Pentagon’s Strategic Support Branch is News to Congress

The militarization of American foreign policy has gone farther than anyone thought. That is the underlying message behind the revelation by the Washington Post that the Pentagon’s Strategic Support Branch has been operating since 2002. Field Marshal Donald von Rumsfeld, Secretary of War, appears to have set this up to break the reliance the Department of Defense had on the CIA for human intelligence. He should have told Congress, but the first the elected representatives of the American people heard of it was in the press two years after the fact.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said the report “is accurate and [it] should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its long-standing human intelligence capability.” He did state that the DoD was operating within the law in doing so. He also said, "The demands of the global war on terror necessitate a framework by which military forces and traditional human intelligence work more closely together and in greater numbers than they have in the past.”

A new kind of war does require a new kind of military structure and operation. And it is quite possible, though one would be surprised, that the SSB does operate within the existing law. However, it is a matter of some concern that Congress was taken by surprise with the announcement. Congress is supposed to know everything, and in the case of extremely sensitive information, a few members (chairmen of military and diplomatic committees) take the responsibility of congressional oversight onto their own shoulders.

Of course, the closer ties between the operational units and the intelligence gathering units could have been resolved differently – the CIA could have added operations control, and the SSB would be its entity. The Field Marshal wouldn’t hear of that -- his screeching and screaming when reform of intelligence in the US threatened his control of 85% of the intelligence budget are still echoing down K Street. Though, as anyone with any sense of history knows, CIA operations are usually bad ideas from the beginning (e.g.,Bay of Pigs).

But the SSB violates the first rule of intelligence operations – those who gather it shouldn’t have to consider the desires of those who are going to use it. Raw intelligence must, of course, be analyzed, but not by the people who are making political and military decisions. The intelligence community of the US was consistent in saying Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the military and political leadership argued otherwise. And now, 1541 coalition troops are dead and many times that have been wounded in a war fought on false pretenses.

If the Pentagon chickenhawks are going to insist on doing this their way, at very least, they need to tell Congress. Their failure to do so violates civilian control of the military. Which makes one wonder which side they have chosen in the fight for freedom.



© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

Home