Neglect the IC’s human capital at our peril

Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence did a YouTube interview with a reporter in which she bragged about abolishing her Office of Human Capital—apparently because it was too focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—for savings of $150 million. But it’s her views on that larger issue—the health of Intelligence Community’s human capital—that concerns me, especially the implicit idea that we can “just throw the ‘human capital’ baby out with the ‘DEI’ bathwater” and survive. 

For the record, that does NOT mean that the IC or the ODNI (or the rest of the federal government for that matter) can’t become smaller, by reducing staff, restructuring itself, leveraging modern technology, etc., and not just by eliminating DEI initiatives. But it does mean that it must be done with great care (and caring). 

Why? Because the IC’s people—the workforce of “about 100,000” military, civilian and contractor personnel—is perhaps its most powerful and potent asset, with a multitude of skills both esoteric and mundane that can only be neglected at the country’s peril. But they are spread all over the bureaucratic map, with separate budgets, staffs and even chains of command, and “herding” them into a more integrated, coherent whole is something only the DNI can do.  

Indeed, as one former DNI described it, the integration of all these INT disciplines and agencies into a more coherent whole is an unnatural bureaucratic act. That’s why the Congress created the DNI in the first place, and neglecting the IC’s human capital will ultimately lead to mission failure. Just look at what happened on 9/11.

Leveraging the IC’s human capital is a mission imperative

On that fateful day in 2001, the IC was grossly understaffed, the result of hatchet-like budget cuts over the previous decade that reduced the IC’s capacity to below-critical levels. Ironically, those were some of the very same savings that the current administration is seeking once again. 

But the IC’s capability gaps were even more pronounced. Before and immediately the 9/11 attacks, our nation’s intelligence agencies had far too few people with the ability to speak Arabic, Pashtu, Urdu and other exotic foreign languages, much less be able to “blend in” and gather intelligence undercover on the streets of Riyad, Jalalabad or Cairo, or even CONUS multi-ethnic cities like New York or San Francisco. 

Even the Russian language and culture had become fallow in the IC of mid-2001...after all, the Cold War was over, and we’d won it, right? 

Bottom line: The IC (and the nation) were in a ‘people deficit’ on 9/11. The IC could NOT effectively perform its many missions—it just didn’t have the collective capability, capacity or, perhaps most importantly, the culture of collaboration to do so—and none of us would argue for an encore of that dismal date and its immediate aftermath. 

DNI Gabbard can change that, but that’s not something she can do overnight, or by herself. It takes five to seven years of concerted, IC-wide effort to recruit and develop seasoned, experienced intelligence officers, whether they’re operators or analysts or support people. But it also takes leadership commitment...that is, the will to do so. And that’s still a question for the new DNI.

Six human capital challenges for the DNI as the leader of the IC

And therein lies my caution to her. You simple cannot neglect these things, even briefly, without paying a price many years downstream! So, here are six “big” human capital issues that Ms. Gabbard should be losing sleep over when it comes to the IC’s human capital...before some adversary mistakenly thinks that that we are too tempting a target.  

1. Is the head count right? This has to do with the number of military, civilian and contractor personnel directly engaged in or supporting intelligence operations...in other words, its capacity. And while that assumes some overlap in furtherance of “competitive analysis” (you don’t wany a single POV when it comes to national security), that overlap can easily grow to into redundancy. So, how much is enough? Only an honest broker like the DNI—who can judge the capabilities of individual agencies—can find the right collective balance. And we’ve seen what happens when that number isn’t right. 

2. Does the IC have the right skills? Capability goes hand-in-hand with capacity, and that too cannot be neglected. The IC needs all the skilled “collectors” it can muster—undercover FBI, CIA, Drug Enforcement Administration and Defense Intelligence Agency agents, among others—both here and/or overseas. But the IC also needs skilled analysts who can interpret what its agencies collect. It even needs expert accountants, financial specialists and, these days, lots of cyber ninjas...literally every skillset you can think of! And all these skills take time to be developed (or recruited), deployed and ultimately combined to form a whole.  

3. Does the IC have the right mix of contractors? The IC includes a significant contractor workforce, and they are just as much part of the IC’s human capital as its military and civilian employees. They are also just as dedicated to the intelligence mission. Indeed, the nation would not have been able to recover after the 9/11 attacks if it weren’t for the “formers” who’d found their way to contractor rolls and could be redirected until the IC could recruit, develop and deploy “inherently governmental” staff to take their place...and thereafter rely on contractors for the surge, spot and gap-filling capabilities they are best at.    

4. How is the IC’s morale and its culture? Back in 2005, when the ODNI was first established, employee climate survey results for some agencies were so bad that they’d been classified as SECRET to hide a counterintelligence risk...that’s a far cry from 2024, when the IC was recognized as one of the federal government’s ‘Best Places to Work.’ But this is more than just morale; it is also a matter of IC-wide culture. The IC wants and needs people who are not afraid to “speak truth to power” even when their superiors may not want to hear it. That takes courage, and if you neglect it, you risk a replay of the mythical Iraqi WMD. And accountability to one’s craft and agency (and our nation) is not the same as political loyalty.   

5. What about the IC’s senior leadership cadre? In one of its clearest human capital mandates, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act told the fledgling DNI to ensure that the IC’s agencies would be led by senior civilians who understood the complexity of its all-source, multi-INT operations, something that clearly was not the case before 9/11. Senior civilians could no longer be developed in agency silos and stove pipes but rather had to be “joint” (like flag officers in DOD, who needed to be able to conduct integrated military operations). And because this meant lengthy interagency assignments, this too requires the ODNI and the IC agencies to work together. 

6. Can the IC field a diverse, mission-capable workforce? This is NOT about DEI, but it is about IC diversity, especially at an operational and analytical level. That’s a true mission imperative in the IC, not just another political slogan. As we have noted, the IC needs seasoned officers who can “live” in foreign cultures, speak foreign languages and dialects fluently and be able to do so anywhere in the world...including in U.S. cities. Blonde, blue-eyed WASPs just won’t cut it. In the IC, diversity is not just a nicety but a mission imperative, and it can still be achieved in a manner that is politically correct. 

All of that that underscores the importance of the IC’s human capital, as well as the DNI’s leadership in that regard, and they represent my most fervent concern. I won’t comment on the options that I hope the DNI is considering when it comes to accomplishing the IC's mission more efficiently (options that range from a controlling central staff to a more collaborative, decentralized approach), because each has its pros and cons, as well as their costs and savings, and as noted above, they are all beside the point.