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OPINION:
The U.S. intelligence community is on a path to its next catastrophic failure.
Despite warning signs, the Defense Department, which owns a massive portion of the intelligence community’s capabilities, is doing nothing to stop the next preventable disaster. The Pentagon conducts many intelligence activities, such as gathering information on foreign adversaries, protecting the nation from terrorist attacks and safeguarding military secrets from foreign intelligence entities. In fiscal year 2025, the intelligence community budget exceeded $100 billion, with a huge amount invested in military intelligence.
Of the 18 intelligence community organizations, nine fall under the Defense Department, including five armed services intelligence elements, four major intelligence community agencies, service-affiliated intelligence agencies, and dozens of defense intelligence components throughout the defense agencies, combatant commands and the Joint Staff.
Despite this massive investment, the Pentagon does not have a single senior official dedicated to intelligence oversight at the department level. Oversight of intelligence activities is fundamentally broken. To prevent the next catastrophic intelligence failure, the Pentagon should immediately halt all efforts that pay lip service to intelligence oversight and restore a dedicated senior official and office to oversee critical intelligence and intelligence-related activities.
How did we get here? For more than 40 years, the Defense Department had a dedicated senior official and office designated as the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight.
Carved out of the Defense Department inspector general in 1982, the position was established to provide independent oversight one year after the publication of the groundbreaking Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities.
Nevertheless, poor decisions in recent years whittled away at the mission and authorities of the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight. The Defense Department eliminated the office in 2021, fatefully within days of the Aug. 29, 2021, drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which killed 10 innocent civilians, including seven children.
At the time of the drone strike, the office and its successor organization had not inspected Central Command in more than four years, despite highly publicized investigations into failures in analytic tradecraft within the CENTCOM Directorate for Intelligence.
In 2021, instead of asking how the Defense Department could make intelligence oversight more effective, the department abolished the office, gave up on intelligence oversight inspections and subordinated and buried the intelligence oversight function under the senior official for privacy.
The decision to subordinate the intelligence oversight function was deprived of data or analysis on the potential negative impacts on the intelligence oversight mission.
The resulting decision undercut the independence of the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight and dismantled an aggressive and effective intelligence oversight program with a dedicated senior official. Ironically, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks later published a memorandum reemphasizing the need for “data-driven decisions” and analysis.
Ms. Hicks did not heed her own guidance. In 2024, a devastating report by the General Accounting Office laid bare the catastrophic results. The GAO said the Defense Department’s intelligence oversight office in calendar years 2017 to 2022 conducted 25 inspections, resulting in hundreds of recommendations that, if implemented, would address inspection findings, observations and policy and support issues, demonstrating the department’s systemic lack of compliance with executive orders, presidential directives and Defense Department and intelligence community policy. Unfortunately, these discoveries were ignored.
As history has shown, the Defense Department needs an independent and effective intelligence oversight office that meets standards of quality, objectivity and credibility, unburdened by the constraints and priorities of the privacy and civil liberties program and any senior official other than the secretary of defense.
Despite overwhelming evidence of incompetence and lack of leadership, no one has been held accountable for these failures.
There are a range of solutions.
The Defense Department could stop paying lip service to intelligence oversight and just cut the mission. If the new administration is looking for efficiencies or programs to cut, it could look at the Defense Department’s assistant to the secretary of defense for privacy, civil liberties and transparency, which has spent millions of dollars but has not published a single independent intelligence oversight report in more than two years.
Rather than cutting the intelligence oversight mission outright, the Defense Department could save millions of dollars by returning it to its inspector general or realigning it under the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security.
Although these options have been discussed in the past few years, the Defense Department has fought against giving more resources to the inspector general because the inspector general answers to Congress, not the secretary of defense. Once absorbed by the Defense Department attorney general, the intelligence oversight mission could suffer from responding to shifting items of congressional interest rather than the secretary’s priorities. If aligned under the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, the Defense Department’s intelligence oversight mission would lack the essential elements of independence and objectivity.
The best solution is to restore the dedicated intelligence oversight mission as the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight, exclusively focused on intelligence and intelligence-related activities, partnered with but not subordinated to privacy or other nonintelligence issues. The Defense Department should stop paying lip service to oversight and restore periodic and regular intelligence oversight inspections, the best prophylactic against systematic noncompliance issues and catastrophic intelligence failures. The Pentagon can still refocus its energy on privacy, but not at the expense of killing intelligence oversight.
Because the Defense Department cannot be trusted to preserve the critical mission and functions of intelligence oversight, Congress should legislate that its intelligence oversight function, established in statute as the department’s senior intelligence oversight official, be independent and detached from assistant to the secretary of defense for privacy and civil liberties or any other senior official. This would restore independence to the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight and result in intelligence oversight no longer being subject to arbitrary resource constraints and irrelevant priorities.
Without bold action, the Defense Department is careening toward its next massive intelligence failure because of staggering incompetence, poor decisions and lack of oversight. Intelligence oversight within the department is fundamentally broken. Lack of accountability and effective oversight mechanisms make it impossible to ensure that intelligence operations are conducted lawfully, ethically and effectively, eroding the trust of the American people. The Defense Department should immediately take steps to ensure that the intelligence community is held accountable for its actions.
• Richard Westhoff is a civilian intelligence oversight specialist in the Defense Department office charged with ensuring that Pentagon intelligence activities are conducted in accordance with federal law, executive orders, presidential directives, intelligence community directives and defense policy.
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