Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee - Implications of the Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission on the Department of Defense

Federal News Service August 11, 2004 Wednesday

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE SUBJECT: IMPLICATIONS OF THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION ON THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

WITNESSES: STEPHEN A. CAMBONE, UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR INTELLIGENCE; VICE ADMIRAL LOWELL E. JACOBY, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY; MAJOR GENERAL RAYMOND T. ODIERNO, FORMER COMMANDER, FOURTH INFANTRY

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REP. JEB BRADLEY (R-NH): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. General, it's great to see you again. The last time I saw you we were in a Blackhawk going from Tikrit to-or, excuse me, Kirkuk to Tikrit, and certainly the opportunity to have spoken with about 25 Iraqi policemen in Kirkuk was one of the highlights of the time that I spent there.

Over the last couple of days we've had a long discussion about reorganization-how the national intelligence director plays in with this, stovepipes, sharing of information. But it's focused on reorganization. And I look at a couple of the themes of the 9/11 Commission report, and that was a failure of imagination and lost opportunities. So my question is: How much of these intelligence failures can be laid at the feet of the fact that we have less intelligence assets today than we had in the 1990s, to not only these lost opportunities, but the failure of imagination? We have less CIA human intelligence agents, less listening posts and that type of thing. So that's number one.

And, number two, if there is going to be a reorganized effort, how can that improve the long-term acquisition of overall intelligence in a reorganized system? And I thank you.

MR. CAMBONE: I'll leave Jake to comment a bit as well on the first question, to which I would say that I think there is some impact in the drawdown that took place during the 1990s in the overall intelligence capability of the country, primarily in two areas. One would be the analytic corps, the corps of analysts who we rely upon. As a consequence of that drawdown, the average age and experience of our people is short and young; that is, experience and age. That's not bad, it's just a fact. And therefore they may not have had the breadth of experience and so forth.

In the second area where there was a drawdown was clearly on the human intelligence side of the house, and that was clearly drawn down quite substantially and significantly. So-and that loss affected us not just prior to 9/11, but we continue to feel that loss.

Now, in terms of the reorganizational approach, if we have an arrangement in which the national intelligence advisor is able to lay down a set of requirements for the kinds of people he wants to bring in-their backgrounds, their language skills, recruitment-and then he sees to their care and feeding and development over time as analysts, transfers them from DIA to CIA to NSA back over to FBI-make sure they get some time over at Treasury-so that they become rounder in terms of their experience, see the problem from more than one perspective-if he can do those kinds of things that has that kind of flexibility within the system, I think what we will get are higher quality analytic products out of those individuals.

And then, lastly, if he insists that those analysts now that he has worked so hard to develop in fact are put in the position of driving collection, if they need to be the ones who say, "I don't understand something-please go out and get more information"-rather than the situation we have today, where they send in a chit, sometime later some product comes back, and that's what they have to work with. That's not how we can do it. We've got to have a much more interactive arrangement. And, again, I think a national intelligence director can make that happen.

ADM. JACOBY: Mr. Bradley, you ask a great set of questions. I don't think it was the drawdown of the '90s that hurt us so much. It was the fact that we could not restock the shelves, and so we basically made no hires, and so we weren't bringing in new talent and training them, and so we do have a very young work force now that is part and parcel. We also did not have the investment money to put into modern information management techniques and that all-source approach that I talked about in my statement. So we're catching up. And those were desperately felt impacts.

I second Dr. Cambone's discussion about jointness. I would offer one caution: Most of the discussion so far about moving people around to promote a community approach talks about breadth of experience. We need to at the same time husband and harbor depth. And so movement for its own sake has some advantages, but for those areas where we need depth over time we're going to have to have a very specific investment program there that's a little bit different than the jointness in a military three-year tour kind of a way.

REP. BRADLEY: I thank you for that answer. It would seem to me that as we talk about reorganization I totally agree with you we have to refill the shelves and make sure we actually have enough assets in place, or else we can reorganize all we want-we're just moving things around to no greater avail.

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