DIA Director Forced to Step Down
04.30.2014 at 11:44pm
Head of Pentagon Intelligence Agency Forced Out, Officials Say by Greg Miller and Adam Goldman, Washington Post
The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency is being pushed out of the job after a series of clashes over his leadership at an agency that is under pressure to shift focus following more than a decade of war, current and former U.S. officials said.
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is expected to announce Wednesday that he is leaving his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency more than a year before he was scheduled to depart, according to officials who said that Flynn faced mounting pressure from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and others in recent months…
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This article is a sad comment on the state of the intelligence community currently.
What is often forgotten is exactly why the DIA was created in the first place—the CIA had failed to provide to the warfighter what was being needed for militay planning—meaning analysis accurate enough to plan with. At the height of the Cold War DIA analysis was far more accurate than that of the CIA and NSA.
Now we have gone full circle and the CIA has “won”—what is also interesting was the attempt to get analysts out and into the field in order to get real time experience in their areas–that seems to have failed as well based on the current DIA employee mindset of hey this is my cubicle and I am not about to leave it and eat dust and MREs.
What the current DIA analyst generation seems to forget was at the height of the Cold War DIA analysts had a great reputation and did often get out of their cubicles and into the field. Remember a lot of analysts came into the system during GWOT and never have served in either the military or fought in the field.
But hey different generation –different mindset and still we lost both Iraq and AFG and AQ is still getting stronger by the year so maybe in order to save more of the taxpayers money why not simply shut down DIA and rely only on the CIA/NSA—how would then the COCOMs respond? —the shutdown would give them more O&M money which would be a good thing and the CIA has never been wrong in the past so they could plan without worrying about getting wrong/false information—well at least not like prior to Iraq 2003? That was the reason for the creation of the DIA—poor military intel analysis being provided to the COCOMs.
When I was in Anbar, we had these high speed low drag DIA Humint guys who couldn’t leave the base. I’m not kidding, their parent organization wouldn’t allow it. I’m not commenting to bash DIA. The example is to highlight the fact that as an organization, they aren’t cut out for tactical intelligence operations. Not every analyst needs to be at the pointy end. DIA has a host of military customers in the beltway that they are chartered to serve. Lets face it, we all have/had appropriately staffed and tasked (ok, sort of) intel resources all the way down to the company level to meet our intelligence needs. I never got anything from DIA about my battlespace that I didn’t already know. Why? because they took my tactical reporting to help shape their analysis. If my Boss ever learned anything about our battlespace from a DIA report, he should have fired me.
Let them sit in their cubicles at Bolling, eat donuts, talk about how much the Redskins suck, and feed the strategic level beast.
Flynn was never going to move the needle at DIA. He is a good idea guy who quickly moves to the next shiny object without following through on his last brilliant initiative.
I remember the paper he put together when he was DCOS Intel in Afghanistan about how to fix intel. It was good stuff, the problem was that not a single FragO was ever issued inside ISAF to fix the shortfalls he identified within his own organization. So why isn’t the staff turning the bosses ideas into actions?
I’m sure he shotgunned ideas around DIA that scared the hell out of the civilian workforce. Scared them so bad in fact that instead of doing their normal “slow roll the military guy until his tour is over” they got him sacked. I think the lesson is that if you attempt to change the culture of a federal agency you put yourself at professional risk.