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Rating: 
Summary: Useful Informed Opinion
Review:
There are two very important themes running through this book, and they earn the author a solid four stars and a "must read" recommendation. First, the author is correct and compellinging clear when he points out that even the most senior intelligence professionals, including DCIs, simply do not understand the full range of intelligence organizations, capabilities, and problems that exist--just about everyone has spent their entire career in a small niche with its own culture. Second, the author is unique for focusing on an area that is both vital and ignored today: that of creating joint and combined intelligence concepts and doctrine to ensure that minimal common understandings as well as training competency levels are reached across varied jurisdictions; and to enable competent community resource management, also non-existent today.
The author is positively instructive in this book, providing both trenchant indictments (for instance, of the National Reconnaisance Office for being oriented toward big budgets and inputs rather than missions and outputs), and many common sense observations that all need to be factored into whatever the Senate finally decides to do about intelligence reform. Among the many important points that he makes, I especially agree with his pointing out the need to fully integrate the management of inputs and outputs within each of the major collection disciplines--as he notes, disconnecting the building of satellites, or aerial imagery vehicles, or unmanned aerial drones, from the actual needs of the end-user and the actual responsibility to produce imagery intelligence, leads to precisely what the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Commission Report of December 1999 noted as the major shortfall in national intelligence--close to a trillion spent on secret satellite collection, and nothing spent on tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TPED). The author specifically identifies $6 billion in savings being achievable from the NRO budget over five years--savings that could be applied to enhancing analysis, creating competent clandestine collection capabilities, establishing global open source collection activities in each of the theaters, and creating a new national counterintelligence and homeland security intelligence program. In passing, on page 146 the author "blows the whistle" on the deception imposed on the public by the CIA's clandestine service, which was actually largely incapable in Afghanistan in 2001, and was saved secretly by Russian sources & methods. My own sources tell me that there are some very ugly stories yet to be made public, and the author--whose access and credibility cannot be questioned--is helpful in sharing what he knows on this--America needs a competent clandestine service, not one that pretends that clerks mixed with cowboys, all working from official installations, are anything other than a joke. The author demonstrates a very deep understanding of the shortfalls of the intelligence bureaucracy, the intelligence culture, intelligence leadership, and the policymakers that fail to direct or exploit intelligence on behalf of the Nation. There are a few weaknesses in this book, costing the author one star, and they are mentioned to correct the record, as it were--in no way do these weaknesses reduce the value of the book or the importance of the author's views when we finally get around to fixing U.S. intelligence. First, he is limited in his understanding of the importance of Global Coverage of lower tier issues that can be addessed by open source intelligence (OSINT), including commercial imagery and Russian military combat charts; and he is equally limited in his understanding of both OSINT, and the urgency of finding new means of supporting multilateral peacekeeping operations that mix both government militaries and government law enforcement missions with non-governmental and other private sector actors. Second, he continues to have a modest obsession with technical solutions, and neglects to properly address the shortfalls in inter-agency information sharing and processing that could be partially resolved by enhancing the National Security Agency's considerable computational power to that it can become an all-source processing manager--at the same time, the author seriously over-states the availability of both bandwidth and tactical processing, while under-stating the enormous flood of unclassified information, including geospatial information, that must be processed if commanders are to be able to understand their combat environments in near real time. Lastly, the author comes close to spasms of fury when referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to a lesser extent, to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of State. His anger and disdain with regard to these organizations are recurring He is clear in his view that the "all source analyst" cannot and should not be centralized, that analysts must work for the end-users, and that both CIA and DIA should be abolished. While I disagree with this viewpoint, it is a mature informed viewpoint that CIA and DIA managers must address--they ignore General Odom's concerns at their peril. The book is based on the 1997 study by the National Institute for Public Policy that was chaired by the author and included such other thoughtful executives as LtGen James Clapper, today the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The author has made his own statement in this book, and it is perhaps the most practical and the most focused on the public statements on the need for intelligence reform. This book has been added to the OSS.NET listing of the top books on intelligence reform.
Rating: 
Summary: Bold reform plan for the U.S. intelligence community
Review: Gen. William E. Odom, now a Yale professor and a former director of the National Security Agency obviously knows the U.S. intelligence community better than anybody else. In chapter after chapter, he examines both civilian and military intelligence agencies and organizations in the U.S. and shows the interdependencies between them. But what's more, through many examples, he makes clear the ways in which they failed in the past, how some very serious failures (like Robert Hanssen's treason and Sept 11 attacks) cost a great deal to America. But Gen. Odom does not suffice just by listing what's wrong with what agency. At the end of each chapter, he also presents a very clear bulleted list of his recommendations as to how to remedy the problems he highlighted within the chapter. His nuanced approach does not fail to substantiate his contention that the policy failures in the past have been as dangerous as the pure intelligence failures. Thus fixing the intelligence faults requires similar reforms on the policy side as well. Specifically, Gen. Odom in effect recommends the dismemberment of the CIA, the NRO and part of FBI and creation of a new overarching National Counterintelligence Service, and promotion of DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) to a national intelligence czar. The book's value is greatly enhanced by an authoritative glossary explaining all the confusing acronyms used in the intelligence business. The Appendix at the end, "Intelligence Organizations and the Intelligence Process," complete with an organizational chart, is brief but very comprehensive in presenting a sharp X-ray of the current U.S. intelligence community. One theme that begs to be developed further is the impact of a much more expanded peace-time intelligence apparatus for the civil rights of American citizens. Odom rocognizes the importance of the issue but suffices by saying that intelligence gathering at a national and expanded scale is possible without endangering the citizens' rights. Perhaps that should be the topic of his next book on this challenge. Odom succeeds in arguing for a bitter medicine for safer tomorrows.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read for anyone interested in Intelligence
Review: General Odom has written an outstanding book, combining a careful explanation of the nature and mission of intelligence with a well-thought out set of suggested reforms. Although the reading can be somewhat dry, General Odom's description of the relationships between different agencies and bureaucracies is succinct and delivered with clarity. Working methodically through the terminology and methods of the intelligence field, he provides necessary background and understanding to enable people to comprehend the need for reform and to assess the suggestions he offers. General Odom writes from the perspective of an insider, a very smart insider, but manages to keep a degree of detachment and objectivity in the process. His thoughtful suggestions regarding how we might go about reforming and improving our intelligence capabilities to cope with 21st century threats should be read carefully by anyone with an interest in these issues. Even if one disagrees with some of the reforms he proposes, this book provides a solid starting point for understanding the complexities of intelligence collection and analysis in the modern world, as well as the problems we face by relying on an intelligence community created fifty years ago to deal with a threat (the Soviet Union) that is now long-gone from the scene. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read for anyone interested in Intelligence
Review: General Odom has written an outstanding book, combining a careful explanation of the nature and mission of intelligence with a well-thought out set of suggested reforms. Although the reading can be somewhat dry, General Odom's description of the relationships between different agencies and bureaucracies is succinct and delivered with clarity. Working methodically through the terminology and methods of the intelligence field, he provides necessary background and understanding to enable people to comprehend the need for reform and to assess the suggestions he offers. General Odom writes from the perspective of an insider, a very smart insider, but manages to keep a degree of detachment and objectivity in the process. His thoughtful suggestions regarding how we might go about reforming and improving our intelligence capabilities to cope with 21st century threats should be read carefully by anyone with an interest in these issues. Even if one disagrees with some of the reforms he proposes, this book provides a solid starting point for understanding the complexities of intelligence collection and analysis in the modern world, as well as the problems we face by relying on an intelligence community created fifty years ago to deal with a threat (the Soviet Union) that is now long-gone from the scene. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: READ THIS BOOK
Review: If you want to understand the intelligence world, and the dangerous world of terrorists and sneak attacks we now confront, READ THIS BOOK! Based on what appears to be a lifetime of experience in the secret enclaves of American intelligence gathering, General Odom's penetrating insights challenge accepted wisdom, and force us to question our nation's strategic vision. For anyone who wants a safe world and a free society, this book is a road map to where we must go as a nation.
Rating:
Summary: Clearly There's an Intelligence Problem
Review: It usually takes a disaster to create change in large organizations. And no one could possibly consider the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to be anything but a disaster. But what to change and how to change it. ==In this book, William Odom a former director of the National Security Agency looks at how the American intelligence agencies are organized and makes recommendations on how to fix the problems. The roots of the problem go back a long ways.
The CIA was organized in 1947 as primarily an organization to collect information about the Soviet Union. With the advent of spy satellites the main thrust of the agency centered on using imagery to track the military forces of the Soviet Union. And as budgets were cut from time to time (under Clinton especially) the agency depended more and more on imagery.
The FBI has responsibilities for both law enforcement and counter intelligence. These are very different responsibilities, one leading to arrest and trial after a crime has been committed. In counter intelligence you don't really care if the bad guy goes to jail, you mainly want to stop his actions from hurting you.
Regardless of how it happened, it is time for a major overhaul of the Intelligence agencies of the U.S. General Odom has made a number of proposals clearly stating how he would do it. It will be interesting to watch what happens as Congress works on the problem.
Rating:
Summary: Fixing Intelligence
Review: This book is entirely about the structural reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community(IC) that is it is about rearranging the boxes of organization charts into new combinations. For this reason, I would not recommend it to the general reader because 'boxology' can be quite tedious reading. I do strongly recommend the book to serious students of the IC and its reform because they will find an enormous amount of food for thought in the book. The author of Fixing Intelligence is retired General William E. Odom who, in the best tradition of the soldier-scholar, has developed an elaborate proposal to restructure and rationalize the IC. Unfortunately, General Odom has retained, from his active duty days, the bad habit of stating assumptions and conclusions as if they were self-evident without bothering to support them with logical arguments. For example, the guiding, but unsupported, assumption throughout this book is that, "Organizational cultures are normally the products of structural conditions." This assumption is dubious at best and I beleive that many in both the intellgence and academic communities would challenge it as incorrect. Another such unsupported assumption is that the nature of intelligence targets is irrelevant to the structure of the intelligence establishment and if that structure had been sound during the Cold War era, reform would be unnecessary now. Again, I think many thinkers in the IC would challenge this assumption as at least misleading. Oddly enough, in typical fashion, General Odom in the end has actually developed a sensible and, I think, workable scheme to resturcture the IC in ways that would make it both more efficient and more responsive to the needs of the 21st Century. His reconstruction proposal is not the whole story of reforming the IC, but it is a good start.
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