should move to more specific, percentage-based assessments rather than amorphous labels, such as “likely” or “unlikely.” Analysts should be encouraged to be honest and put the percentage as high as possible, with rewards for those who rate actions at 70 percent or above and are correct; but only certainties like “the sun rising in the East” would warrant a 90 percent rating. Such a rating approach would help to push the dilemmas of decision-making back on the policy leadership rather than intelligence analysts.

At the end of the day, the IC needs to become a more adaptable institution — one that can evolve with the changing national security situation so that it doesn’t require serious reforms every decade or so.

The U.S. faces an increasingly complex national security environment, one dominated by violent nonstate Islamic extremists and anti-status quo states. It’s a situation that requires the IC to become an analytically diverse, yet organizationally united, enterprise that can constantly learn and adapt.

• Mary R. Habeck is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Charles “Cully” Stimson is senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and manages its National Security Law Program. They are the co-authors of a new report: “Reforming Intelligence: A Proposal for Reorganizing the Intelligence Community and Improving Analysis.”

Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters

Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.