The Department of Defense (DOD) is aiming to upgrade its espionage capabilities by creating the Defense Clandestine Service. According to a Washington Post report, the new service will closely work with CIA as the missions of both increasingly converge. Previous attempts by DOD to create such functionality were constrained due to concerns over duplication.
The Defense Clandestine Service has been created as a result of a classified report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence last year. The report had recommended that the military needs an espionage service that looks beyond the tactical needs of Iraq and Afghanistan and better incorporates intelligence on demographic and political landscape of the battlefield, often referred to as the Human Terrain System.
Defending President Obama’s new defense strategy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Gen Dempsey recently stated that US plans to develop a military,
“that can deter and defeat threats at every point along the spectrum of conflict, from lone individuals or terrorist groups to middleweight militaries packing a new punch, and all the way up to near-peer competitors.”
