New DIA Director

"The Defense Intelligence Agency is a powerful if obscure organization responsible for providing intelligence to military commands, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its secret weapon: It’s chiefly responsible for all of the Defense Department’s human informants. Yet it can seem overly bureaucratic and in eclipse compared to the military tactical-intelligence shops it helps man.

“Flynn’s nomination is interesting because he does not seem like someone who would choose to be a placeholder at an agency in decline,” says spywatcher Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “The appointment may signal a revival of DIA, or at least some upheaval.”"  Wired

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The "crockery" needs breaking.  DIA tends to be inhabited at the top by bureaucratic politicians who should be sent to graze somewhere else.

Not a West Point graduate.

Flynn sounds like a good idea.  We will have to see if he will do as good a job of backing up his analysts in NIE discussions as did Burgess.  pl

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/michael-flynn-dia/#more-78557

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_T._Flynn

 

Comments

[The Twisted Genius]

Agree. Flynn does sound like a good idea. He's certainly no stranger to DIA. He was plucked from the J2 in the Pentagon (a DIA position) by Petraeus and McCrystal to head the intel shop in Afghanistan. He's coming from the DNI, just as Burgess did before him.

He wrote a scathing critique of the ineffectiveness of military intelligence in Afghanistan in 2010 and published it through CNAS. The solution he proposed in that paper called for a geographically based approach to the human and social aspects of the battlefield rather than the laser focus on the Taliban fighters and IEDs that intel was doing at that time. The changes he laid out sounded a lot like the 10th Group CASMAP (Command Area Studies and Mission Analysis Program) started in the early 80s. That program was influential throughout the Special Forces and Special Ops communities. Flynn was probably familiar with the concept from his JSOC days.

I don't know how much more change DIA can go through. That place has been through more reorganizations, restructurings, transformations and transmogrifications than I can count. As DIA Director, he will also be the commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JFCC-ISR) for U.S. Strategic Command. This is all part of the "Defense Intelligence Enterprise" thingy which eludes my understanding. If he can loosen the grip that the micromanaging bureaucrats have on the analysts and collectors, he will be doing plenty.