The intelligence community fails to reward officers, analysts, and other professional staff who take greater risks to deliver more valuable intelligence products. To improve things, it needs to reward risk-taking and penalize those who play it safe.
There is hope. In his new National Intelligence Strategy on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats called for innovation in intelligence gathering and analysis. But Coats’ words are insufficient, betraying a comfort with the status quo of an overly bureaucratized, risk-averse intelligence cycle.
Coats notes, “The IC must also foster unconventional thinking and experimentation that address new, better ways of accomplishing the IC’s mission, especially those approaches that emphasize acceleration, simplicity, and efficiency without sacrificing quality and outcomes.” He adds, “To achieve this, IC leaders must be prepared to boldly accept calculated risks to attain high-value results.”
That sounds fine. But I suggest four concrete proposals that could give some real weight to what Coats is saying and to reduce the preference for false bureaucratic safety.
First, Coats should require the 17 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community develop internal anonymous processes to allow employees to complain if they believe their work is being unjustly weakened or sanitized by senior editors. This is a critical concern in preventing the disillusionment of young analysts in the early years of their careers. Helping here would be a requirement that the originating analyst of any particularly high-value product be invited to the briefing with the relevant top-level intelligence consumer. President George W. Bush was particularly good at inviting junior CIA analysts to brief him on their areas of expertise. The result was a more inspired workforce and a more effective intelligence delivery.
Second, the intelligence community should provide greater formal recognition and reward for analysis or operations that are particularly bold and/or risky. Reward risk-taking, even if the risks do not always generate immediate gains. Risk, in and of itself, is the marker of the best intelligence officer. This is crucial not simply in rewarding talented work, but in retaining talented individuals who could earn far more in the private sector.
Third, learn from the British and make the hiring processes more flexible and efficient. Too many unconventional thinkers are excluded by the current process.
Fourth, the intelligence community should rate managers of all ranks on the basis of the cutting edge work that their subordinates have produced. If a manager’s team is providing standard fare product that suggests a manager is playing it safe, that manager should be judged more skeptically in the next round of promotions. With time, this will cultivate a cadre of the most innovative managers at the top of the intelligence community. Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo and current officeholder Gina Haspel have done some good work in this regard, but the other agencies (with the exception of the NSA, which is innovator central) must catch up.
Of course, the above will take political leadership as much as internal reform. Actions by Senate Democrats in recent years to dredge CIA officers through the mud has been especially damaging in creating an aversion to risk. Intelligence officers deserve to know that when they take lawful risks that go wrong, they will have political cover.
Still, the simple truth here is that the intelligence community won’t be able to innovate unless its internal structures are reformed to cultivate that innovation. Coats needs to put meat on the bones of his new strategy.
