Author's Note
In our first paper, DNI Day One: Three Strategic Decisions for National Security Evolution, we identified three challenges confronting the next Director of National Intelligence: enterprise leadership, resource alignment, and strategic competition. This paper focuses on the reforms most likely to improve the Intelligence Community's ability to meet those challenges.
The recommendations that follow are not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, they represent structural changes that could have disproportionate impact across the Intelligence Community: refocusing ODNI on total enterprise leadership, modernizing how intelligence investments are governed, and creating a mechanism to identify and resolve the institutional seams that America's adversaries increasingly exploit.
Reasonable observers may disagree on the specific solutions proposed here. However, the need for reform is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Twenty years after the creation of ODNI, the Intelligence Community faces a fundamentally different operating environment shaped by strategic competition, commercial innovation, artificial intelligence, and increasingly integrated threats. The challenge is not whether the nation needs intelligence reform, but where leaders should focus their attention to achieve the greatest enterprise impact.
Recommendation 1: Return ODNI to its Community Management Roots
We do not recommend eliminating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The need for a senior intelligence leader responsible for integrating the Intelligence Community remains as important today as it was when leaders such as Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar first advocated for reform in the 1990s. The failures exposed by the attacks of September 11, 2001, demonstrated the limitations of the existing Community Management Staff structure and ultimately led Congress to establish the DNI.
The challenge today is not whether the nation needs a DNI. It is whether ODNI is organized to perform its most important functions and has the correct authorities and oversight functions to truly lead the intelligence community.
The next DNI should undertake a deliberate reevaluation of ODNI’s mission and functions to refocus the organization on its original purpose: enterprise leadership, integration, resource alignment, and community management. Functions that primarily execute intelligence missions, including analysis, collection activities, and intelligence operations, should be performed by agencies whose core mission is operational execution. ODNI should focus on the responsibilities that only an enterprise integrator can perform.
Specifically,
Conduct a 90-day review of all ODNI organizations against a simple standard: Does this function uniquely require an enterprise integrator? The review should be led by a small panel of respected former intelligence leaders and provide recommendations to both the DNI and Congress. This would include specific evaluations of the transfers of NCSC and NCTC, both of which have been periodically discussed.
Transfer mission execution functions that do not require ODNI ownership to the agencies best positioned to perform them.
Reestablish National Intelligence Managers as true enterprise leaders responsible for integrating priorities, collection, analysis, partnerships, workforce planning, and resources.
Rebuild the ODNI as a modern Community Management Staff focused on enterprise integration, technology governance, workforce planning, and resource alignment
Why
ODNI's greatest value is ensuring that the Intelligence Community performs its missions effectively. The DNI should be a leadership and service organization rather than another operational intelligence entity. The Intelligence Community needs a strong enterprise manager capable of aligning priorities, resolving disputes, integrating capabilities, and driving accountability across agencies.
The Intelligence Community's most significant challenges, including artificial intelligence, commercial data integration, workforce modernization, and emerging technology governance, require enterprise leadership. ODNI should lead these efforts.
Recommendation 2: Integrate the Civilian and Defense Intelligence Enterprises and Modernize Intelligence Investment Governance
The next DNI and Secretary of Defense should establish a shared leadership model for integrating the Intelligence Community's civilian and defense intelligence enterprises. As part of this effort, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USDI&S) should serve as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, creating a direct leadership link between the Office of the DNI and the Defense Intelligence Enterprise.
Together, the DNI and Deputy DNI should establish and co-chair an Intelligence Investment Board responsible for enterprise-level investment decisions in areas where national and military intelligence requirements increasingly overlap, including:
- Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics;
- Commercial data and data acquisition;
- Space-based intelligence capabilities;
- Cloud infrastructure and computing environments;
- Enterprise architectures and interoperability standards;
- Open-source intelligence data procurement;
- Collection modernization, including human intelligence
The Board should review major intelligence investments through an enterprise lens, identify opportunities to eliminate duplication, establish common standards, and ensure that capabilities serving both national and military missions are developed and funded as integrated priorities.
Over time, Congress should direct a formal review of the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and Military Intelligence Program (MIP) construct with the goal of transitioning from separate budget categories toward a capability-based investment framework that better reflects how intelligence is collected, analyzed, and delivered in the modern operating environment.
Why
The Intelligence Community has made significant progress integrating its civilian intelligence agencies over the past two decades. Less attention, however, has been paid to fully integrating the broader Defense Intelligence Enterprise, including DIA, the military services, Combatant Commands, and Joint Staff intelligence organizations. Collectively, these organizations represent the majority of the Intelligence Community's personnel, collection infrastructure, and operational intelligence capabilities.
The current structure creates an inherent challenge. The DNI is responsible for leading the Intelligence Community, while the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security is responsible for oversight, guidance, and policy across the Defense Intelligence Enterprise. Yet, many of the capabilities that will define future intelligence advantage increasingly serve both national and military missions.
Artificial intelligence, commercial data, space-based collection, cloud infrastructure, and advanced analytic platforms do not neatly align with traditional organizational boundaries. They support policymakers, military commanders, intelligence analysts, and operational forces alike. Maintaining separate governance and investment decisions for capabilities that serve both national and military missions risks duplication, slows modernization, and increases costs.
We recognize that proposals to further integrate intelligence governance between ODNI and the Department of Defense may raise concerns about authorities, resources, and departmental equities. This recommendation is not intended to diminish the Department's role in intelligence or transfer operational control away from Defense organizations. Rather, it reflects the reality that much of the nation's intelligence capability already resides within the Defense Intelligence Enterprise and that effective enterprise leadership requires a governance structure that fully incorporates those resources.
Nor is this recommendation fundamentally about transferring budget authority between organizations. Many of the capabilities discussed in this paper already support missions identified as national intelligence responsibilities under Executive Order 12333 while simultaneously enabling military operations. The challenge is not determining who owns the mission. The challenge is ensuring that enterprise investments are prioritized, governed, and integrated in ways that serve both national and military decision-makers.
To support this integration effort, the Intelligence Community should adopt several enterprise principles.
The DNI and Deputy DNI should jointly establish intelligence priorities and investment guidance. As part of this effort, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework should be modernized into an Intelligence Priorities Framework that reflects the reality that many of today's intelligence challenges span both national and departmental missions. Priorities should be organized around mission outcomes and decision advantage rather than institutional ownership.
The Intelligence Community should pursue acquisition reform focused on enterprise outcomes. Today, agencies often procure similar data, software, cloud services, and analytic capabilities through separate contracts, acquisition strategies, and governance processes. The result is unnecessary duplication, higher costs, slower technology adoption, and inconsistent access across the enterprise. The Intelligence Investment Board should promote joint procurement strategies, establish common requirements where practical, and leverage the collective buying power of the national and defense intelligence enterprises. The goal is a more coordinated approach to acquiring capabilities that support shared missions.
The Intelligence Community should treat commercial capabilities as foundational intelligence infrastructure rather than niche enhancements. Commercial space systems, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and open-source intelligence capabilities are no longer supplementary tools. They increasingly form a core infrastructure upon which intelligence advantage depends.
Finally, the Intelligence Community should deepen its engagement with industry, academia, and the broader innovation ecosystem through formal executive and technical exchange programs. Despite decades of outreach initiatives, advisory boards, and pilot programs, the government continues to struggle with integrating commercial innovation at the speed of relevance. Time-limited assignments for leaders from industry, academia, and venture-backed technology firms, coupled with opportunities for intelligence professionals to gain experience in the commercial sector, would help close this gap. These exchanges should operate under rigorous ethics and conflict-of-interest safeguards and be tied to specific objectives such as technology adoption, acquisition reform, commercial integration, and workforce modernization.
For the first time in Intelligence Community history, much of the innovation that will determine future intelligence advantage is being driven outside government. The Intelligence Community's governance, investment, acquisition, and talent management models must evolve accordingly.
Recommendation 3: Establish Strategic Competition as a Core Community Management Function
The next DNI should designate strategic competition as a core Community Management responsibility and direct the Deputy DNI to establish a formal enterprise process for identifying, prioritizing, and resolving the intelligence, counterintelligence, information-sharing, technology, and operational seams that America's adversaries routinely exploit.
This recommendation does not require the creation of a new mission center, operational office, or permanent bureaucracy. Rather, it should be accomplished through a realignment of existing ODNI Community Management responsibilities, leveraging the National Intelligence Managers, Mission Integration organizations, and existing interagency coordination mechanisms.
The Deputy DNI should be responsible for leading this effort in close partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflecting the reality that strategic competition increasingly occurs at the intersection of foreign intelligence, domestic security, counterintelligence, and military operations.
The objective should be straightforward: identify where institutional barriers are preventing the United States from effectively developing strategic competition options and assign responsibility for resolving those barriers.
The Deputy DNI should provide regular updates to the DNI, Director of the FBI, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor, and congressional oversight committees identifying:
- The most significant intelligence integration challenges affecting strategic competition.
- Progress in resolving identified institutional barriers.
- Recommendations requiring policy, resource, legislative, or executive action.
- Remaining risks to national security resulting from unresolved seams.
The effort should establish annual priorities focused on key strategic competitors, beginning with China, Russia, and Iran, and develop measurable objectives tied to enterprise integration and operational outcomes.
Measures of effectiveness should include reductions in information-sharing delays, improvements in technology protection, increased intelligence support to operational missions, improved integration across agencies, and demonstrable disruption of adversary activities.
Why
America's strategic competitors already operate as integrated national security enterprises. They do not distinguish between intelligence collection, technology acquisition, economic competition, cyber operations, influence campaigns, espionage, military modernization, and industrial policy. They employ all instruments of national power in a coordinated manner to advance national objectives.
The United States, by contrast, often organizes its responses through institutional, legal, budgetary, and bureaucratic boundaries that were designed for a different era. As a result, adversaries frequently exploit the seams between foreign intelligence and domestic security, intelligence and law enforcement, technology protection and economic policy, cyber defense and traditional intelligence operations, and national and military intelligence activities.
Intelligence support to strategic competition increasingly requires enterprise leadership capable of integrating activities across the Intelligence Community and identifying barriers that no single organization has the authority or perspective to address independently. This responsibility naturally belongs within ODNI's Community Management function. Strategic competition is fundamentally an enterprise integration challenge. It requires leadership capable of aligning priorities, resolving disputes, integrating capabilities, and ensuring that intelligence activities contribute to broader national objectives.
Also, the DNI, working closely with the FBI and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is uniquely positioned to bridge the foreign-domestic and intelligence-operations divides that adversaries increasingly exploit.
Ultimately, the Intelligence Community must evolve from simply informing policymakers about adversary campaigns to providing options for the US to compete effectively against adversaries. Strategic competition is the defining national security challenge of the twenty-first century and should be treated as a core Community Management responsibility.
The Ultimate Test of ODNI: Measuring Enterprise Success
As the enterprise leader of the Intelligence Community, this new DNI should demonstrate not only value to Congress and the Executive Branch, but also measurable value back to the agencies, departments, and professionals that comprise the Community. The ultimate test of ODNI's effectiveness is not how many directives it issues, how many meetings it convenes, or how many organizations it oversees. It is whether the Intelligence Community operates more effectively because ODNI exists. The ability to demonstrate measurable outcomes across the enterprise may ultimately be the strongest answer to the recurring question that has followed ODNI since its creation: Does the nation need a DNI? We believe that answer is yes, but that value should be visible, measurable, and attributable.
Specifically, the DNI should be able to demonstrate measurable progress in the following areas to share with OMB, Oversight and the Public:
• Enterprise Priority Alignment
Can the Intelligence Community rapidly align collection, analysis, and resources against emerging national security priorities without creating new organizations or duplicative structures?
(Example: Intelligence Community resources were redirected within weeks to support a Taiwan crisis, major cyber incident, or emerging Arctic challenge without establishing a new task force or mission center.)
• Resource Integration
Has the Intelligence Community reduced duplicative investments and improved enterprise decision-making across the National Intelligence Program and Military Intelligence Program?
(Example: Enterprise licensing and coordinated procurement reduced duplicative commercial data purchases by $15 million annually while expanding access to multiple agencies.)
• Technology Adoption
Has the time required to identify, procure, accredit, and operationalize new technologies been reduced?
(Example: The average timeline for deployment of AI-enabled analytic tools decreased from 24 months to less than 12 months.)
• Commercial Integration
Can commercial capabilities, data, and services be incorporated into intelligence missions at the speed of relevance while maintaining security, interoperability, and mission assurance?
(Example: Commercial GEOINT, RF, maritime, and financial data became available through enterprise contracts rather than separate agency purchases.)
• AI Enablement
Has the Intelligence Community successfully integrated artificial intelligence into collection, processing, exploitation, analysis, and dissemination workflows while preserving human oversight and accountability?
(Example: AI-assisted workflows reduced imagery exploitation timelines by 50 percent while maintaining analytic quality standards.)
• Strategic Competition
Can the Intelligence Community identify, expose, disrupt, and provide options to impose costs on adversary campaigns that span intelligence, cyber, economic, military, and informational domains?
(Example: Intelligence support enabled the disruption of a foreign technology acquisition network or exposed a coordinated foreign influence campaign.)
• Warning and Decision Advantage
Are policymakers, military leaders, and operators receiving integrated intelligence faster and in forms that improve decision-making?
(Example: Strategic warning identified adversary military preparations or cyber activity days earlier than historical performance benchmarks.)
Conclusion
Twenty years after the creation of ODNI, the Intelligence Community faces a fundamentally different operating environment than the one that existed following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Strategic competition, artificial intelligence, commercial innovation, and increasingly integrated threats are challenging many of the assumptions that shaped intelligence governance over the past two decades.
The recommendations outlined in this paper are not intended to redesign the Intelligence Community. Rather, they focus on three areas where reform could produce disproportionate enterprise impact: returning ODNI to its Community Management roots, modernizing how intelligence investments are governed across the national and defense intelligence enterprises, and establishing strategic competition as a core Community Management responsibility.
Taken together, these reforms would strengthen the Intelligence Community's ability to compete more effectively against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Most importantly, the reforms can largely be accomplished through leadership, governance, and organizational discipline rather than the creation of new bureaucracies or increased resources.
The Intelligence Community does not suffer from a lack of talent, authorities, or capability. Its greatest challenge is ensuring that its capabilities are organized and integrated for the environment it faces today rather than the one it inherited twenty years ago. The next DNI has an opportunity to help lead that transition.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
