A trial by fire: military intelligence reform and the Cuban missile crisis

Abstract

The Cuban missile crisis occurred in the midst of a major upheaval in United States (US) military intelligence. For over a decade prior to the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, military intelligence in the United States was shot through with service parochialism that made it virtually impossible for policy-makers to have a clear grasp of Soviet intentions and capabilities. Years of backbiting and infighting among the services badly hampered the Secretary of Defense’s ability to make informed decisions about US force structure and resulted in a wasteful military intelligence establishment that was hobbled by institutional rivalry, inefficiency and unnecessary redundancy. When Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense in 1961, one of his first major acts was to address this problem by ordering the creation of an integrated Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which was to manage the services’ intelligence resources, deconflict their operations, and conduct analysis on their behalf. It was to be the most sweeping reorganization of US military intelligence since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and its subsequent amendment in 1949. The creation of DIA was anything but smooth, however, and the turmoil generated by McNamara’s order had not yet subsided by October 1962. This upheaval lurked in the background of military intelligence operations during the Cuban missile crisis and ultimately played a role in shaping those operations. Substantial bureaucratic and cultural issues within the military intelligence hierarchy, the remnants of the previous decade’s parochialism, remained unresolved. These issues ultimately had an impact on DIA’s ability to fulfill its task of managing the military intelligence response to the crisis. The result was an increasingly uncoordinated collection and analysis effort that opened the possibility of a significant surprise in the event of military operations.