Authors’ Note:
This paper is intended to frame a discussion, not settle one.
Too often, debates about intelligence reform begin with organizational charts and predetermined solutions. We believe the more important starting point is identifying the strategic decisions that should not be avoided. The next Director of National Intelligence will have to address questions surrounding enterprise leadership, resource alignment, technological modernization, and strategic competition. This first paper examines those issues and the questions that should be asked. A second paper will explore potential answers.
Introduction
The next Director of National Intelligence inherits an Intelligence Community facing simultaneous technological, geopolitical, and institutional disruption.
The post-9/11 reforms that created the DNI helped solve many of the Intelligence Community's integration challenges. Those reforms were designed for a world still shaped by the aftermath of 9/11, where the primary concern was improving information sharing and coordination among intelligence agencies. They did not anticipate the strategic environment the next DNI will face.
Today, artificial intelligence is changing and improving how intelligence is collected, analyzed, and consumed. Commercial providers increasingly own capabilities once reserved for governments. Space has become a critical intelligence domain and a contested warfighting environment. Adversaries exploit the seams between foreign and domestic authorities, using cyber operations, influence campaigns, technology theft, and economic coercion to achieve strategic objectives below the threshold of armed conflict.
At the same time, the Intelligence Community faces growing fiscal pressures associated with the costs of advanced technologies, commercial data, and modern collection systems. The Community must modernize while sustaining a full operational tempo. Intelligence professionals continue to support ongoing crises and competition across the Middle East, Russia's war against Ukraine, strategic competition with China and tensions surrounding Taiwan, challenges throughout the Southern Hemisphere, and emerging frontiers such as the Arctic and space. The next DNI will not have the luxury of choosing between today's missions and tomorrow's investments; success will require doing both.
This paper identifies three strategic decision areas that deserve immediate attention from the next DNI. The question is no longer whether the Intelligence Community must evolve. The question is whether it can evolve fast enough to stay relevant.
Scenario 1:
Resist the Urge to Build New Bureaucracies
Core Question
Is the Intelligence Community suffering from a lack of organizations—or a lack of integrated management?
Discussion
Since its creation in 2004, ODNI has steadily taken on missions, oversight responsibilities, and coordinating functions. While these additions addressed legitimate needs and emerging challenges, they also have raised a more fundamental question: has ODNI become too focused on expanding its own mission responsibilities and not focused enough on its primary responsibility to lead, integrate, and support the existing functions of the Intelligence Community?
The DNI was created to serve as the nation's senior intelligence integrator, bringing together the capabilities, expertise, and resources of a diverse Intelligence Community. Its value was never intended to come from building large operational organizations or owning missions. Its value comes from setting priorities, convening stakeholders, aligning resources, resolving disputes, and ensuring that the Intelligence Community functions as a coherent enterprise.
As new challenges emerged, the Intelligence Community often responded by creating new centers, offices, governance structures, and oversight mechanisms. While many have delivered value, the cumulative effect has been to draw ODNI toward mission execution and away from its core service imperative: enabling the success of the organizations that conduct intelligence collection, analysis, operations, and support to policymakers and warfighters every day.
The central question for the next DNI is whether ODNI is best positioned as another mission-focused organization within the Intelligence Community or whether it should recommit to its original role as the leadership, integration, and convening body for the enterprise.
The next DNI should examine whether the current structure is optimized to lead the Intelligence Community as a unified enterprise or whether a renewed focus on Community Management would better support integration.
KEY ISSUES:
·Should ODNI return to a Community Management model focused on enterprise leadership, integration, and resource alignment?
·Has the growth of ODNI strengthened the Intelligence Community or diluted ODNI's ability to serve as the enterprise integrator?
·What functions are uniquely appropriate for ODNI, and what functions should remain with existing intelligence agencies and departments?
·How should the DNI exercise leadership across the Intelligence Community without creating additional layers of bureaucracy?
·What mechanisms are needed to align collection, analysis, technology adoption, workforce development, partnerships, and budgets across the enterprise?
·Should National Intelligence Managers be empowered as true enterprise leaders responsible for integrating mission execution across agencies?
·How should ODNI lead the integration of emerging priorities such as Artificial Intelligence, commercial data, and space capabilities without becoming the owner or operator of those missions?
·What is the appropriate role of ODNI in supporting Defense Intelligence, NCTC, NCSC, and other mission organizations while avoiding duplication of effort?
Scenario 2:
Resource the Intelligence Community for the AI and Space Age
Core Question
Can the United States afford fragmented investment decisions in an era where artificial intelligence, commercial data, and space capabilities are becoming decisive intelligence advantages?
Discussion
In Washington, strategy ultimately becomes a resource question. Priorities, authorities, organizational responsibilities, and technology adoption all follow the allocation of resources. In FY2026 alone, the Administration requested approximately $115.5 billion for intelligence activities, including $81.9 billion in the National Intelligence Program and $33.6 billion in the Military Intelligence Program, increases of $8.5 billion and $5.4 billion respectively over the previous year. One of the most important issues facing the next DNI is whether the Intelligence Community's current resource structure is aligned with how intelligence is actually produced, consumed, and operationalized today.Complicating this challenge is the longstanding divide between funding in the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP). While often treated as distinct funding streams with separate constituencies, the reality is considerably more complex. The current arrangement is rooted less in strategic design than in a series of historical compromises intended to balance the authorities of the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the broader Intelligence Community.
Today, that framework increasingly obscures more than it clarifies. What many outside the Intelligence Community do not realize is that substantial portions of intelligence resources funded through the National Intelligence Program directly support military operations, combat support activities, and defense intelligence functions. Likewise, many intelligence capabilities developed to support military missions provide strategic warning, indications and warning, and national-level intelligence for policymakers across the government.
The distinction between "national" and "military" intelligence made more sense in an era when intelligence missions, collection platforms, customers, and operational environments were more clearly separated. Today, the same satellite constellation may support strategic warning, operational planning, targeting, humanitarian assistance, maritime awareness, and battlefield operations. Commercial data is consumed by analysts and warfighters alike. Artificial intelligence models may support national policymakers, combatant commanders, and tactical operators simultaneously.
The more important question is not how funding is labeled, but whether the Intelligence Community is organized to make coherent investment decisions across the enterprise. The next DNI should examine whether the current MIP-NIP construct encourages integrated capabilities and enterprise modernization or reinforces organizational boundaries that no longer reflect operational reality.
This question has become increasingly urgent as the Intelligence Community enters a period in which technological advantage may matter as much as traditional intelligence tradecraft. Artificial intelligence, commercial data, advanced sensors, and space-based capabilities are reshaping how intelligence is collected, analyzed, and consumed. The challenge is no longer simply acquiring information. The challenge is processing, validating, integrating, and acting upon unprecedented volumes of data at operational speed.
At the same time, the Intelligence Community faces fiscal pressures and rapidly rising costs associated with artificial intelligence infrastructure, commercial data, cloud computing, advanced collection systems, and space capabilities. The challenge is establishing common priorities, investment strategies, and architectural principles across an Intelligence Community that remains divided among multiple agencies, departments, funding streams, priorities, and acquisition authorities.
For much of the Intelligence Community's history, the government drove intelligence innovation through its own research, development, and procurement activities. Today, that dynamic has fundamentally changed. Artificial intelligence, commercial remote sensing, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and many of the data sources increasingly relied upon by intelligence professionals are being developed and scaled by industry. For the first time in Intelligence Community history, a significant portion of future intelligence advantage will be derived from capabilities developed, built, and funded outside government.
This reality presents both opportunity and risk. The opportunity lies in unprecedented access to innovation, competition, and commercial investment. The risk is fragmentation: duplicative purchases, incompatible architectures, inconsistent security standards, vendor lock, and missed opportunities to leverage enterprise buying power. At no point in Intelligence Community history has the opportunity for partnership with industry been greater. Equally, at no point has the need for enterprise discipline been more important.
Taxpayers should expect intelligence resources to produce secure, interoperable, and mission-driven capabilities regardless of which budget line funds them. Achieving that outcome will require greater alignment across intelligence priorities, acquisition decisions, technology architectures, and commercial partnerships than the current construct was originally designed to support.
Key Issues
• Would National Intelligence Program and Military Intelligence Program merger be more cost effective or is increased alignment enough?
• The Department of Defense is the largest consumer of intelligence, owns most of the nation's collection infrastructure, and operates the largest intelligence enterprise. What is the appropriate relationship between the DNI, OUSDI&S, the Joint Staff, and Combatant Commands in setting intelligence priorities?
• Who should establish enterprise collection investment priorities?
• How should the Intelligence Community approach commercial GEOINT, commercial data, and emerging commercial intelligence capabilities?
• What is the right balance between AI-enabled analysis and human expertise?
• What role should open-source and commercially available information play in future intelligence architectures?
• How can the Intelligence Community modernize technology and data architectures while avoiding duplication, vendor lock, and fragmented acquisition strategies?
• What common standards, security frameworks, and enterprise investments are required to maximize taxpayer value and mission effectiveness?
Scenario 3:
Competing Without Borders
Core Question
Are U.S. intelligence institutions aligned with the realities of modern strategic competition?
Discussion
America's principal adversaries do not recognize the traditional boundaries between foreign intelligence, domestic security, law enforcement, cyber operations, economic competition, and influence campaigns.
China conducts technology acquisition, influence operations, cyber espionage, economic coercion, and military modernization as part of a coordinated national strategy. Russia blends intelligence operations, cyber activities, disinformation, political influence, and proxy networks to shape perceptions and undermine democratic institutions. Iran and other actors increasingly exploit digital platforms, transnational networks, and non-state actors to advance strategic objectives while remaining below the threshold of armed conflict.
These activities are not isolated intelligence challenges. They are components of long-term campaigns designed to influence decision-making, shape global narratives, acquire technology, weaken alliances, and gain strategic advantage without resorting to conventional war.
Yet many of the institutions responsible for defending the United States remain organized around distinctions that are becoming increasingly difficult to separate in practice even if rooted in well-intentioned constitutional constructs. Foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, law enforcement, economic security, cyber defense, and influence operations often fall under different authorities, organizations, and policy frameworks despite being employed simultaneously by America's adversaries.
The challenge for the next DNI is not simply improving intelligence collection. It is confronting the reality that America's principal adversaries have learned to exploit the seams between intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, cyber defense, economic security, technology protection, and influence operations. These gaps are no longer theoretical vulnerabilities. They have become operational opportunities for foreign adversaries seeking strategic advantage below the threshold of armed conflict.
While America's adversaries increasingly pursue integrated national campaigns, the United States often responds through separate organizations, authorities, and policy frameworks. Foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, economic security, cyber defense, influence monitoring, and law enforcement remain divided among multiple institutions, even as adversaries employ them simultaneously.
For much of the post-Cold War era, the Intelligence Community focused on warning, collection, and analysis. Those functions remain essential, but strategic competition demands something more. The Intelligence Community must help identify, expose, disrupt, and provide options to impose costs on adversary campaigns that span diplomatic, economic, informational, cyber, and military domains. This requires not only intelligence excellence, but also stronger integration across government and a renewed focus on irregular warfare and strategic competition.
Key Issues
·Are U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and national security institutions organized to compete against adversaries that operate across traditional bureaucratic and legal boundaries?
·How should the Intelligence Community support whole-of-government campaigns for strategic competition and irregular warfare?
·What role should counterintelligence play in protecting U.S. technology, research institutions, critical infrastructure, and economic competitiveness?
·How should the United States balance civil liberties and openness while countering foreign influence, manipulation, and information operations?
·Is the current division between intelligence and law enforcement authorities optimized for the realities of modern strategic competition?
·What role should economic security and technology protection play in Intelligence Community priorities and how does ODNI handle this work?
·Should the United States consider new institutional models, including an expanded counterintelligence architecture or an MI5-like construct, to address foreign influence and hostile state activity?
Conclusion
A successful DNI will not be measured by how many organizations are created, merged, renamed, or eliminated.
Success will be measured by whether the Intelligence Community becomes more integrated, more technologically agile, more operationally relevant, can defeat our adversaries, and be more capable of providing options for decision-makers during strategic competition.
The next DNI's greatest challenge will not be managing the Intelligence Community inherited from 2004. It will be preparing the Intelligence Community required for 2045.
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