Leadership

Accelerating Change: Today's Defense Intelligence Imperative

To the men and women of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

As your new Director, I am proud to serve our nation with you. As our defense strategy highlights, our nation is at a moment of transition and the global security environment presents increasingly complex challenges and opportunities. The demands on the U.S. intelligence system, especially the Defense Intelligence Agency, will increase. Nonetheless, I am convinced that DIA's greatest challenges, along with its greatest contributions, lie ahead. Together we will prepare DIA to meet those challenges by maximizing our capabilities while growing our next generation of leaders.

Accelerating rates of change and increasing complexity drive today's world. We must continue to adapt, evolve and transform to anticipate events, risks and threats. We must continue to deliver better, more accurate and relevant intelligence. We must operate more efficiently while instilling even more agility and resiliency throughout our workforce. DIA's 2012-2017 Strategy will continue to guide all that we do.

Commanders, national security policymakers, our law enforcement colleagues and our foreign partners depend upon DIA to ensure their success in current operations while also anticipating tomorrow's crises. It's more than just focusing on current intelligence. It's always looking to find the right blend of classified and open source information that identifies future national security challenges and threats; and the people, trends, movements, ideologies and social phenomena fueling them. The only litmus test for judging our performance is the value we provide our customers, especially our military forces.

To exceed our customers' expectations, we must build on the many lessons learned at great cost since September 11, 2001.

Among them: our analysis must always be timely, responsive and relevant to our customer's needs. We must strengthen our human intelligence collection against strategic defense targets growing more difficult to penetrate, while fully incorporating counterintelligence. We must continue to integrate science and technology to enhance our operations. Given DIA's unique responsibilities for the nation's TS/SCI network (JWICS), we must be especially attentive to our national leaders' reliance on that network while we also protect it from insider threats. In all that we do, we must operate at our customers' speed and inside their decision-making cycles no matter the time zone.

Around the world, I have worked with and met many of you who are rising leaders throughout DIA, many with time in Iraq, Afghanistan and other operational areas. You know what good intelligence looks like. You know DIA from the inside. And more importantly, you know how we look to our customers from the outside. Your perspective, ideas, energy, experience, ability to innovate and intellectual agility will determine DIA's future. To that end, we will provide our workforce with the training, education, mentoring, experience and room to grow so we are prepared to replace current leadership, including me. We must maintain an environment in which all of us thrive and drive ourselves toward our full potential. I believe there are no limits to DIA's contributions if we continue to work together to earn each other's trust. You, the men and women of DIA, are our future.

Doing all these things in today's more austere financial environment will require difficult risk-based choices. We have to think, innovate and apply the best ideas to grow talent and vital capabilities. A culture must take root – one in which cost efficiency is part of every decision we make. However, each decision must be carefully balanced with acceptable risk.

While DIA's professionals have performed heroically since 2001, as I noted above, the demands upon us will only increase. Today's global environment is less forgiving of strategic failure, and our nation's margin for acceptable risk has narrowed. That explains why today's operational pace is no aberration. It is our new steady state, and it demands a sense of urgency.

In this environment, our foundation for success rests upon our values, our principles and a renewed sense of esprit de corps. I want to lead men and women who are as proud of this agency as they are of their work. That means clearly understanding our mission, understanding our past and our present, and knowing our future direction.

Above all else, what defines DIA is our value to our operating forces, our nation's military and national security leaders, our relationship to our law enforcement partners and the many coalition and foreign partners who depend on our capabilities. No other standard is more important.

We are the Defense Intelligence Agency. We are a combat support agency, and the only intelligence agency with the word defense in its name. It's there for a reason. It's our foundation and our future.

As Director, I will expect no less than our customers require. We must deliver the very best intelligence we can with candor, without bias, and as timely as possible – always. History is being made now. Our actions and decisions today will shape our agency and our nation's future for years to come.

One Mission, One Team, One Agency.

VR,

FLYNN

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Director's Guidance

Mission: DIA is first in all-source defense intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners and policymakers. As a combat support agency, DIA professionals deploy globally alongside warfighters and interagency partners to defend America's national security interests.

Vision: One team of highly skilled, agile and accountable professionals providing our military forces and national security leaders with the timely intelligence they need for success in current operations and against future challenges.

Intent: Achieve DIA's maximum potential.

Download a PDF of the Director's Guidance »