John O. Brennan: disagreement

Transcript context

…As you know, Bob Gates has argued that the director of National Intelligence position has some problems. It creates a new bureaucracy. If you were to look at the flow chart of the post-9/11 US intelligence community, it seems to be a highly complex nightmare. Is that just the way things have to work? Should it actually be that way? Do we need to simplify? Are there too many positions? Are there too many chefs in the kitchen? What’s your view? Well, the intelligence community of 2020 is the legacy of many, many years, decades of intelligence agencies that have grown up and have evolved and have adapted to the new realities. Unfortunately, over time, there has not been as much of an effort to try to better integrate those agencies and authorities and capabilities, as well as to ensure that they are complementary as opposed to unnecessarily redundant. I disagree with Bob Gates. I do believe that the office of director of National Intelligence needs to be looked at afresh after 16 years in existence. Some modifications need to be made, but as CIA director, the last thing I wanted was to have to be CIA director and the director of the intelligence community writ large — 17 agencies. There’s more than enough to keep the director of CIA busy. However, I do think that that orchestration function of the director of National Intelligence can be refined and modified to try to push the intelligence community in a direction that sheds some of those unfortunate legacy practices that are a drag on the system and to better integrate capabilities to make the US intelligence community much more effective. Is 17 intelligence agencies too many or too few?…

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