Author’s Note: It is tempting to keep swimming deep in the swamp. This has been a remarkable week in the history of the mire; reeling from the outflow from debates, lurching through a Supreme Court nomination and culminating with the President and First Lady testing positive for the vile epidemic of COVID19. We told you here a while back to expect the scandal/crisis de jour to continue on a relentless planned cycle, augmented by things that actually happened. That is the reason some of this seems warmed-over. There were a couple trial balloons floated among the big winners for publicity and incorporation into existing narrative lines. The revelations of a Melania Trump tape barely broke the surface of the ooze before we were on to the next thing. I saw one Pundit mourning the demise of the Hornet Murder story, since it had so much potential. Others were overcome pulling for a tragic end to the President, and he was just the most visible of many. Some of the might actually be news. The pandemic seemed to be on its last legs, and now it is back. The contents of this strange past week will set the agenda for a few days, and I am eager to see what it is. In the meantime, I thought about what it was like to be inside the swamp, swimming with the creatures. It has evolved a bit, but take a visit to the time we readjusted from the fall of a great power that wasn’t ours. And only one of my former boss’s may be a risk for indictment, which these days in Washington is a real plus.

– Vic

11 June 2001

Life After Wartime

“We are going to do the worst thing to you. We are going to take away your threat.”
– Rear Admiral Feliks Gromov, 1989

In 1991 Lieutenant General James R. Clapper swept into the Pentagon to relieve Lt. General Harry Soyster as the Director of DIA. Harry was a leonine-looking man, tall and impressive in his dress green Army uniform. He had stayed above the fray during the Gulf War, content to allow RADM Mike McConnell engage in the wild tumult of the Joint Staff and OSD circus that went along with it. Jim Clapper was not inclined to take the same approach. He wanted to take hand’s-on direction of DIA. He was peripatetic and dynamic. He had started long ago as an enlisted Marine, and after college won a commission in the Air Force. He wore his blue suit with crisp élan and the air around him crackled with energy. He brought a keen sense of operational imperative to his directorship. His background was in the Pacific and Korea. His first months in the job dealt with the detritus of the major land war in Southwest Asia, and the dizzying operational commitments to the Kurds (PROVIDE COMFORT), Russians (RESTORE HOPE), the Somalis and Haitians and Slovenians and all the rest of the code-named operations the in-coming Administration was eager to mount. In this changing landscape he was determined to make DIA relevant, efficient and revitalized.

The first thing he realized was that he couldn’t be the J2- the Joint Staff Intelligence Officer. He had his hands full trying to navigate the Agency and the larger fiscal Program through the wild rapids of the reorganization of the Department of Defense. An astute leader, he soon recognized that while the bully pulpit of the Directorship was a useful tool it paled in significance to the power of the purse he wielded through his position as the Program Manager. If he could use the financial power of the GDIP to implement his vision he had a hammer. What he needed was a consigliore, someone familiar with the arcane mechanics of Program and Budget to help him swing the hammer accurately.
Screen Shot 2020-10-03 at 12.46.21 PM.png

Previous Directors had to contend with the individual power centers of the GDIP Staff and his nemesis in the Office of the Comptroller. The Comptroller was one of the most senior of Senior Executives, Mr. Lew Prombain. He existed in uneasy symbiosis with Marty Hurwitz in the GDIP. Marty owned the Program years, that is, the future. But when it came to the year of execution and the money became real, in belonged to Lew. He wrote all the checks for DIA. So there was always dynamic tension between how the money was programmed and how it was executed. Lew kept generations of Directors out of trouble by scrupulous attention to the letter of the law. But his interpretation of the law was his alone, and sometimes had some quirks. But Marty had been fired by act of Congress, the power diffused to what were called “Functional Management” staffs belonging to the Barons of Production, Collection and Systems. So the paradigm of Marty and Lew, ying and yang, battling it out without direct involvement of the Program Manager was about to end. In 1991 there was a vacuum in the GDIP, and nature abhors a vacuum. It was going to get filled.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall brought sweeping change to the entire Intelligence Community. One In keeping with the superb example of the DoD Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) in the Pentagon, the regional CINCs around the world began to consolidate their intelligence resources in new, large commands. In addition to the lessons-learned from the Gulf War, there was a growing imperative on the Hill to find a peace dividend and spend on something else. Congress directed an examination of military intelligence resources in the FY-1991 Defense authorization. SECDEF responded to this direction with his famous Duane Andrews memo of 15 March, Strengthening Defense Intelligence. The community caught its collective breath. The memo had some interesting direction on how to shake up the establishment. It turned out that not everyone had been fighting the war. Some had been scheming about the great new world that would begin after the unpleasantness war was behind us. There was money to be harvested and redistributed. The scramble was on.

The memo directed that all the old ways of doing business be examined. All structures were to be scrutinized. Resources would be affected. Careers would be made and broken. Venerable programs and projects were at risk. Everything would be reviewed within an inch of its life. The consequences of the review were significant. The U-2 and COBRA BALL aircraft left the GDIP, bound for the newly established Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office. There was talk of establishing an agency to manage satellite imagery. There were indications that SECDEF was going to look at the number of people working in the Intelligence Community with an eye toward trimming the payroll. Congress wanted that, too. Washington, the insular little city that it is, decided to look elsewhere for savings. It looked directly at the Unified and Specified Commands (for the Strategic Air Command and the Army’s Forces Commands still existed as specified mission commanders) and their associated intelligence structures.

The Rice Bowl issue is directly related to the study. Signals intelligence, the collection and processing of them, is the sole purview of the National Security Agency. They guard this authority zealously. The resources associated with this mission are significant, and fund a worldwide system. Any examination of intelligence resources would logically look at those contained in both the GDIP and the Consolidated Cryptologic Programs. Moreover, it should include those intelligence activities contained in the individual Service Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) accounts. That would be the logical approach.

But in point of fact there was no consensus about how many people were in the Theaters, all the organizations were in a state of flux, and there was no mood for cooperation. NSA was transforming itself into a regional network of operations centers. The GDIP was consolidating into the Joint Intelligence Centers. The Services were being drawn down, and were not sure how many intelligence activities they required to support the force. So if General Clapper wanted to follow the direction the SECDEF gave him, he was on his own.

General Clapper turned to his Production Chief, Pat Duecy and directed that a survey of the Unified Command GDIP resources be conducted, with an eye toward redistributing them to meet the New World Order. Pat knew a thankless task when he saw one and passed it on as fast as he could. In the wake of Marty’s abrupt departure from the GDIP Staff, Deputy Director Joan Dempsey spent her time dismantling the organization in accordance with the Congressional language. It was clear that Joan had the potential to be a high-flyer. A youthful 39 at the time, she combined exceptional programmatic skills with keen intelligence. She had a warm heart, but also the capability to make tough decisions When the job was complete she turned what was left over to Air Force Colonel Billy Starnes. She moved to Bolling Air force Base and reported as the Production Functional Manager. It was good-news bad-news. With the promotion she also was handed the thankless task.

In giving her the responsibility to complete the study, management was able to meet two distinct requirements. The first of these was to put the best available talent on the case. The second was to provide distance to protect the seniors from the high potential for failure. There were ten four-star flag officers out in the Commands. They all had unmet requirements and not one of them was inclined to give up people to help someone else. The Four Services were implacable as Executive Agents for the Commands, and as the ultimate resource providers. DIA had a dog in the fight, since they were running the survey and did not want scrutiny of manpower inside the Beltway. Not one of the players was prepared to give an inch.

Thus was born the survey that came to be known as The JIC-JAC Study. The actual title was something like “Intelligence Support to Warfighters” or something equally boring. The neat rhyming title that subsumed the official one referred to the establishment of Joint Intelligence Centers at each of the Commands- the JICs. The European Command had established the Joint Analysis Center – the JAC- at Molesworth, England. Hence, JIC-JAC. Like Tic-Tac. Catchy.

Joan Dempsey was the logical lead for the task since virtually all the resources used to operate the JICs were programmed in the Production bailiwick. The personnel resources involved were significant, amounting to nearly a quarter of Program’s manpower. It was a daunting task. It required the establishment of a methodology to detail the functions of the JICs. And the JICs were as disparate as little Transportation Command and a behemoth like the Pacific Command. The big regional Commands were multi-layered and festooned with organizational ornaments of the great World Wars. Further, and with some surprise, Joan discovered that no one had ever tried to count the number of people or functions in the Theaters before. Never! The whole thing had been on autopilot, everything additive and nothing ever taken away. With reductions now really coming, Central Command was beginning to panic. It had just directed DESERT STORM, largely on borrowed manpower. It would never have the people on its own roster to conduct the mission. Manpower would have to be found elsewhere, and that meant all the other four-star Commanders would be defending their people with claws and teeth. It was likely to be impossible and messy to finish the survey and make recommendations in a fair and impartial manner.

The real ground rules were that this was a zero-sum game. Any fixes we recommended were going to have to come out of savings. And the fixes were driven by the Unified command Plan, the UCP. That is the document that apportions missions and the forces to carry them out. It is developed by the Joint Staff and signed by the Secretary of Defense. It apportions missions and forces to the Unified Commands. It is a big deal, and the Department of Defense was still quivering with the aftershocks of the change brought by the end of the Cold War. The mature Commands- the Pacific and Atlantic- were large and heavily Navy in composition. The Strategic Command, composed of the former Strategic Air Command and the Navy’s ballistic missile submarine force had a huge nuclear targeting program. This represented a potential billet farm to be harvested to meet emerging requirements. The Central Command desperately needed people, and the young Southern command in Panama was valiantly trying to meet the new counter-drug mission.

I was working in the headquarters of one of the Joint Staff intelligence offices, and was at loose ends. The War had been one of the highlights of an operational intelligence career, and everything else was a bit of a let-down. I had recently been assigned to support one of the Functional Management Staffs on a rotational basis and was quickly convinced that I wanted no part of the program and budget business. After DESERT STORM concluded and we were all demobilized, I had an exhilarating eight months as Managing Editor of the Defense Intelligence Network, appropriately nicknamed the DIN. It was a classified TV station, broadcasting via secure cable to cleared offices in the pentagon and around the world. It was a fabulous concept, one that could literally have put the national intelligence picture on the desktop of soldiers and sailors around the sprawling American empire. But I came have what show-people call “creative differences” with the flamboyant Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who ran the network and had to find myself a new job. I had heard rumblings about the JIC-JAC study, and convinced Admiral McConnell that he needed to assign me to the team to ensure that the Joint Staff equities, not to mention those of the Navy, were protected from the rapacious civilians at DIA.

I met the other members of the team, and one was particularly noteworthy: Paul was an elegantly tailored young analyst with insight and flair. He had once been a model, and still carried himself that way. Joan had about twelve people on the project full-time, and I joined the team determined to protect the truth and the warfighter by whatever means necessary. That was my agenda, but I soon discovered just how many others there were. In a declining resource base, I was determined to protect Joint and Navy equities to the best of my ability. That meant protecting the two big regional commands for which Navy was Executive Agent: the Atlantic and Pacific Commands. And in that end, I felt myself generally successful, although it was Paul who provided the metrics and Joan who provided all the vision, the strategy and the final slight-of-hand that got the results to General Powell without the final Joint Staff Review process in which Army was determined to kill the Study.

Using the “top cover” of General Clapper and General Powell, Joan skillfully kept the CINC’s and Services at bay, playing off the prospective winners against the losers.

She recognized immediately that she faced a buzz-saw. She would have to reach into the rice-bowls of the Services, Unified commands and entrenched bureaucracies and realign people and jobs. There were no databases and no one had ever attempted to account for the number of people assigned to the Commands and Theaters around the world. Honestly! What’s more, the National Reconnaissance Office was still not officially acknowledged, and thus we would stumble over little pockets of people and activities that didn’t really exist, not in the way that the books said they did. It was very strange. Further, the leadership was clearly expecting savings for re-investment, so the stage was set for intense political competition.

In the summer of 1992 the Commands were summoned from around the world to Washington to participate in what was hoped to be a mellow collegial effort. This expectation dissipated with the vitriol that began to flow with the second vu-graph. The Commands were unified in their refusal to accept outside judgment of their missions and functions. With the basic methodology in question, the entire enterprise hung on the verge of failure.

Joan turned it around. She did it by thinking through the process. She had seen that the line managers, the iron Colonels, were not going to accept a bottom-up approach to the resource issue. There would never be agreement between peers on the division of their treasure. Accordingly, she enlisted General Clapper to turn around the Principles of the Military intelligence Board. The MIB, as it is known, had been an effective forum during the War for the Service Intelligence Chiefs to flow resources to where they were needed in the Desert. She managed to pull it off. The MIB principals agreed to the study. With that in hand, the normal process would have been to circulate the report around the Joint Staff, which is where the Big Service would have the chance to squash it like a bug. That was exactly what Army intended to do. Instead, magically, the Study bypassed the Joint Staff and flew over the transom into General Powell’s in-basket. I had drafted a really cool endorsement for him to sign, and he did.

So that is how JIC-JAC slam-dunked the U.S. Army, and how the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs came to call the JIC-JAC Study a “trailblazing effort” to restructure intelligence resources. Hundreds of billets were moved between the Commands over the course of the five-year defense plan. You can get people to accept pain, if they know it is years away, and most won’t be around to see it anyway. But the process began in 1993 and it is done now.

See, no one really believes in the out-years, even though they always come. It is sort of like elections, you know?

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com