17 - Managing the community

Summary

The last chapter considered what drives intelligence and how far it lends itself to measurement, and suggests some general assumptions for managers seeking its effectiveness and efficiency. This chapter discusses management at the level of the intelligence community as a whole. Chapter 18 looks at management at the individual agency level.

The community has already been discussed (chapter 15) as the means of producing interdepartmental assessments. But it also produces problems of resource allocation, common standards and community projects, the orchestration of different kinds of collection on the same targets, developing responses to new community-wide problems and projects, and so on. In addition governments need to decide on overall intelligence budgets. How to provide strategies, direction and advice to government on such issues is the subject of this chapter.

The problem is orchestrating intelligence's fairly loose communities. Two approaches are considered. One is to introduce ‘market-like’ disciplines, so that problems of strategy and resource allocation are solved by ‘user choice’. The other is to increase central authority, preferably linked with budget processes.

The consensus community

The community is charged not only with assessment but also with the responsibility already quoted for ‘the organization and working of British intelligence activity as a whole at home and overseas in order to ensure efficiency, economy and prompt adaptation to changing requirements’ – words little changed from the Committee's pre-Second World War foundations. The DCI has a similar formal role within the US community, including budgetary responsibility for the National Foreign Intelligence Program.