John Bennet, senior сongressional reporter at Defense News, a well-known and widely respected expert, says in his brilliant piece Analysis: Defense Clandestine Service Is Here To Stay that the US Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) is a done deal. According to Defense News, «Senior US officials and lawmakers are sending new signals that a fledgling cadre of military spies is a done deal, despite no real substantive public debate». Despite unresolved questions about operational and budgetary redundancy, Congress has rubber-stamped the Pentagon’s plans and President Obama is adamant in his desire to go the whole hog and make it all come to fruition. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a former military intelligence official, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn faced the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 11. The way the deliberations go, it is likely that the DCS will have no serious obstacles to overcome, it’s becoming a full-fledged intelligence community element is a cut-and dried decision. 

In April 2012 the US created the Defense Clandestine Service to ramp up spying operations against high-priority targets under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s spying efforts beyond war zones. The mission is to focus more attention outside the battlefields on «national intelligence» – gathering and distributing information on global issues and sharing that intelligence with other agencies. 

The new entity is to make up for the poor record of collecting human intelligence, known as HUMINT, as recent war time experience has shown. It fits into a broader convergence trend. U.S. Special Operations forces are increasingly engaged in intelligence collection overseas and have collaborated with the CIA. It is believed that more DCS operatives overseas would shore up intelligence on subjects that the CIA is not able or willing to pursue. One of the factors affecting the decision was the fact that the CIA is increasingly overstretched with its drone campaign against terrorists while the pressure is mounting to make it stay abreast of issues including the Middle East and disturbing events in the Asia-Pacific, Ukraine etc. CIA officials including John D. Bennett, director of the National Clandestine Service, have backed the DCS’s plan. The frictions with the CIA have been reduced, largely because the CIA sees advantages to the new arrangement, including assurances that its station chiefs overseas will be kept apprised of DCS missions and have authority to reject any that might conflict with CIA efforts. The CIA will also be able to turn over hundreds of Pentagon-driven assignments to newly arrived DCS operatives. U.S. officials believe that thanks to their military backgrounds DCS operatives are often better equipped to recruit sources who can answer narrow military questions such as specifications of weapons systems. 

The project was triggered when a classified study by the director of national intelligence saw light in 2011. It concluded that key Pentagon intelligence priorities were falling into gaps created by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) heavy focus on battlefield issues and CIA’s extensive workload. U.S. officials said the DIA needed to be repositioned as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave way to what many expect will be a period of sporadic conflicts and simmering threats requiring close-in intelligence work. The DIA played an extensive and largely hidden role in the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan sending analysts into war zones and turning a large chunk of its workforce and computer systems in Virginia into an analytic back office for JSOC.

In late December, Congress raised no major obstacles. The both houses have approved the legislation, and it is awaiting President Obama's signature. 

But the military so far has failed to convince Congress the idea doesn’t not imply duplication of efforts with the CIA   and the 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies. As a result, a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act withholds half the allocated money for the new spy service until Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proves it is collecting useful intelligence. For instance, a requirement withholds 50 percent of the spy service’s 2014 funds until the Pentagon certifies to congressional national security committees that «DCS is designed primarily to fulfill priorities of the DoD that are unique to the DoD or otherwise unmet; and provide unique capabilities to the intelligence community.» Not a big thing for the military to do. Other provisions require to design metrics for assessments and submit notifications of any significant changes and briefings on activities – the things which are a norm for any state agency. 

The DCS is the arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency, staffed by civilian and military personnel, which conducts espionage activities around the world to answer national-level defense objectives. The new service is expected to grow from several hundred to an estimated 1,600 undercover operatives and military attachés overseas to recruit sources and collect intelligence on emergent battlefields. The attachés are part of the 1,600 target for the DIA, but such «overt» positions will represent a declining share amid the increase in undercover slots.  The personnel will be trained by the CIA and often work with the JSOP, but they will get their assignments from the Department of Defense. The CIA has agreed to add new slots to its training classes at its facility in southern Virginia, known as the Farm, to make room for more military spies. The two agencies have also agreed to share resources overseas, including technical gear, logistics support, space in facilities and vehicles. The new slots for the DCS would be created at the expanse of existing positions in the DIA. Over the past decade its staff has doubled to about 16,500, mostly by absorbing different intelligence entities. But it has about 500 «case officers» – the term for clandestine operatives – at the moment. This number is to reach between 800 and 1,000 by 2018. The DIA has employed undercover operatives to gather secrets on foreign militaries and other targets for decades, but was somehow regarded as an inferior sibling to its civilian counterpart. There are some definite challenges from a cover perspective. The plan faces some challenges, such as the need to create cover identities for hundreds of new undercover operatives. Having them pose as academics or business executives requires painstaking work to create those false identities, and it means they won’t be protected by diplomatic immunity. Nothing is said if operatives will go through a career path on the principle of rotation going back to conventional military units from time to time or they are going to belong to narrow specialists category limited in promotion opportunities. 

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The plan fits in with the Obama administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action over conventional force. Evidently Washington is applying efforts to enhance intelligence efficiency in view of security failures, especially in the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and other places. Creating new billets and personnel training and other things related to strengthening the DCS inevitably means significant expenditure against the background of financial woes. As has become widely known thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations, the NSA – another military agency under the jurisdiction of DOD – acts beyond the scrutiny of Congress and violates human rights, domestic and international law at home and abroad, so there is a big chance the military intelligence will do the same now… As President Obama’s NSA speech in January showed, nothing in concrete terms is going to be done about it. Dozens of other prominent opponents of government surveillance were also quick to denounce the speech as mere lip service Boris Kazantsev, a Strategic Culture Foundation expert, published a great piece devoted to this issue in January.

Mr. Obama actually left in place most of the intelligence practices that have violated the 4th amendment of Constitution and essentially turned the United States into a police state, as many Americans believe he did. Critics of government surveillance were quick to denounce the changes as minuscule, the intelligence agencies are still allowed to conduct surveillance on millions of Americans without probable cause. As the President put it, the foreign leaders are off limits "unless there is a compelling national security purpose" – that is spying is allowed because, as is known, the national security purpose is doomed to be forever compelling. If the administration is not able to tackle efficiently the issue of NSA, how can anybody be sure getting the DCS into full swing will not add to the stockpile of problems the US faces home and abroad?