National Defense Intelligence Agency

The Defense Intelligence Agency is presented as one of the specialized, partly autonomous bodies in the U.S. intelligence community. The book uses that system to distinguish decentralization from effective organization: independent expertise can broaden analysis, but without ways to share and aggregate information and judgments, the community may possess useful knowledge without making it collectively useful.

Place in the Intelligence Community

In the postwar period, the Central Intelligence Agency was initially the leading intelligence body, but the community became more fragmented over time. It included the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the intelligence arms of the three major military services. Although the CIA director was nominally responsible for the community as a whole, the book says that this authority brought little practical supervision; much of the funding for intelligence operations came through the Department of Defense. The FBI, responsible for domestic law enforcement, operated almost entirely outside the community’s orbit, despite the relevance of information about foreign terrorists inside the United States.

Specialization and Shared Judgment

The book does not treat the division of intelligence work among agencies as inherently mistaken. Specialization can produce more detailed understanding and greater analytical expertise, while diverse perspectives can help reveal relationships that one group of analysts might miss. Acting Defense Intelligence Agency director Lowell Jacoby made this point in testimony to Congress: information one set of analysts regarded as irrelevant noise might provide critical clues when another set examined it.

The weakness was that the community lacked a genuine mechanism for aggregating not only information but also judgments. NSA specialists, CIA officers, and FBI agents might each contribute distinct knowledge, yet there was no adequate process for drawing on their collective judgment. In the book’s formulation, the system had decentralization without aggregation: agencies retained specialized knowledge, but the broader organization could not reliably turn it into a coherent assessment.

The Post-September 11 Debate

After the September 11 attacks, Congress focused on failures of information sharing and on the fragmentation of information holdings. Senator Richard Shelby, a sharp critic of the intelligence agencies’ performance, singled out the FBI’s decentralized structure and argued for abolishing its largely independent fiefdoms. His proposed remedy was a central authority standing above the disputatious bureaucracies, returning to the goal of unified intelligence associated with Wild Bill Donovan.

The book distinguishes this proposed centralization from the more limited case for coordination. A central authority might make it easier for one agency to oversee information, but concentrating control could sacrifice the diversity, independence, and local knowledge that specialization makes possible. The desired correction, the author argues, was not simply to place one institution at the center, but to create effective ways of aggregating what the separate agencies knew. Linking databases was one practical possibility; notably, two years after September 11, the government still lacked a single unified watch list drawing on data from across the intelligence community.

Significance

The Defense Intelligence Agency’s role in this discussion illustrates a broader organizational problem: distributed expertise is valuable only when the system can connect it. Local knowledge and independent analysis may increase the total information available, but valuable findings can remain trapped within organizational boundaries. The book therefore presents the intelligence community not as a case against decentralization itself, but as a warning about decentralization without channels for sharing, comparison, and collective judgment.