Pentagon Intel Chief Seeks Same Unity of Effort as Military Services

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.