The executive summary of the CIA Inspector General’s report on the agency’s pre-9/11 performance contained some nuggets overlooked by most news coverage and partisan bickering. Reading a recent Stratfor analysis (subscription required) made me appreciate how important these nuggets were.

On the third page of the summary sits this bombshell:

The JI concluded that, before 9/11, neither the US Government nor the IC had a comprehensive strategy for combating al-Qa’ida. It charged that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of IC resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States. The OIG Team also found that the IC did not have a documented, comprehensive approach to al-Qa’ida and that the DCI did not use all of his authorities in leading the IC’s strategic effort against UBL.

Considering that the fundamental purpose of leadership and directors is to deal with strategic issues, this criticism cuts to the heart of the DCI’s responsibilities. The implicit assumption of claims that subjects are above one’s pay grade is that someone else is addressing the issue. The OIG Team found that in this case, no one was.

While the DCI and DDCI issued warnings and signed memorandums describing the threat posed by UBL and al-Qa’ida, this were not translated into any coherent plan.

The Team found that neither the DCI nor the DDCI followed up these warning and admonitions by created a documented, comprehensive plan to guide the counterterrorism effort at the Intelligence Community level. The DDCI chaired at least one meeting in response to the DCI directive, but the forum soon devolved into one of tactical and operational, rather than strategic, discussions… While CIA and other agencies had individual plans and important initiatives underway, senior officers in the Agency and Community told the Team that no comprehensive strategic plan for the IC to counter UBL was created in response to the DCI’s memoradum, or at any time prior to 9/11.

Memorandums, meetings and forums all fit within the already established bureaucratic processes. They leave copious records for investigations like this to study and provide plenty of fuel for the obscuring smoke screens that spin experts use to escape fundamental issues. All of this, however, doesn’t get us a strategy. Bureaucratic processes need to reflect strategy, but they do not generate strategy.

The DCI may have built a process, but he did not build a strategy for understanding al-Qa’ida, identifying its weaknesses and systematically attacking those weaknesses. Or, to quote directly from the summary,

…the Team concludes that the former DCI, by virtue of his positino, bears the ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created, despite his specific direction that this should be done.

Note the passive voice: a strategic plan should be created. Surely part of the reason why one never was created is due to the fact that no one seemed to believe that it was his or her personal responsibility to create such a strategic plan.

All of this dysfunction reflects the underlying structural problem that faces the intelligence community and the larger national security apparatus of the United States. Bureaucracies do not make strategy, yet for the past fifteen years we have been trusting our strategic re-alignment to a bureaucratic process built around a strategy whose time has passed.