'We need Civilian Security Force' - John Brennan's reforms would turn the CIA into a paramilitary organization.

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 'We need Civilian Security Force' - John Brennan's reforms would turn the CIA into a paramilitary organization. (TheWeek).

While "cyber" and "innovation" are certainly newsier buzzwords than "restructuring," Brennan's planned changes to the CIA's internal architecture are generating controversy and conversation, and rightly so. 

Brennan's reform would extend the model of the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a division already inside the CIA to the entire agency. This means analysts and operations officers will no longer work separately, but side by side in regional and thematic units. This is a major shift which overcomes a decades-old division of labor.

The CTC model is not without its advantages. Analysts with deep knowledge of their enemies would be able to target operations more efficiently, and they could more easily assess the reliability of incoming information. Intelligence would circulate more freely among those working on the same topic and officers would be able to apply their talents and expertise to a wider range of tasks.

If Brennan's suggested reform comes to pass, any pretense of disinterested objectivity in the CIA would disappear. The CIA would become a largely paramilitary agency with no separation between analysts and operators, the opposite of what Kent had envisioned.

The likely consequence would be a multiplication of the biased assessments like the ones on the drone and interrogation programs. In the long run, the CIA would lose its reputation for objectivity, its ready access to senior policy-makers and its centrality in the policy process. Read the full story here.