Obama's National Security Team

Fred Kaplan wrote a column for Slate about the appointment of Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (The column is attached to the title of this piece.) The burden of Mr. Kaplan's assertion that this is a good appointment is that Panetta knows his audience. More to the point, he knows what the consumers of intelligence need to know.

I used to do training for a living. My then-manager taught me one very valuable lesson about training, one which applies to other areas of life. The point isn't to tell your audience everything you know, although that might make you look smart. The point is to tell them what they need to know in order to do their jobs. That means that you need to know their business; you need to know something about their jobs and what is required to do them. So I can see Mr. Kaplan's point: Panetta knows what information his customers need, so he will also know what information to demand from the resources under his command.

The weakness of appointing a career professional to the top job isn't only that he won't have any political clout, although he won't, at least until he proves himself. It's that agencies have values that distort the information they give the consumers - values that are irrelevant to the needs of the consumers. For example, I hear that there is a tendency to rotate the subjects of the President's Daily Brief among various bureaus, so that no one will feel left out. That's all very well, but the only criteria for inclusion in the brief is how important the information may be to decisions the President is going to have to make.

For this sort of objective assessment you need people who understand the political process and what issues are confronting the White House. On the other hand, you also need a lot of solid professionals to support the effort. It appears from another Kaplan article that Mr. Obama is putting together a very sound team of professionals at the operational level in the Defense and State Departments: http://www.slate.com/id/2208215/

Lest you think that only the mainstream media types at Slate see benefits in the appointment of Mr. Panetta, Mark Safranski wrote an article on the subject which appeared in the conservative site Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-leon-panetta-may-be-the-right-man-for-cia-chief/.

These may be straws in the wind, but it seems that Mr. Obama is determined to have good advisors, and good implementers, on the national security front, so that he can concentrate on the economy without worrying that the world will descend into chaos due to American inattention.