Formal Structure for Americas Intelligence Agency - Essay Example

Formal structure for Americas Intelligence Agency The fact that the United s Intelligence Community (IC) is a combination of several federal bodies with the common objective is a challenge in itself. The intelligence community has been facing a number of challenges owing to its complex structure. It is noteworthy that the number of intelligence agencies have been increasing rapidly since the begging of cold causing the structural problems faced by the Intelligence community. The Intelligence for a long period has had to deal with the uncountable challenges with its structure.

The major problem with Intelligence community has been shortfall in information sharing and coordination and all these can be attributable to some of which include but not limited to duplication of efforts, lack of proper communication guidelines, budget overrun. Lack of proper control of the primary data as well as poor dissemination methodologies has also contributed significantly in challenges faced by the intelligence community. Most of policy makers felt that increasing the number of intelligence agency was an important for adequate and effective intelligence information gathering.

However, this was a major mistake because the ever-bulging size of the intelligence has not done any good in maximizing the effectiveness of intelligence gathering and dissemination owing to the fact that most of these agencies tend to compete with one another when this should not be the case. The following structure represents the new face of United States Intelligence Community (IC) The above proposed structure of the American intelligence agency seeks to address the complexity that have been in the system which include lack of proper coordination and communication, competition between various agencies, information sharing shortfall, lack of a single authority, and ineffective control.

The current system allows each agency to act at its capacity and directives despite the fact that they share a unified mission of collecting and disseminating intelligence information for the President and members of the policymaking, law enforcement, and military communities require to execute their appointed duties (Intelligence. Gov). This mission has not been successfully achieved in the homeland and internationally owing to over-classification of intelligence products, lack of joint planning mechanism and duplication.

This new proposed structure puts the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) at the helm of the structure. The Director of National Intelligence will oversee operations of the intelligence community. DNI will not only coordinate activities of the four key members of the Intelligence but also control them by ensuring that she approves all plans of the agencies before an agency can carry it out. The proposed US intelligence structure will be highly centralized. This move will only be aimed at ensuring that duplication does not exist in the system.

Duplication of effort has been discovered to be the major source of complexities in the current system. The Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will establish a centralized database, which will act as a hub for all the plans and programs of each agency. Additionally the ODNI will be responsible for approving all the plans of every agency. All these will play a great deal in curtailing duplication. Centralization of all the programs under the ODNI will also see a joint planning mechanism established.

The joint planning mechanism that will engage all the agencies involved in intelligence and surveillance activities will play an important role in eliminating competition between the agencies. The DNI will always chair joint planning programs involving the intelligence community. The present structure is highly decentralized in the sense that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cannot hire or fire an employee of the federal agencies dealing with intelligence services (Intelligence. Gov).

Under the new system, the DNI will have the authority to appoint and dismiss the top executive of every agency under the intelligence community. The overall authority to fire and hire top executives of the intelligence community will be under the custody of DNI. Under the new system, DNI will be in charge of all the key decisions taking into consideration that he will be responsible for organizing, controlling, and directing activities of gathering, disseminating, and processing of intelligence information.

Because the Director of National Intelligence will be responsible for ratifying every program of the Intelligence community members, he will be responsible for controlling the budget of the intelligence and surveillance activities. This means that DNI will be making critical financial decisions regarding which programs require agent funding, large amount of funds and those that should not be funded. Controlling budget of the intelligence and surveillance gives the Intelligence community an upper hand in preventing duplication of effort considering that every program will be scrutinized before it is funded.

The Director of National Intelligence under the proposed formal structure will also be responsible for evaluating the performance of every member of the intelligence community. This plays a significant role in ensuring that each member attains the overall object of the intelligence community. Work cited Intelligence. Gov. A Complex Organization United Under a Single Goal: National Security. Retrieved 7 May 2012 from< http://www.intelligence.gov/about-the-intelligence-community/structure/>