INTELLIGENCE SUPPORT TO NATIONAL DECISION MAKING IN PERIODS OF CRISIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91M00696R000600160035-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 3, 2004
• Sequence Number: 35
• Content Type: MF

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MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
FROM Crisis Management Task Force
SUBJECT Intelligence Support to National Decision Making
In Periods of Crisis
I. The PROBLEM
The past three decades have constituted a period of dramatic,
even revolutionary, change for intelligence. Burgeoning.technology
and the broad scope of requirements placed on intelligence have
given us collection capabilities (and budgets) that would have
been literally unthinkable at the close of World War II. Our
organizational and procedural concepts, however, have changed
much more slowly. They have not yet fully adapted to the changes
technology has made in the intelligence environment. As a re-
sult, we are in a situation where technology can actually inhibit
our performance.
The Intelligence Community has three basic sets of respon-
sibilities:
-- Warning, i.e., providing advance warning of an impend-
ing attack upon the United States or on US forces
abroad by a foreign power; or providing warning of
the fact that a foreign power is planning, or even
seriously contemplating, such an attack.
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-- Supporting those who, under our Constitution, make
the decisions that determine our country's foreign
and national security policy. This function has
particular importance in periods of potential, im-
minent, or actual crisis.
-- Supporting the conduct of foreign policy and the
execution of national security decisions, including
supporting the conduct of wartime operations.
Our present national intelligence structure is not optimally
designed to perform these functions. In particular, it is not
set up to cope with the stresses and demands of a period of
major crisis and is even less well structured to handle the re-
quirements of a wartime situation.
The reasons for these design flaws are not hard to discern.
At one level they derive from the fact that the Intelligence Com-
munity, and its several components, serve a variety of customers --
from the President and the NSC to a battalion commander -- who
have different interests, perspectives, and needs. These inter-
ests are frequently competitive, especially in matters relating
to the allocation of collection or analytic resources, or to the
tasking of systems that cannot handle the requirements of all
users simultaneously.
At another level, however, the problems alluded to above
derive from the fact that we do not really have a single, inte-
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grated national intelligence system. Instead, we have two sys-
tems, with most components of the Community being members of
both.
a. One could be termed the Intelligence Community
System. This is the Intelligence Community whose founda-
tions were laid in Section 102(d) of the National Security
Act of 1947. It has evolved over almost three decades into
the conglomerate described and defined in Executive Order
11905. At its apex is the Director of Central Intelli-
gence, who is the President's principal foreign intelli-
gence officer and advisor. He reports directly to the NSC
and is not subordinate to the head of any cabinet depart-
ment. The DCI chairs two important bodies: one, the Com-
mittee on Foreign Intelligence, plays a key role in devel-
oping and allocating the Community's resources; the other,
the National Foreign Intelligence Board, plays a key role
in guiding the Community's production of national intel-
ligence. A major element of this system is the Central
Intelligence Agency, which the DCI also heads. The CIA
is an independent entity which reports through the DCI
to the NSC. Within this system the CIA has primary re-
sponsibility for the clandestine collection of foreign
intelligence and for covert action, and for the production
of national (as opposed to departmental) intelligence.
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b. The other could be termed the National Command
Authority System. This is the system being developed by
the Department of Defense to link with its Worldwide Mili-
tary Command and Control System. The Defense Department
planners developing this system naturally incorporate
within it all the intelligence assets and components of
the Defense Department -- which comprise roughly 80% of
the assets of the Intelligence Community.
The two systems described above do not really track or
--'They are built on different concepts:
a. The IC System is built on the concept of a true
community, with military and civilian components, headed
by a non-departmental DCI and intended to support the
President -- especially in his role as head of the Na-
tional Security Council -- the NSC Staff, and all of
the NSC departments.
b. The NCA System is built on the concept ofa line
running from the President -- in his capacity as Commander-
in-Chief -- through the Secretary of Defense, the Chair-
man of the JCS, and the JCS (as an institution), to major
US military commanders in the field, the CINCS. As re-
cent exercises have demonstrated, few of the concepts or
institutions around which the IC System was built -- the
NSC, the WSAG, the Secretary of State, the non-departmental
SECRET
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DCI, and the CIA -- fit easily into the NCA schema.
-- They are keyed to different enviroments:
a. The IC System was designed primarily to function
in a peacetime environment, to support the President and
the NSC and its members (plus to some extent, the Congress)
in formulating and conducting foreign and national security
policy.
b. Oversimplifying, it was designed to help our gov-
ernment prevent or avoid major crises, including war. It
was not meant as a mechanism to assist in the conduct of
wartime operations. (All of the pertinent statutes and
Executive Orders, for example, are silent on what the
DCI's wartime role is supposed to be.)
They are focused on different perceptions of intelligence
needs:
a. The IC System, oversimplifying again, responds to
what we have come to view as reality. It is meant to sup-
port the making of political decisions (which may, of course,
have significant military ingredients). It is built to
produce information, analyses, assessments, and estimates
on the political dynamics of foreign situations, the poli-
cies and intentions of foreign governments, and the factors
that are likely to shape, influence, or alter the policies
of foreign governments.
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b. The NCA System is designed to help the President
as Commander.-in-Chief, the Secretary of Defense, the JCS,
and the CINCS fight a war. In its intelligence focus, it
is keyed to monitoring the concrete -- troop deployment,
and other forms of actual behavior,-- not to assessing
such abstractions as political dynamics, priorities, goals,
or intentions.
To make matters worse, these two overlapping systems are
not only significantly different in concept, design, and pur--
pose, but they also show that no real planning has been done
on whether, when, or how the US intelligence structure should
shift from one to the other. Such transition questions are
thorny and not easily resolved. They involve major issues of
jurisdiction and asset control.
They also have built in tensions. The natural instinct
of those who would be responsible for fighting a war is to
want to take control of the intelligence assets they would need
in wartime as early as possible in any crisis situation that
could end in hostilities. The natural instincts of senior of-
ficials with other responsibilities, however, run in precisely
the opposite direction. They want to make the most of the Presi-
dent's and the.NSC's flexibility by postponing as long as pos-
sible any diminution of the Intelligence Community's capacity
to contribute to peacetime political decision making.
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The net result of the above factors is that the US Intel-
ligence Community is not well structured to support the Presi-
dent and his senior advisors in a serious crisis situation, and
even less well organized to do so in wartime. Peacetime-crisis-
wartime transition arrangements are unclear. This almost
guarantees confusion and dimhed national intelligence capa-
bilities at the very time when these can least be afforded.
II. Steps Toward A Solution
The solution to the problems described above lies in im-
proving our perception of the way political events, including
foreign threats to the security of the United States,
develop and interact. Peacetime, crises, and wartime
discreet states. The latter two can develop quickly,
do not come from a vacuum. In foreign affairs, there
tinuum, ranging from peacetime, or "normalcy," to all
nuclear war. This continuum sets limits on a dynamic
full of continuously interacting variables.
actually
are not
but they
is a con-
out thermo-
process,
For conceptual purposes, we have divided it into four seg-
ments. This four-segment thesis is arbitrary: it could be one,
two, or an infinite number. But it is essential to understand
that each of these segments is a part of the continuum, with each
growing out of the one that precedes it and shading into the one
that follows.
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In our opinion, however, the problems outlined above can
best be addressed in terms of intelligence support arrangements
necessary for supporting national decision making and for ex-
ecuting national policy, in four different environments:
a. The first is "normalcy," the kind of situation
that existed on 1 August 1976. The world is full of ten-
sion, stress, and actual or potential strife. There are
many messy situations (e.g., Lebanon) but there is no
immediate likelihood of hostilities in which the US would
be directly involved or of any attack on the US or US forces.
b. The second is what we call a "small-c crisis."
This is a situation that engages the-urgent attention of
the President and his senior foreign policy advisors
(civilian and military), which requires special concentra-
tion, decisions, and/or procedures -- e.g., special WSAG
or NSC meetings -- but does not involve the threat of major
hostilities in which US forces would be attacked or a
physical attack on the territory of the United States.
Lebanon, at various times, has been a "small-c" crisis.
Another example would be the Mayaguez incident.
c. The third, closely related to the second, is what
we call a "capital-C crisis." Its hallmark would be a
S tt situation that could readily involve a significant use of
US forces or a direct confrontation -- even if this were
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initially a political confrontation -- with a foreign
power capable of physically attacking the home territory
of the United States, e.g., the Soviet Union. A new
Middle East war in which the Soviets were directly back-
ing at least some Arab protagonists while we were support-
ing the Israelis would be an example of a capital-C crisis.
Similarly, a capital-C crisis could swiftly be generated in
Yugoslavia were Tito to die and the Soviets to interfere
in the succession in a way the US considered unacceptable.
d. The fourth is wartime, which we define as a situa-
tion in which US forces are engaged in combat with forces
of a foreign power capable of physically attacking the United
States. Vietnam would not have been a wartime situation
under this definition; an outbreak of hostilities in Central
Europe would be, whether war had been formally declared or
whether nuclear weapons had been used.
None of the four stages of the continuum concept outlined
above is static. A situation can evolve from one to the other
slowly or quickly, and can move in any direction, depending on
what the various actors concerned (including the US) do. Each,
however, poses its own special requirements for intelligence
support to national decision making, and the continuum concept
provides a useful context for developing smooth, efficient transi-
tional arrangements.
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If these arrangements are to be smooth and efficient, how-
ever, they must be truly transitional. Each new set of arrange-
ments should build on those of the preceding segment, with no
radical revisions of the way the Intelligence Community does
its business and with no sudden injection of totally different
concepts or procedures just when there will inevitably be con-
fusion. Also, if intelligence is to provide the best possible
support when the best possible assessment of a putative ad--
versary's behavior is most needed, adequate measures will have
to be taken to ensure that those framing this assessment are
fully apprised of what the US is doing --- e.g., of US actions
(from force deployments to hot line messagesl that could in--
fluence the behavior of foreign governments.
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