by Tim Shorrock
The Distributed Common Ground System is a striking example of how national intelligence collection agencies have been incorporated into military operations during the Bush administration. The Raytheon system was developed under the direct supervision of Stephen Cambone, who served from 2002 to 2007 as the nation’s first undersecretary of defense for intelligence and was the top intelligence adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. During that period, the Pentagon emerged as the dominant force in U.S. intelligence, with vast new powers in human intelligence and domestic counterterrorism. Its new powers were partly a reflection of its control over intelligence budgets; but they also flowed from a strong desire by Rumsfeld, Cambone, and their allies in the Bush administration—most notably Vice President Dick Cheney—to place intelligence collection under the Pentagon’s command and control system, and to create within the Department of Defense a separate spy network that would provide an alternative source of intelligence to the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been the nation’s primary source of human intelligence since its founding in 1947.
Much has changed since Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in the wake of the crushing Republican defeat in the 2006 congressional elections. But despite the efforts of his successor, former CIA director Robert Gates, to rein in the Pentagon’s spying units and return the locus of power to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, most of the systems created during the Rumsfeld era to institutionalize the military’s role in intelligence were left intact. Understanding those systems, and how they tie in with the broader spying industry, is essential background to the story of U.S. intelligence, and a prerequisite to our analysis of the role of contractors at the NSA and the NGA, which both play a significant role in military operations as combat support agencies and are the subjects of the next two chapters.
In 2002, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was given a mandate by Congress to launch an investigation into the U.S. government’s actions before and after the attacks. As the commission was beginning its work that autumn, Rumsfeld seized the opportunity to push legislation—backed by Cheney since the 1980s—to create an intelligence “czar” within the Pentagon. It wasn’t a hard sell: CIA director George Tenet favored having a central point of contact for intelligence at the Pentagon, and congressional Democrats, who had made a similar proposal for an assistant secretary for intelligence during the Clinton administration, generally favored the idea. As innocuous as the legislation sounded, it would have serious repercussions for the way the government organized and managed its intelligence services.
The bill creating the new position was passed by a lame-duck Congress on November 12, 2002, and signed into law on December 2, 2002. Shortly thereafter, Stephen Cambone was appointed to the undersecretary position. He was a natural candidate: during the first Bush administration, he had worked under Cheney at the Pentagon as director of strategic defense policy and, in the 1990s, had been staff director for the two commissions Rumsfeld ran on missile defense and space weapons. Plus he was a die-hard neoconservative and a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, the group of foreign policy hard-liners that, in a major policy document on “rebuilding America’s defenses” issued in 2000, had proposed a greater role for intelligence agencies in war fighting.3
The new position provided enormous powers to Cambone. Under the law, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief exercises the secretary of defense’s “authority, direction and control” over all DoD intelligence, counterintelligence and security policy, plans and programs, and serves as the Pentagon’s representative to the DNI. That specifically meant control over the Defense Security Service, which is responsible for all security clearances in the U.S. government, as well as the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Cambone’s power increased even more when President Bush signed an executive order making the undersecretary for intelligence the number three person in the Pentagon’s line of succession, after the secretary and his deputy. Previously, the line of succession had run from the deputy secretary to the undersecretary for policy.
Rumsfeld’s drive to centralize Pentagon control reached another milestone in 2004 in the legislative battle over intelligence reform, when pro-military lawmakers in the House prevailed in a major fight to maintain the Pentagon’s control over the three national collection agencies: the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. In its final report issued that year, the 9/11 Commission had argued strongly against the consolidation of intelligence within the Pentagon and recommended the transfer of the three national agencies to a new Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).* Under its proposal, the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence—Cambone’s position—would also report to the DNI as the chief representative of the Pentagon. Budgetary authority over the three “nationals” would thus be passed to the ODNI, while control over tactical intelligence by the four armed services would remain under the domain of the Department of Defense. These proposals were folded into the intelligence reform legislation creating the ODNI that was backed by President Bush. The bills were passed by both the House and Senate.
When the legislation went into conference in December 2004, however, it ran into a storm of opposition. Led by Duncan Hunter, R-California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, pro-military lawmakers argued that the transfer of authority over the national agencies to the DNI would weaken the power of the Pentagon to wage war. After weeks of stalemate, Cheney stepped in to negotiate a provision that met the demands of the Hunter group by guaranteeing direct access to intelligence for military commanders. Afterward, Hunter explained how the arrangement would work. In a wartime scenario, he told reporters, “it’s important for the combatant commanders and their subordinates, whether it’s a platoon leader in Fallujah or a Special Forces team leader, to be able to access that information very quickly.” That intelligence, he pointed out, included satellite surveillance.4 Once the compromise was approved, the die was cast: henceforth, the NSA, the NGA, and the NRO would remain under the Pentagon’s command and control system.*
Melvin Goodman, the former CIA officer who was one of the most vocal critics of Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon, believes that the Cambone appointment and the congressional battle to keep the national collection agencies inside the Pentagon were turning points in the national desire to reform the Intelligence Community. “That to me pre-empted all reform; that’s when the damage was done,” he told me. In particular, “the CIA really was savaged by all these reforms, and they were vulnerable because of their own corruption, particularly in the run-up to the war in the use of intelligence,” said Goodman. “So the Pentagon has been the big bureaucratic winner in all of this.”5 Goodman has been a lone voice in arguing for the return of the NSA, the NGA, and the NRO to the director of national intelligence. His views, however, were apparently widely shared inside the Intelligence Community.
In 2006, Joan Dempsey, the former number three official at the CIA, delivered a remarkable speech at Harvard University in which she denounced both Cambone’s elevation within the Pentagon hierarchy and Rumsfeld’s power grab over the national collection agencies. Those “two very arcane and little-understood bureaucratic events sent seismic shudders through the intelligence community,” Dempsey said. Placing the undersecretary for intelligence in the line of succession was “pretty extraordinary in my book,” she added. It represented “a Kremlin approach to organizational responsibilities.” Those were extremely harsh words for someone who had spent her formative years in government working for the Department of Defense.
Dempsey, who had just left her job in government to take a position at Booz Allen Hamilton, argued that Cambone’s appointment “signaled to everyone in the national security community” that this was a
“key position,” and gave the new undersecretary “further clout and influence over his domain.” As for the intelligence reform legislation, which Dempsey called “very flawed,” she noted that the DNI was now dealing with the Pentagon hierarchy “with no interaction with the secretary of defense, who is the 800-pound gorilla in any conversation about national security. It’s a very different environment, and from where I stand it’s not a better environment than the one we came from.”6
Her dissent, in retrospect, was highly significant. At the time of Cambone’s appointment in 2002, Dempsey was the deputy director of central intelligence for community management, and had spent the past four years dealing with intense interagency rivalries within the IC. Moreover, since 2003, she’d been the executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and, in 2004, had been awarded the Intelligence Community’s highest award. If anybody represented the voice of the IC, it was Joan Dempsey. By publicly repudiating Rumsfeld’s power grab, she was giving voice to intelligence officials and contractors who believed in civilian control over the national collection agencies. That tension would persist throughout the remaining years of the Bush administration.
For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the “arcane” measures that caused the IC to shudder in despair provided the cover for an extraordinary expansion of power. Even before the ink was dry on the 9/11 reform legislation, Rumsfeld was circulating a directive instructing regional military commanders to create a plan for an expanded Pentagon role in military intelligence.7 This led to the creation of a new clandestine espionage unit called the Strategic Support Branch, which was designed to end what Rumsfeld called his “near total dependence” on the CIA for human intelligence.
By 2005, the support branch was deploying small, covert teams of case officers, interrogators, and special operations forces to Somalia, Iran, the Philippines, and other places—sometimes without contacting the U.S. ambassador or the local CIA station chief—to launch covert military operations and prepare for future U.S. military action. The Pentagon had moved into the management and deployment of secret intelligence teams both abroad and at home, seizing the initiative from the CIA in every theater of action where the United States was involved. “The Pentagon is now running its own covert operations, and running them in a big way,” Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer who once worked in military intelligence, told me at the time. “The whole playing field has changed.”8
Soon the capital was abuzz with reports that the CIA had been outmaneuvered and overpowered by the intelligence bosses at the Department of Defense. Rumsfeld had “consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post–Second World War national security-state,” Seymour Hersh concluded in January 2005 in a startling report in The New Yorker.9 For contractors, the Pentagon’s power grab had immediate, and very lucrative, consequences. The most important were the adoption by the Pentagon of the concepts of network centric warfare (NCW); the expansion of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the primary intelligence collection agency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense; and the creation inside the Pentagon of two organizations that would become extremely influential in national intelligence over the next three years, the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers and the Counterintelligence Field Activity office. With the Intelligence Community depending on information technology more than ever before and outsourcing the equivalent of 70 percent of its budget, the programs initiated by Rumsfeld and Cambone became vehicles for an extraordinary expansion of contracting within the Department of Defense representing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new business for the Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
Even in the face of his appalling record in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld will long be remembered, for bad or worse, as the man who forced the armed services to embrace the revolutionary, IT-driven concept of network centric warfare. The road to military domination, he believed, was to create a global, network-based communications system for all information and intelligence on military operations; transformation and “netcentricity” were the keys to future American power.
Boiled down to its essentials, network centric warfare means two things: harnessing information technology to maximize the power and accuracy of weapons; and using computer networks to instantly link ships, planes, satellites, and ground forces into a single, integrated unit connecting every player in the military chain of command, from the highest-ranking general to the lowliest war-fighter on the ground. The idea is to fight wars more “efficiently” by deploying fewer troops armed with lighter, more mobile weapons, utilizing vehicles and vessels that are easier to maneuver in battle, and using the full spectrum of signals intercepts and imagery to see and track the enemy in real time. According to official Pentagon statements, the concept involves “shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability and a degree of self-synchronization.”10
The national collection agencies play a pivotal role in netcentric warfare. The NSA, in addition to its considerable abilities to intercept enemy communications and weapons signals, is responsible for security assurance at the Department of Defense and providing encryption technologies that keep defense and intelligence networks secure from cyber-attacks and hackers (that includes protecting the Global Information Grid, the mother of all computer networks).* The NGA contributes the imagery and mapping critical to real-time action on the battlefield. The NRO controls all military satellites and, by a simple tip of an antenna, can shift the visual “situational awareness” of U.S. war-fighters and fighter pilots in an instant. The DIA integrates all the information available from intelligence units of the unified commands, and is responsible for ensuring its delivery to the war-fighter on the ground (its efforts to provide “dominant battle space awareness” are “essential to the success” of netcentric warfare, the Pentagon said in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review). The DIA is also responsible for measurement and signatures intelligence (MASINT).
For defense contractors previously focused on military hardware, the opportunities presented by networking these agencies into the new paradigm of war fighting have expanded their market from tanks, planes, and ships into software and information technology. By 2005, according to a 2006 study conducted by the research firm Frost & Sullivan, the corporations supplying the information technology and integration tools for network centric warfare were a $25 billion industry.11 The network, it said, “is not an entity in itself” but rather a “compilation of systems…built by linking transmitters, receivers, servers, routers, displays, encryption devices, firewalls, satellites, manned and unmanned sensor systems and weapons systems.” The top suppliers of these technologies were Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, which together held a 44 percent share of the netcentric warfare market.
Northrop Grumman was the dominant player with a 20.1 percent share, and was involved, Frost & Sullivan said, “in nearly every major [network centric] program either as a lead systems integrator or as a contributor.” Lockheed Martin’s market share was 12.4 percent, and Raytheon’s was 11.5 percent. Frost & Sullivan predicted that the network centric warfare market would reach a peak of $38 billion to $40 billion a year by 2012. While the military’s investments in IT systems and the Global Information Grid will boost total netcentric company revenues to $32 billion by 2012, Frost & Sullivan also expressed concern about the ability of the different military networks to communicate with each other. “Competition between some of the market participants is having the effect of slowing progress on interoperable systems,” it concluded.
With the emphasis on computer networking, netcentric warfare has opened markets for companies not ordinarily associated with defense, such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. For Cisco, which makes networking gear for Air Force Airborne Warning and Control System surveillance planes (AWACS) and many other mil
itary missions, network centric warfare is a natural extension of its global business. “Just about everything we make can be adapted in one way, shape or form to the military,” says Terence C. Morgan, a retired Marine Corps officer who is director of the defense initiative team for Cisco Systems’ Global Defense, Space & Security Group. “If you think of a base, it’s a city. If you think of the [Global Information Grid], it’s a major telecom service provider.” From that perspective, he said, Cisco “is a netcentric company.”12
