The year 1975 marked a low point for both America's influence on the international scene and the institutional position of the Army The growing power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), first manifested at the time of the Yom Kippur War, seemed to threaten the economies of the Western industrialized world in an unprecedented way. The Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment had damaged the confidence of the nation in its government and had effectively undercut the foreign policy strategies with which President Nixon had been identified. Southeast Asia fell to Communist armies in 1975, and Soviet-backed regimes came to power in Angola and Mozambique. The Army, underfunded and unpopular, was hard pressed to fill its ranks with quality personnel without the stimulus of the draft. It was under these unpromising circumstances that the Army drew up a new charter for intelligence, which emerged as a result of the Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study (IOSS).
The disillusionment resulting from the nation's long involvement in Southeast Asia was slow to dissipate. Nevertheless, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and continued instability in Central America gradually fostered a renewed interest in American security. Although the nation attempted to put the Vietnam experience behind it, there was no return to isolationism. From 1979 on, the country began to accelerate the buildup its defenses. By the mid-1980s the Army's morale and strength had been restored, a new generation of weapons for ground combat fielded, and the force structure increased. During this period the IOSS reforms, conceived in an environment of tight resources, continued to provide a viable architecture for Army Intelligence in a plentiful time for the Army and for intelligence operations in general.
Remaking Military Intelligence
The Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study originated in a 1974 memorandum from Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway to Army Chief of
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Staff General Frederick Weyand. "We maintain considerable information which is of questionable value and seldom used," Callaway noted, and that "really makes me wonder about how much money we are wasting and raises serious questions as to the costeffectiveness of our intelligence system."1
In addition, broader considerations made an overall assessment of Army intelligence appropriate. Army Intelligence resources for the 1974-1978 time frame had already been reduced significantly by a program-budget decision of the secretary of defense in 1973. The Army inspector general had recently found grave deficiencies in the operations of the Army Security Agency. The dismantling of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command, which had just occurred, meant that the Army counterintelligence and human intelligence organization was in the process of evolution. At the tactical level, the STEADFAST reorganization had abolished the field army command, leaving without a mission the MI tactical units designed to support it. Finally, the Army in general realized that an overall appraisal of the intelligence structure was long overdue. Too many intelligence elements within the Army had been allowed to evolve apart from the development of the Army as a whole. It now seemed time to align Army Intelligence with the rest of the Army. The chief of staff entrusted the initial steps to a panel headed by Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Ursano.
After an exhaustive study of the structure and organization of Army Intelligence, the panel submitted its findings and recommendations in August 1975. The IOSS report was critical. It pointed out that the organization of the ACSI staff did not facilitate effective supervision of the Army's most crucial intelligence resources. The Directorate of Foreign Intelligence, ACSI's major contact point with the rest of the Army Staff and the other functional major Army commands (MACOMs), had only half the resources allotted to the staff elements supervising intelligence collection. Priorities within collection itself were even more skewed. Staff supervision of human intelligence took up a disproportionate amount of effort. The vital signals intelligence function was isolated and neglected.
The panel found intelligence production fragmented. Various aspects of production were being carried on by several ACSI elements as well as the Forces Command; other production elements operated under the Army Materiel Command and the Office of the Surgeon General. The disparate system fully satisfied only a portion of the Army's intelligence needs. Only a unified production center would, in the panel's judgment, alleviate the situation. Specific collection efforts also came under criticism.
The Ursano panel estimated that in the security field some 80 percent of the Army effort went into operations designed to counter the threat from foreign human intelligence organizations, and the remaining 20 percent was devoted to signal security. These were old and familiar functions, carried out respectively
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by the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency and the Army Security Agency. But there was no effort directed against hostile imagery intelligence and no organization handling the total security picture and providing support to operations security (OPSEC). The panel concluded that as a result the allocation of security resources was wildly disproportionate to the existing threat.
The panel reserved some of its most stinging criticism for the Army Security Agency. The establishment of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service organization, it found, had essentially reduced ASA headquarters to just another bureaucratic layer. Lacking any operational responsibilities or a core of technical cryptologic experts, it was saddled with an immense span of control because of the closing of the various ASA theater headquarters. The Ursano board noted that field commanders could readily assume ASA's remaining support functions. Moreover, despite its best efforts, the agency was not meeting the Army's tactical requirements, since it could not field enough units to support the planned sixteen-division Active Army
A succession of previous Army reviews-in all, eleven had been made since World War II-had upheld the validity of the Army Security Agency's traditional vertical command structure. The Ursano panel dissented vigorously. In the panel's opinion, the ASA pattern of organization had actually impeded the development of an efficient mechanism for carrying out intelligence and electronic warfare. The monopoly of signals intelligence and electronic warfare by an organization operating under compartmented secrecy had artificially kept signals intelligence out of the general intelligence flow and had largely excluded the rest of the Army from involvement in the vital electronic warfare field. At the same time, ASA's preoccupation with the cryptologic aspects of its mission had prevented it from keeping up with new trends in electronic warfare, despite the emphasis which the Army now had given to the latter function.
In the field, the IOSS report charged, the Army Security Agency's organizational and functional independence worked against the effective integration of all-source intelligence that was now necessary. It also imposed substantial administrative costs, since unit G-2s at tactical operations centers had to coordinate the intelligence flow produced by three separate elements: ASA, regular Military Intelligence units, and the special security officer dissemination system. Each of these elements had its own separate communications system and its own separate support system.
The Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study: Solutions
The Ursano panel recommended radical surgery to correct the perceived deficiencies of the Army Intelligence structure. Its complex prescription called for both centralization and decentralization. The heart of the suggested program, however, was dismantling the Army Security Agency. ASA's tactical units
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should be resubordinated to field commanders and its training and research and development functions assigned to other major commands in conformity with the pattern which the McNamara reforms and the STEADFAST reorganization of 1973 established for the rest of the Army The IOSS report offered three alternatives for realigning Army strategic and theater support intelligence assets. Under the proposal finally adopted, the Army Security Agency's headquarters and fixed field stations would become the core of a new major command. By adding the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, those Military Intelligence groups engaged in a theater support role, and the various intelligence production elements to this base, the Army would create, for the first time, an integrated intelligence, security, and electronic warfare organization capable of fulfilling its national requirements.
At the tactical level, the proposals called for organizational decentralization and functional integration. With the dissolution of ASA's vertical command structure, ASA and MI field units could merge into a single system of unified intelligence and electronic warfare forces. In the committee's view, tactical Special Security Offices could become part of the units they supported. Army tactical commanders at the corps level and below would thus for the first time have substantially the same control over their intelligence assets as they did over the rest of the forces assigned to them. Signals intelligence would be merged into the all-source intelligence needed to meet tactical requirements.2
The recommendations raised a number of questions, one of which involved the issue of acceptability. The commanding general of the Army Security Agency, Maj. Gen. George Godding, rather predictably did not concur, not only because of the impending dismemberment and transformation of his organization, but also because of the proposed reorganization's possible effect on cryptology On the whole, however, the Army's response was very positive. The new arrangements seemed to be designed to give the commander in the field what he wanted. The response from USAREUR, for instance, not only expressed support for the concept, but also demonstrated Army reservations about some of the features previously associated with intelligence work: "MI is fighting its way back to acceptance by the Army community Stovepiping and restoring the `spook' image must be avoided." 3 Under the IOSS concept, Army Intelligence would march in step with the rest of the Army, a prospect that pleased many
One question which the Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study left unresolved was that of command. The ACSI suggested that control of the proposed new intelligence and security command be vested in himself. This arrangement would have given Army Intelligence an institutional structure strongly resembling that of World War II, when the G-2 had controlled the
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Military Intelligence Service and after 1944 the strategic operations of the Army Signal Security Agency.
This proposal was rejected, however, and the new major command was allotted a commander of its own. The ACSI suggestion ran against the doctrine that staff and line functions should be separated, and it posed another problem. After the adverse publicity of the early 1970s, intelligence was still a sensitive field. At the time Army leadership believed that any merger of policy formulation and program management functions with operational capabilities would "deny the CSA [chief of staff of the Army] a check and balance mechanism believed necessary in today's environment of sensitivity to intelligence activities. "4
Implementation of the IOSS proposals began in 1976. The Army realigned elements within OACSI, initiated staff planning for a new intelligence and security command, and fielded the first experimental intelligence and electronic warfare battalion. The U.S. Army Security Agency Training Center and School at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, was resubordinated to the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Huachuca, along with its two detachments at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, and the Navy facility at Corry Station, Florida. This shift achieved the long-standing Army goal of centralizing all Military Intelligence training and further enhanced the importance of the Army Intelligence Center and School itself. The latter organization already had achieved the status of a general officer command after absorbing the Combat Developments Command Intelligence Agency and the Combat Surveillance and Electronic Warfare School. In 1983 the rank of the Army Intelligence Center and School commander was elevated to two stars after the commander received proponency over the Military Intelligence Branch and assumed the title of chief of Military Intelligence.5
In addition, the Special Security Group was radically reorganized, losing its operational role in communications and its tactical elements. By the end of 1976 tactical special security offices came under the control of ASA direct support units. Ironically, the Army Security Agency achieved the control over this organization, which it had sought for twenty years, just before its own demise. Concurrently, the Army restructured what remained of the Special Security Group along functional rather than regional lines through seven special security commands, each of which controlled subordinate offices servicing different major commands.6 The culmination of the IOSS reorganization came on 1
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January 1977, with the formation of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia.
New Directions for Military Intelligence: INSCOM
The Army formed the new major command, INSCOM, by redesignating the U.S. Army Security Agency as the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command and reassigning the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, as well as ACSI's and FORSCOM'S intelligence production units, to the new command.7 At the same time, control of ASA's tactical units reverted to the supported commanders. The training, personnel, research and development, and materiel acquisition and administration functions which the Army Security Agency had carried out were assumed by other major commands and by elements of the Army Staff. INSCOM also assumed command of three Military Intelligence Groups located overseas: the 66th in Germany, the 470th in Panama, and the 500th in Japan. Previously, these units had been assigned respectively to USAREUR and Seventh Army FORSCOM, and the U. S. Army Intelligence Agency. Despite the similarity of their designations, these groups varied widely in size and mission; moreover, theater commanders continued to exercise operational control over the units. On 1 October 1977, the former U.S. Army Intelligence Agency headquarters became part of INSCOM, and the command established a unified intelligence production element, the Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center, on 1 January 1978.
INSCOM provided the Army with a single instrument to conduct multidiscipline intelligence and security operations and electronic warfare at the level above corps and to produce finished intelligence tailored to the Army's needs. The new major command merged divergent intelligence disciplines and traditions in a novel way. Its creation marked the most radical realignment of Army Intelligence assets in a generation. Without fully realizing it, the Army had achieved not a ,'multidiscipline" organization, but an interdisciplinary approach to intelligence collection. The new command provided Army Intelligence with a framework within which the individual intelligence disciplines could cross-cue one another; the results of this collective effort would be greater than the sum of its parts.
Traditionally, the Army Security Agency had been the centerpiece of the Army Intelligence community in terms of personnel and resources. When the agency melded into INSCOM under the new realignment, it lost its vertical command structure, many of its functions, and thirty of its tactical units. As a result, Brig. Gen. (later Maj. Gen.) William I. Rolya, the former ASA commanding general who became INSCOM's first head, found himself heading an organization considerably smaller than its predecessor, although it had gained the U. S. Army Intelligence Agency, the theater Military Intelligence groups, and produc
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tion elements. However, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command had at its disposal a wide array of diverse assets. Initially, these included eight fixed field stations inherited from ASA-three of them in the Far East, two in the continental United States, two in Germany, and one in Turkey. There were also the three intelligence groups overseas, transformed into multidisciplinary units by incorporating former ASA assets into the previously existing elements. A fourth, the 501st Military Intelligence Group, was soon organized in Korea. Because of Eighth Army's special requirements, the unit not only carried out a theater support mission, but also performed functions executed elsewhere by the Army's corps-level intelligence organizations.
In the continental United States, INSCOM received command over various single-discipline elements: the Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center; the CONUS MI Group, which furnished cryptologic personnel to the National Security Agency and controlled the two field stations in the United States; an expanded 902d Military Intelligence Group, which was assigned a combined counterintelligence and signal security support mission throughout the continental United States; the Central Security Facility, which maintained the counterintelligence records in the Intelligence Records Repository; and a number of other specialized subordinate units. Significantly, one function which the Central Security Facility previously performed-the adjudication of Military Intelligence-related and other sensitive clearances within the Armyshifted in October 1977 to a new Central Clearance Facility administered by the Military Personnel Center. This was done partially to further standardize the clearance process throughout the Army, secondarily to remove the process from Army Intelligence control, on the grounds that the investigative function should not be combined with the judicial.
With the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command in place, ACSI found it expedient to surrender control of most of the remaining operating functions to the new organization. Ever since the 1950s, the ACSI's operating responsibilities had waxed and waned cyclically as various incumbents transferred control of field operating agencies back and forth between OACSI and Fort Holabird. Now came another turn of the wheel. In 1978 INSCOM took over the Army's Russian Institute in Germany and in 1980 assumed command of the Special Security Group. A year later, OACSI discontinued its Inspector General's Office, since substantially all of its field activities had gone to INSCOM, and there was little in the field to inspect.
The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command faced certain problems when it started out. At first it was hampered by a shortage of resources. By the end of fiscal year 1978 only 10,400 people were assigned to the new command, debilitating shortages in key Military Intelligence specialties existed, and the command found itself unable to completely meet all the national collection requirements with which it had been tasked. However, the readiness situation improved steadily, as a new national consensus regarding the importance of
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intelligence brought a greater infusion of resources. By 1985, 15,000 persons were assigned to INSCOM.8
The command's institutional and structural problems took longer to solve. INSCOM was designed to perform intelligence and security operations at the echelon above corps, but the precise structure of this echelon continued to be a matter of doctrinal dispute within the Army. The Army's traditional echelon above corps, the field army, had been discontinued in 1973 and replaced with a joint command system. INSCOM's broad responsibilities and the diverse nature of the units it commanded posed another problem. Proposals were made to simplify the command structure by creating additional subordinate headquarters overseas, as the Army Security Agency had done originally, but overseas headquarters elements proved expensive, and INSCOM finally abandoned this approach. Additionally, the command's exact role in electronic warfare remained undefined. Although INSCOM was the main proponent, its units were limited in this area.
The field of intelligence production also continued to present difficulties. The IOSS panel had originally recommended that all Army Intelligence production resources be brought together in a single location. However, Army leaders decided that the Army's scientific, technical, and medical intelligence production responsibilities would continue to be dispersed among three separate centers under the Army Materiel Command and the Office of the Surgeon General. It even proved impossible for INSCOM to collocate all elements of its own production center, the intelligence and Threat Analysis Center. Although most of the center's resources were at Arlington Hall Station, it proved physically impracticable to move some of its major production functions from either the Washington Navy Yard or Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
How to impose a satisfactory organization on all Army intelligence production elements was resolved temporarily in 1985 by a more or less Solomonic decision. The Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center was removed from INSCOM and resubordinated to a new Army Intelligence Agency, a field operating agency of ACSI with headquarters in Northern Virginia. At the same time, the new agency was given command of the Army Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the Foreign Science and Technology Center. The Surgeon General's Medical Intelligence and Information Agency had become a joint service organization. Army intelligence production still remained geographically dispersed, but the situation was improved when elements of the Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center moved to the Washington Navy Yard. The new arrangement again made ACSI a major player in the field of intelligence operations, for the Army Intelligence Agency, with a personnel strength of 1,500, was as large as the Army's intelligence production organization before the creation of DIA.
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Finally, INSCOM operations were impeded by physical limitations that split its headquarters elements between two Army posts forty miles apart. The physical facilities which INSCOM inherited from its predecessor organizations, ASA and USAINTA, simply were too limited. Attempts to find a suitable central headquarters location either at Fort Meade, Maryland, or at Vint Hill Farms, Virginia, repeatedly fell to political and fiscal constraints. However, the withdrawal of the large DIA presence from Arlington Hall in 1985 at last made it possible for planners to order that all headquarters elements be consolidated at that site during the following year. Nevertheless, a number of subordinate units at Fort Meade, including the Central Security Facility, remained behind, and Arlington Hall proved only a way station. In 1985 the Army finally decided that INSCOM's permanent headquarters would eventually be located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The command finally relocated in the summer of 1989.
Despite its initial growing pains, INSCOM provided a useful base on which the Army could build an expanded intelligence program once the long slide in defense spending was arrested. Human intelligence received fresh emphasis, as did the expansion of the command's cryptologic activities. In 1980 INSCOM established an Army presence at a joint service field station in Kunia, Hawaii. This was the first new Army field station set up outside the continental United States since the Vietnam War. Two years later, it organized another new field station in Panama from resources already in place. Later, the command fielded Army technical control and analysis elements to provide better cryptologic support to tactical Military Intelligence units.
A major new Military Intelligence unit based in the United States, the 513th Military Intelligence Group, was activated in 1982. The group would support possible operations of the Army component of Central Command (CENTCOM), the unified command created that year to deal with contingency situations in Southwest Asia. As initially configured, the group exercised command and control over three flexibly organized battalions: the 201st, 202d, and 203d Military Intelligence Battalions. Later, the 513th organized a TDA Military Intelligence battalion to deal with low-intensity conflict situations.
The group's 203d Military Intelligence Battalion at first was organized as a technical intelligence unit, indicating the Army's renewed interest in this sometimes neglected area. The battalion's main operating unit was the 11th Military Intelligence Company, the latest in a succession of company-size units that had stayed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, since the 1960s. In 1978 this company had acquired the important additional mission of supporting the Army's Opposing Forces (OPFOR) training program. However, conflict soon developed between the technical intelligence battalion's mission of deploying overseas with its parent group in a contingency situation and its tasking to support the OPFOR program in the United States. A subsequent reorganization
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reassigned the technical intelligence function to the Foreign Materiel Intelligence Group, a TDA unit directly subordinate to INSCOM headquarters, but the 513th regained the mission in 1989.9
By 1985 the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command was redefining its structure and practices along a variety of fronts. The resubordination of its production element to the Army Intelligence Agency allowed the command to focus most of its energies on its principal mission-managing the Army's strategic and theater-level collection resources. However, a reexamination of INSCOM's organization revealed that it was still carrying out functions of combat development and materiel development that in theory were supposed to have been transferred to TRADOC and the Army Materiel Command. Although INSCOM attempted to step out of these fields, the command's nucleus of resident experts made it difficult to abandon all its developmental efforts, since no other organization was prepared to address such requirements.
More definite resolutions were found in other areas, one of which was counterintelligence. As revelations of successful penetrations of America's most sensitive agencies by hostile intelligence services mounted, 1985 became the "Year of the Spy."10 The Intelligence and Security Command moved to reconfigure its limited counterintelligence assets into more productive arrangements to meet the Army's needs. In the process, the command moved away from a concept of providing general operational security support to all Army elements in favor of a narrower focus on priority objectives, such as expanding polygraph examinations and technical services countermeasures and providing counterintelligence support to the Army's growing number of Special Access Programs (SAPS)- highly sensitive projects that required exceptional security measures.
In turn, this concern led to a reorganization of the command's main counterintelligence unit in the United States, the 902d Military Intelligence Group. Originally organized on geographic lines into three TDA battalions, the group's subordinate elements were restructured on a functional, rather than geographic, basis in 1985. At the same time, the group was given greater responsibility for handling counterespionage operations in the continental United States.
Change continued in 1986. Beginning that year, INSCOM's five multidiscipline intelligence groups were redesignated as brigades. This transition was intended to be more than cosmetic; the units would now be organized for possible warfighting, rather than having structures geared to national collection requirements in time of peace. A basic brigade was designed to consist of a headquarters and headquarters company, a numbered echelon above corps
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intelligence center for intelligence production, a signals intelligence battalion, an imagery analysis battalion, a counterintelligence battalion, an interrogation and exploitation battalion, and a collection element. Because of the diversity of intelligence requirements in the several theaters, however, the actual units allotted to each INSCOM brigade would differ. In the event of mobilization, INSCOM leaders planned to call up reserve component units as needed to bring the brigades to full strength. Additionally, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School drew up new TOES that mandated the conversion of the command's flexible battalions into fixed elements.
Finally INSCOM took action to redesignate some of its TDA units as numbered Military Intelligence brigades, battalions, and companies in the 700 series. Units redesignated included the Continental United States Military Intelligence Group and a number of field stations. This would provide units with designations more intelligible to the rest of the Army, and it would enhance the pride and esprit of their assigned soldiers. As a result of this step, existing command assets combined into three new Military Intelligence Brigades (the 701st, 703d, and 704th) and a number of new battalions in 1987.
The Combat Electronic Warfare and Intelligence Concept
The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command was only part of the new organizational design which the Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study imposed upon Army Intelligence. The IOSS also had brought about a major realignment of the Army's tactical intelligence assets in the field. These reforms drastically reshuffled the old command channels in the tactical arena. With the dissolution of the Army Security Agency's vertical command structure, all former ASA tactical elements were now under the command of the units they supported. At the same time, the Army formed new integrated combat electronic warfare and intelligence (CEWI) units to carry out functions previously performed by a variety of different organizations. This new type of Military Intelligence unit joined together Military Intelligence and former Army Security Agency assets.
Two separate institutional thrusts combined to create the ultimate CEWI structure. The first was a growing belief that under conditions of modern warfare it was absolutely essential that a combat division have its own organic intelligence capability This concept marked a revolution in Army institutional thinking. The Army had reorganized the division force structure twice since the Korean War, creating the pentomic division in 1957 and replacing it with the ROAD division in 1962. Each time, its leaders had explicitly rejected the idea of making an intelligence unit organic to the division, partially because linguistic requirements would vary so greatly under different theater conditions. Until 1969 Army divisions received intelligence support, apart from signals intelligence, from attached Military Intelligence units. Although most of these detach
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menu subsequently had been expanded to full companies, such elements were still only temporary attachments to the division.
In the mid-1970s, after intensive study and testing, the Army reversed its stance and allotted each division an organic intelligence company. Army policy makers had finally concluded that the incorporation of permanent intelligence units into divisions would provide better peacetime training opportunities and would forestall the necessity of hastily assembling the requisite intelligence assets whenever a war broke out. Such units would also furnish a convenient locus from which to manage radar and ground sensor assets previously dispersed throughout the division. One underlying assumption was the growing importance of various technical collection mechanisms in relation to human intelligence sources on the future battlefield. This technology-driven approach complemented the newly developed process the Army termed "the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield," in which data on enemy, weather, and terrain would be plotted on map overlays to provide commanders with a graphic intelligence estimate.11
The second and more important element leading to the creation of CEWI units was the emphasis of IOSS on the need to integrate diverse intelligence disciplines in the field, both to enhance the support provided commanders and to reduce overhead. The end result of this process came when a TRADOC study group produced the first blueprint for a CEWI type of unit in early 1976. An experimental combat electronic warfare and intelligence battalion, the 522d Military Intelligence Battalion, was fielded later that same year at Fort Hood, Texas, and assigned to the 2d Armored Division. The successful activation of this prototype CEWI battalion meant that the TOE of the divisional intelligence company, which appeared the same year, was already obsolete. The Army's acceptance of the need for battalion-size units to support divisional intelligence requirements demonstrated how far the discipline had come since its World War I beginnings, when divisions had met their intelligence needs with staffs of four officers and a few enlisted men and militarized civilians serving as field clerks.
An agreed-upon TOE for an organic divisional CEWI battalion appeared in 1979. Significantly, the TOE for this new-model Military Intelligence unit was numbered in a different series from previous Military Intelligence and Army Security Agency tables of organization and equipment. The new organizational table provided for a headquarters and headquarters and operations company containing collection management, counterintelligence, and interrogation personnel, and included a platoon of helicopters configured for electronic missions.
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It also called for three line companies that respectively carried out functional missions of collection and jamming, ground surveillance through radars and sensors, and service support. The new structure thus merged existing intelligence, signals intelligence, and electronic warfare assets available at division level and integrated them with divisional ground sensor and ground surveillance radar elements. 12 Planners also contemplated giving the unit a long-range reconnaissance patrol capability, an addition initially rejected but revived a decade later. Subsequently, the pattern of organization prescribed by the 1979 TOE was modified often in the field, as "company teams" containing elements from all disciplines were organized on an ad hoc basis to support the requirements of each of a division's three brigades.13
Although combat divisions continued to have separate reconnaissance battalions and were now allotted target acquisition batteries, the creation of the CEWI unit meant that the division's tactical operations center could draw on the resources of a single element to meet the bulk of its intelligence, security, and electronic warfare needs, rather than having to deal with fragmented elements scattered throughout the divisional structure. The CEWI battalion organization was intended to be strong enough to provide the diverse intelligence disciplines it contained with the necessary support. Since only a quarter of the CEWI battalion's strength consisted of highly trained intelligence specialists, it allowed maximum use of these scarce resources. 14
The organization of the division-level CEWI battalion was only the beginning of a wholesale restructuring of Army intelligence at the level of tactical support. Company-size CEWI units were formed to support separate brigades and armored cavalry regiments. The Army also replaced all its active component Military Intelligence battalions, air reconnaissance support, with "military intelligence battalions, aerial exploitation." These new units consisted of a headquarters and headquarters company, an imagery interpretation company, a combat intelligence company (aerial surveillance), and an electronic warfare aviation company (forward). When the battalion operated independently, an electronic warfare aviation company (rear) could be attached. The concept provided a suitable management framework for the Army's own aerial assets and integrated different types of mission aircraft into a single unit.15
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Initially the capstone of the new tactical support intelligence structure, the Military Intelligence group functioned at the corps level. The first of these units activated, the 504th Military Intelligence Group, went to support the III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas, in 1978.16 In 1985, the 201st, 205th, 207th, 504th, and 525th Military Intelligence Groups assigned to support the five corps then operational in the Active Army were all upgraded to brigade status. Each Military Intelligence brigade consisted of a headquarters and headquarters detachment, an operations battalion, an aerial exploitation battalion, and an interrogation and exploitation battalion.
Military Intelligence in the Reserve Components
The integration and reorganization of the Army's intelligence elements were not confined to the Active Army, but also affected the reserve components. The end result of the process was to greatly expand the Military Intelligence presence in these components. While the 24th Military Intelligence Battalion continued as an aerial reconnaissance support unit, the three existing ASA battalions and the single field army type of Military Intelligence battalion in the Army Reserve were all converted to CEWI units, and four additional battalions were activated. Actual implementation of the program took some time. The first Army Reserve CEWI unit, the 138th Military Intelligence Battalion, was not activated until late 1983, and not until 1988 did the last remaining Army Security Agency battalion in the reserve phase out.
Initially, the Army had determined that all combat electronic warfare and intelligence battalions in the reserve structure would belong to the Army Reserve. The National Guard operated under state control in peacetime, and national policy makers had reservations about placing sensitive intelligence assets under state government control. Ultimately, the intelligence community decided that policy considerations did not preclude establishing such units in the National Guard, and the 629th Military Intelligence Battalion was organized in 1988 to service the intelligence and electronic warfare needs of the Maryland-Virginia National Guard's 29th Infantry Division. This issue did not arise in the case of non-CEWI types of National Guard military intelligence units, and aerial exploitation battalions appeared in the Georgia and Oregon National Guards in 1982.
One National Guard unit continued to provide unique support to Armywide intelligence requirements. In 1980 the 142d Military Intelligence Battalion was organized in the Utah National Guard, replacing a similar company-size unit originally organized in 1960. This TDA battalion, a linguist unit, drew heavily from a pool of expertise provided by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who had previously undergone language training to
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carry out overseas missionary work. Battalion personnel on temporary duty repeatedly assisted the Regular Army in meeting its linguistic needs. The concept was so successful that in 1988 the battalion was converted to a TOE unit; a second similar battalion was organized in the Utah National Guard; and a TDA unit, the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade, was created to provide command and control. Later, the Army approved the organization of Guard linguist battalions in several other states.
Training continued to present difficulties for intelligence units both in the reserve components and in the Regular Army. Many intelligence specialties could not be exercised normally in hometown environments or even under garrison conditions. However, in 1978 the Intelligence and Security Command instituted the Readiness Training Program (REDTRAIN) to expose practitioners of intelligence disciplines throughout the Army to "enrichment" programs. REDTRAIN allowed both reservists and Regular Army soldiers to further their skills by participating in current operations. In practice, this was accomplished either by assigning personnel on temporary duty to units with an operational mission or by bringing the mission to the unit.
Military Intelligence in the 1980s
The 1980s were prosperous years for the Army, especially for its restructured intelligence component. The formation of INSCOM and the implementation of the CEWI concept not only affected intelligence operations throughout the Army, but also drew the Military Intelligence Branch firmly into the mainstream of the service. For the first time, most MI personnel were assigned to TOE units. By 1988 five MI brigades and no less than thirty MI battalions had been formed under the CEWI concept to support tactical units in the field, while another five TOE MI brigades and ten TOE single-function battalions carried out theater- and national-level support missions under INSCOM. Twentyfive thousand Military intelligence specialists-over 15 percent of them female-were on active duty, backed up by another 8,700 in the reserve components. The active duty Military Intelligence component alone was as large as the entire Regular Army had been in 1885, when the Army first created a permanent intelligence organization. As retired Lt. Gen. James A. Williams, a former director of DIA, pointed out, the Army now had "the equivalent of two combat divisions in collection and analysis."17
There were still significant shortfalls in a number of areas. The proliferation of job opportunities presented by an information-based society made recruiting and retaining personnel in a number of intelligence specialties a pressing concern for what continued to be an all-volunteer force. The tactical-level force
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structure had grown so large that some Army Intelligence professionals questioned whether it could be maintained indefinitely, given anticipated constraints on Army resources and the competing demands of the Army's echelon above corps intelligence structure. The lightning advance of technology, combined with convoluted contracting and procurement procedures and growing fiscal constraints, had left the Army saddled with equipment that fell far behind the state of the art in many intelligence disciplines. For much of its aerial work, Army Intelligence still depended upon the durable Mohawk, which despite its considerable virtues was now thirty years old. Almost thirty-five years after the inception of Project MICHIGAN, the Army was still struggling to field a satisfactory remotely piloted vehicle-a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft. Army tactical signals intelligence and electronic intelligence resources in the field were mounted on slow and overloaded carriers that could not keep up with the new generation of Army tanks and armored fighting vehicles. Moreover, as 1990 approached there were already signs that the greatest defense buildup since the Korean War was about to end, and this necessitated further changes in the organization of Army Intelligence.
In 1987, however, two significant developments seemed to confirm that the Army had at last accepted its Intelligence arm as an equal member in its family of branches. In May of that year the position of ACSI was upgraded to deputy chief of staff for intelligence (DCSINT), a change that ended the position of perceived organizational inferiority of the Army intelligence staff post. Lt. Gen. Sidney T. Weinstein became the Army's first DCSINT. That same year, Army Intelligence became part of the regimental system that embodied the heritage of the U.S. Army. On 1 July 1987, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of intelligence as a Regular Army branch, all Army Intelligence personnel, military and civilian, became part of a single large regiment, the Military Intelligence Corps, headed by the commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School. Although symbolic, the measure was significant. Maj. Gen. Julius Parker, the first chief of the Military Intelligence Corps, called the step "a recognition and celebration of our evolution from a plethora of diverse and separate intelligence agencies into the cohesive MI community we enjoy today. In short, it symbolizes the fact that Army Intelligence has truly arrived."18
Additional proofs that General Parker's statement was not overly optimistic were soon forthcoming. In 1987 the Army published a detailed Army Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, and Target Acquisition Plan (AIMP). The AIMP conceptualized the future structure of Army Intelligence as a "system of systems" and laid out a detailed and coherent road map of the measures needed to reshape the Army's intelligence organizations and technologies in ways that would satisfy future requirements. In 1989 INSCOM shifted its headquarters
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from Arlington Hall Station to a site on the north post of Fort Belvoir, Virginia. INSCOM's new headquarters facility, the Nolan Building, was named in honor of Maj. Gen. Dennis E. Nolan, Pershing's G-2 in World War I. This was the first Army Intelligence headquarters ever designed specifically for its purpose. In 1990 the chief of Military Intelligence became commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca. This step paved the way for the eventual closure of the Intelligence School at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and the consolidation of almost all Military Intelligence training at Fort Huachuca. Meanwhile, the internal evolution of Military Intelligence within the Army was already being affected by outside events.
1 IOSS, Aug 75, Exec Sum, p. 6.
2 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1977), pp. 25-26.
3 IOSS, Aug 75, vol. 1, ch. 8, ann. B, p. 2.
4 IOSS, Aug 75, vol. 1, ch. 8, p. 61.
5 Saunders, "U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School." The transfer of MI Branch proponency to the commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School took place as part of an Army-wide shift of this function from the Army Staff to the TRADOC schools. Proponency allowed the chief of Military Intelligence to initiate and coordinate actions in the areas of force structure, unit deployment and sustainment, and personnel acquisition, training, and distribution. It did not, however, give him control over individual career management.
6 History of United States Army Special Security Group, n.d., p. 6, INSCOM History Office files.
7 Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1977 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1979), pp. 30-31.
8 One of the few mentions of INSCOM in open sources can be found in Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 66-68.
9 The Foreign Materiel Intelligence Group was redesignated the Foreign Materiel Intelligence Battalion and resubordinated to the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade on 16 October 1989. In 1996 this TDA battalion was discontinued and the mission assumed by the provisional 203d MI Battalion.
10 Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polgar, Merchants of Treason: America's Secrets for Sale (New York: Delacorte Press, 1988), p. 2.
11 IPB: Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (Fort Huachuca, Ariz.: U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, n.d.). The IPB process was potentially adaptable to automation. This seemed a necessity, since it was estimated in the 1970s that a corps commander in a European war scenario would have to track some 35,000 "movers, shooters, and emitters" in the adversary force. G. Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 145.
12 Don Gordon, "CEWI Battalion: Intelligence and Electronic Warfare on the Battlefield," Military Intelligence 5 (October-December 1979): 22-28.
13 Company Team Commander Responsibilities, 313th MI Bn (CEWI), 82d Airborne Div, Apr 84, copy in INSCOM History Office files.
14 Gordon, "CEWI Battalion," p. 27.
15 This change in force structure was in part dictated by the fact that relying on traditional Air Force photoreconnaissance platforms in a high-intensity conflict no longer seemed a viable proposition. Army aerial assets could conduct various forms of electronic surveillance while flying in relative safety behind their own front lines. The discontinuance of MIBARS units in the Active Army meant that the Army would henceforth rely on INSCOM IMINT companies and on the reserve components to provide imagery interpreter support for Air Force tactical reconnaissance missions.
16 This unit was created by reorganizing and redesignating the 504th Army Security Agency Group, originally activated in 1974 to provide cryptologic support to FORSCOM.
17 Benjamin F. Schemmer, "Former DIA Director Urges That Four-Star Should Head All Military Intelligence," Armed Forces Journal International, Feb 88, p. 24.
18 Ltr, Chief, Military Intelligence, Huachuca Scout (Military Intelligence Corps Activation Supplement), 25 Jun 87, p. 2.
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