House Intel Chair: 'Joint service environment' needs to prepare for future conflicts

Rick Crawford is reaching back to the post-9/11 playbook, and honestly, it's a fair place to look. That was the last time Washington actually reorganized itself around a threat instead of around turf. The joint task forces, the fusion centers, the information sharing that finally happened after years of agencies refusing to talk to each other because of bureaucratic pride. It worked, more or less. So when the chairman of House Intel says the same mentality needs to apply to drone tracking and whatever comes next, that's not a radical idea. It's an admission that the current setup still has too many silos.

The uncomfortable part is why this needs saying again in 2024. Twenty-plus years after the 9/11 Commission report chewed out the intelligence community for exactly this kind of stovepiping, we're apparently still having the conversation. Agencies still guard their own data, their own budgets, their own turf, even when the threat picture, drones over military installations, near-peer competition, cyber intrusions, demands speed and shared visibility more than any single agency's ownership of the problem.

None of this happens by memo. A "joint service environment" is a culture, not a slide in a briefing deck, and culture changes when leadership forces it, funds it, and punishes the agencies that slow-walk it. If Crawford wants this to be more than a talking point, the committee needs to attach teeth to it: oversight that actually tracks whether information is moving, not just whether officials say the right words in a hearing room.

We'd like to believe the lesson from 9/11 stuck the first time. It clearly didn't fully take, or we wouldn't be relearning it heading into a new era of drone threats and great-power competition. Better late than never, but "late" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.