At one time the NIC and its predecessor, the National Board of Estimates, produced the best the Intelligence Community (IC) had to offer policy makers on matters of strategic intelligence. The products, national intelligence estimates (NIEs), were often not well received, especially during the Vietnam era, because they clashed with administration policy choices or simply did not focus on the issues most important to policy makers at the time. They did, however, provide policy makers with a more comprehensive perspective rather than the more parochial, narrow views of the separate agencies. Since the mid-1980s, however, critics have stressed that the NIEs were merely summaries of current reporting that provide them with no new insights. I can’t disagree.
That was not always the case. Ages ago when I was a young analyst on the Chinese military in the Office of Strategic Research (OSR), the late Jim Lilley, then the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for China asked me to draft a China military NIE. I had the research produced by DIA and CIA to pick from plus the work of a 5 Eyes project with the moniker of HATTRICK that began with cooperation between the US, Great Britain, and Canada later joined by Australia and New Zealand, to improve the Chinese ground force order-of-battle. Any areas of disagreement or gaps in our knowledge exposed in the NIE prompted OSR to include these issues in the next year's research plan.
Fast forward to the mid-1980s when I found myself the NIO for East Asia in the NIC. I soon discovered that prying NIE drafters out of the CIA or DIA became an exercise more difficult and painful than a tooth extraction. Even when I succeeded in obtaining volunteers, the drafts they produced were merely summaries of that year’s current reporting containing zero material derived from research. Only when I assigned the drafting to one of the few NIC analysts did I get a more indepth draft for community coordination.
The annual Warning of War in Korea is a classic example. Given the large number of forces on both sides prepared to prevail in any future conflict, many being American forces, you would think that considerable detail work would be done each year to refine our understanding of the strategic situation on the peninsula. Not so. What bothered me most about the first year’s draft was the judgment that we would have 48 hours warning of an attack. I found it puzzling that we had such a precise judgment without having a detailed list of tip offs that an attack was imminent other than some sketchy mentions of unit movements that we might detect. When I questioned how we had arrived at the 48 hour figure, the response I received was that the Commander in Korea had done a study.
When it rolled around to the time to do my second Warning of War, I pressed to see the Commander's (CINC’s) study that justified we would have 48 hours warning of an attack. Lo and behold the real answer was that at sometime in the past one of the CINCs in Korea had indicated that it was imperative that he have 48 hours of preparation to defend against an attack by the north. Accordingly, the IC had adopted the figure demanded by the CINC without following up with a more definitive answer to the question based on detailed research. I ensured that the new estimate indicated the time the CINC needed for a successful defense, but made it clear that we were just in the beginning stages of building a list of key indicators we would expect to see before an attack and when we would likely detect such activities.
If the NIC was producing mostly summaries of current reporting posing as NIEs in the 1980s you can imagine the state of affairs at the NIC today. Once the DNI gave the NIC responsibility for preparing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) guess what takes up most of a NIO’s time? My bet is that current intelligence reporting receives the NIOs’ top priority and the NIC has become just another current intelligence office. The DNI allowing State INR and DIA to participate along with CIA analysts in the drafting of PDB items is a positive development, but overall the NIC’s new focus makes it just another current reports office and a further indication that the IC does not consider creating new knowledge through strategic analysis worth the bother.
It is so odd. The ODNI organization chart as provided on its website no longer includes the National Intelligence Council. It has something called the National Intelligence Center and an inside source says this is just a typo. But it hasn't been corrected in three weeks. And advertisements for deputy NIOs, see the one for principal deputy military NIO, makes no mention of the NIC. So, it looks to me they are trying to sink the NIC into the woodwork, keeping its high paid positions for internal ODNI people and preventing any outside expertise to creep in. I haven't seen any open advertisements for NIOs in ages. Still no chair or vice chair. Do they have something to hide from the public? This is, as Carl says, is an important unit that is named in the National Security Law of 1947, as amended.
It is even worse than Carl suggests. The NIC Chair has been downgraded and has been vacant for two years and its scope of work has gone over to current events in which it has no expertise, such as climate change and its fancy every five-year list of every threat imaginable. It all seems to have come apart after it blew the quick-fire Russia gate investigation by including and then leaking the already debunked Steel "dossier", as an appendix, in the ICA briefed to incoming President Trump. Who wins from such a devolution? CIA most likely, or maybe the oddly managed "NIM-C". (Full disclosure--I was honored to be selected in 2019 to be NIO for Economics but after a 14-month wait was rudely cancelled due to "mission change". The bureaucrats won; they didn't want expertise on China, just pipelines. Security clearance, they said, was not the issue. Go figure.)