Former CIA veteran Richard Coffman looks at Intelligence reform and the "Directorate of National Intelligence" one year out.
A couple of caveats. For one thing, Coffman is ex-CIA, and unlikely to take it well that some of his agency's perogatives were handed to the DNI via the 9/11 Comission's recommendations. For another, a year is a pretty short time to assess something like this. Having said all that, he makes some good points. I never did understand how adding another layer of bureaucracy was supposed to be a solution; if I had to bet, I'd bet that DNI will eventually be seen as a mistake.
Read Coffman's piece and see what you think. Better still, read it after reading DNI's National Intelligence Strategy (I was not kind, but read the PDF original for yourself), and taking a quick look at some of the changes that Ronald Sanders, chief human capital officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has been talking about. Then see what you think.
Of course it will be seen as a mistake. Bush has made a lot of strange decisions for a conservative. His confidence in big government is... well just strange for a conservative. All the budget stuff etc I can unhapilly live with, but there are 3 things Bush has introduced in his terms that will live longer than all of us: the medicare drug plan, the department of homeland security, and the DNI.
The first one I guess you can chalk up to gross political calculation. The second two just make you shake your head. They literally tried to fix bureaucratic nightmares of incompetance by adding more bureaucracy. That is equivalent to trying to save the Titanic by adding more ballast. They would have been better off firing 500 people than hiring 500 more.
Oddly Tom Clancy might be on to something with his Ops Center books. We need small and nimble, not big and lumbering.
Except "small and nimble" generally implies "drastically reduced oversight", which is anathema to bureaucracies of any flavor. (Not to mention the thorny question of "how much oversight do we really want to nix in these matters?")