BRIEFING FOR THE SECRETARY OF WAR: The Interagency Approval Process for Covert Action and Clandestine Military Operations
Mission Necessity, Institutional Tribes, and the Politics of Risk
Oversight’s Revolving Door: When the safest answer is to just say no
The United States is experiencing one of the most significant periods of leadership turnover within the Department of War and Intelligence Community in recent memory. New political appointees, acting officials, senior military officers, intelligence executives, congressional staff, and oversight personnel are cycling into positions of extraordinary responsibility.
Such transitions are a normal feature of American government.
They are also moments of elevated risk.
At no time is that risk more consequential than in the oversight and approval of covert action, clandestine intelligence collection, and sensitive special operations. The public rarely sees this process. By design, most Americans never will.
Yet hidden behind closed doors, a small number of officials determine whether the nation’s most sensitive operations proceed, are delayed, are modified, or quietly die before they ever leave the drawing board.
I spent my professional life inside that system. As a Special Forces officer and mission commander in leading Department of War - Special Mission Unit operations, I witnessed the operational consequences of decisions made far from the battlefield.
Later, while coordinating Clandestine Intelligence Operations Proposals (CIOPs) under Director of Central Intelligence Directive 5/1, serving within the Joint Chiefs of Staff - Special Operations Division, and assigned in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SOLIC), I observed the approval process from inside the machinery itself, at every level of command from the Presidential Finding, to the isolation and deliberate planning process of an activated team.
Those experiences taught me an enduring lesson: oversight and obstruction are not the same thing.
In a constitutional republic, oversight is not merely appropriate; it is essential. Legal review protects national values. Intelligence deconfliction prevents fratricide between agencies. Policy scrutiny ensures operations remain aligned with national objectives. Congressional accountability and ambassadorial awareness help preserve democratic legitimacy.
Proper oversight can strengthen a mission.
The problem arises when institutional self-preservation disguises itself as oversight.
Throughout my career, I repeatedly encountered operations that were not delayed because they were unlawful, strategically unsound, or contrary to U.S. national interests. They were delayed because individuals within the approval chain feared congressional inquiries, media scrutiny, inspector general investigations, political controversy, or personal association with a failed operation.
The safest answer was often “no.” The second safest answer was “not yet.” In time-sensitive operations, both answers can produce the same strategic consequence.
This reality explains why operators so often describe themselves as “fighting their own government in order to do what they believe is right.” The phrase is not a rejection of civilian control, constitutional authority, or legitimate oversight.
Rather, it reflects the frustration of watching mission effectiveness erode through layers of bureaucratic risk aversion that no adversary could have imposed more effectively.
In the world of covert action and clandestine operations, delay is often indistinguishable from defeat. Missions lose surprise. Intelligence grows stale. Targets move. Opportunities disappear. And when that happens, the paperwork remains intact, the process remains protected, and no one is ever held accountable for the operation that never occurred.
BLUF
The interagency approval process is not a clean staff action. It is a political combat zone disguised as coordination. The paper trail may read like orderly governance: JCS deployment orders, OSW policy review, CIA equities, DIA validation, NSA collection support, State Department concurrence, embassy country-team coordination, and intelligence-community deconfliction under legacy Director of Central Intelligence Directive 5/1 procedures.
In practice, the process is a contest among institutional warring tribes, each protecting its authorities, budgets, reputation, legal exposure, and future congressional defensibility.
The Secretary of War must understand this clearly: the fight is rarely between patriots and obstructionists. It is usually between mission necessity and institutional self-preservation:
The mission commander sees opportunity, time, access, and consequence.
The policy staff sees exposure, hearings, leaks, and blame.
The intelligence agencies see source protection, collection equities, counterintelligence risk, and institutional ownership.
State sees diplomatic survivability.
The country team sees whether they will be left holding the bag when Washington’s appetite for risk evaporates.
The Joint Staff sees force protection, command authority, and whether the military will become the visible signature of a policy decision no one else wants to own.
Bottom line: the system is necessary, but it is not neutral. It protects the republic from reckless action, but it also protects bureaucracies from responsibility. A SecWar who does not manage it personally will discover too late that strategic surprise was lost not to the enemy, but to the approval chain.
I. The System as It Exists on Paper
On paper, coordination for a covert action or clandestine military operation is designed to ensure legality, policy consistency, intelligence deconfliction, diplomatic awareness, and command accountability:
For a covert action, the central legal and policy distinction is presidential authorization and deniability: the United States Government intends to influence conditions abroad while the role of the United States is not intended to be apparent or acknowledged.
For a clandestine military operation, the emphasis is concealment of the operation itself, the force, timing, method, or presence, even if ultimate U.S. responsibility may not be formally deniable. The two categories often overlap in effect, but they are not identical in law, policy, or oversight.
The interagency process exists because no single department owns all the risk:
Defense may provide the force.
CIA may own the human terrain, liaison channels, or covert-action infrastructure.
NSA may provide signals intelligence or access.
DIA may validate military intelligence and threat assessments.
State owns diplomatic consequence and embassy equities.
The country team lives with the aftermath.
OSW owns policy.
The Joint Staff owns the military instrument and deployment orders.
The National Security Council process may integrate or distort all of it depending on the White House’s discipline, ideology, and appetite for accountability.
Legacy Director of Central Intelligence Directive 5/1 (DCID 5/1) coordination mattered because it forced clandestine intelligence activities and military operations to be deconflicted with CIA and broader intelligence-community equities.
The practical purpose was simple: prevent one U.S. element from compromising another, prevent fratricide in denied areas, prevent liaison embarrassment, and ensure that a special mission unit did not walk through a collection architecture or human-source network without knowing it.
The same principle remains valid even as structures and terminology evolve: clandestine military action cannot be treated as a purely military staff action when the operating environment is already saturated with intelligence activities.
Personal operational experience confirms why DCID 5/1 mattered and why the principle still matters. The directive was not a paperwork ritual. It was a mechanism for preventing one arm of the U.S. government from walking blindly across another arm’s clandestine equities.
In the real world, a Special Mission Unit movement, a CIA access agent, a liaison channel, an NSA collection window, a DIA threat picture, and an embassy political relationship may all occupy the same invisible battlespace.
If those elements are not deconflicted, the United States can compromise itself before the adversary ever detects the operation.
At the same time, DCID 5/1 coordination could become a choke point. A process designed to prevent fratricide could be exploited by offices that wanted visibility, leverage, or veto power without corresponding responsibility for mission outcome. That is the danger the Secretary must contend: every necessary coordination mechanism can become an institutional weapon when timing, authority, and accountability are not tightly managed.
II. The System as It Exists in Real Life
In real life, the approval process is tribal. Every agency enters the room with a mission statement, but also with institutional memory, trauma, and fear:
CIA remembers operations that went bad and congressional knives that came out afterward.
Pentagon remembers intelligence promises that did not survive first contact with the ground.
State remembers ambassadors blindsided by Washington and left to repair host-nation damage.
NSA remembers collection accesses burned by kinetic or human operations that never considered long-term intelligence value.
DIA remembers being treated as a supporting annex rather than an analytic and operational stakeholder.
The Joint Staff remembers being asked to produce military options for policy desires that no civilian leader will clearly authorize in writing.
That tribal friction is not always bad. A clean approval chain with no dissent is often a warning sign. Good friction exposes assumptions, validates authorities, clarifies risk, and forces the mission sponsor to explain why the action matters.
Bad friction is different:
Bad friction is when an official with no operational understanding substitutes personal career protection for oversight.
Bad friction is when an office says no because no is safer than yes.
Bad friction is when lawyers, deputies, or political appointees demand visibility into compartmented details not because they need to know, but because they want veto power without responsibility.
The most corrosive form of interagency resistance is passive obstruction:
Nobody says the mission is illegal.
Nobody says the intelligence is wrong.
Nobody says the objective is not in the national interest.
Instead, they request one more paper, one more concurrence, one more legal review, one more country-team comment, one more sensitivity assessment, one more meeting after the deputies meet, one more chance for someone who has never commanded anything to express concern.
The clock moves. The target adapts. The window closes. When the opportunity is gone, the bureaucracy calls it prudent process.
I saw this repeatedly while coordinating CIOPs and later while operating inside Joint Staff and OSD channels. The fight was rarely over whether the United States had an interest. The fight was over who would be exposed if something went wrong.
A mission commander looks at the disappearing window, the movement of the target, the vulnerability of the source, the readiness of the force, and the strategic cost of inaction. A political or policy reviewer may look at the same proposal and see a future hearing, a leak, a cable traffic trail, a question from a senator, or a career-ending headline.
That gap in perspective is where many good missions begin to bleed out. It is not always malice. Often it is fear wearing the uniform of prudence.
III. The Main Tribes and Their Native Instincts
Tribal Council
The Department of War tribe thinks in terms of assigned mission, command relationships, force protection, operational feasibility, and execution risk. Its best officers understand that speed and surprise are not slogans; they are strategic commodities. Its weakness is that it can become impatient with policy ambiguity and underestimate diplomatic consequence when the military solution is technically sound.
The CIA tribe thinks in terms of access, placement, cover, liaison, sources, plausible deniability, and long-term intelligence equities. Its strength is deep understanding of the human and political ground. Its weakness is institutional ownership. CIA may resist a military operation not only because it is dangerous, but because it threatens CIA primacy in a domain the Agency considers its own.
The NSA tribe thinks in terms of access preservation, collection yield, signatures, compromise, and technical visibility. Its strength is strategic insight through exquisite collection. Its weakness is that collection can become an end in itself. NSA may prefer to watch a target indefinitely when the mission requirement is to act before the target acts.
The DIA tribe thinks in terms of military intelligence validity, threat systems, adversary order of battle, target characterization, and operational support to commanders. Its strength is tying intelligence to military consequence. Its weakness is that it can be overshadowed by CIA in human terrain and NSA in technical collection, even when DIA’s military judgment should be decisive.
OSW (Office, Secretary of War) is the policy-control tribe. It lives at the intersection of civilian authority, political accountability, congressional sensitivity, legal review, and strategic messaging. Its strength is ensuring that operations serve policy, not institutional momentum.
Its weakness is risk aversion disguised as policy sophistication. OSW is where many good operations go to be slowed, softened, re-staffed, or buried because a political appointee fears being associated with failure.
This is where my experience in SOLIC and the Joint Staff was most instructive. OSW is essential because special operations must serve policy, not personal initiative or institutional momentum. But OSW can also become the place where time-sensitive missions are laundered through endless caution until the operational opportunity disappears.
A political appointee can be bright, patriotic, and well-intentioned while still lacking the operational literacy to understand that the loss of timing can be the loss of the mission itself.
The Joint Staff is the coordination and force-employment tribe. Its strength is disciplined military process, command-and-control logic, and integration across combatant commands and services. Its weakness is that it can become a bureaucratic absorber of risk: everybody pushes unresolved policy questions into the deployment order, and the Joint Staff is expected to make ambiguity executable.
The State Department is the diplomatic-survivability tribe. Its instinct is to ask what happens when the host nation discovers the operation, when the press calls, when parliament erupts, when the ambassador is summoned, when the target government retaliates, and when allies ask whether they were lied to. State’s strength is consequence management. Its weakness is that diplomatic caution can become strategic paralysis.
The country team is the ground-truth tribe. The ambassador, chief of station, defense attaché, security officer, political officer, and other embassy elements know the local environment in ways Washington often does not. They also know they may be abandoned by Washington after a failure. Their caution may be frustrating, but it is often earned.
A wise SecWar listens to them without allowing local fear to become national policy.
IV. Why the Process Becomes a Knife Fight in a Phone Booth
The struggle begins because covert action and clandestine military operations occupy the most politically sensitive space in national power. They are designed to do what diplomacy cannot do openly and what conventional military power cannot do without escalation.
That makes them valuable.
It also makes them threatening to every official who imagines a future hearing room, subpoena, inspector-general review, hostile leak, or televised accusation that they approved something reckless:
From the operator’s side, this is the moment when the process begins to feel less like oversight and more like a domestic obstacle course. We fought through it. We went around them, under them, over them, and when necessary through them. Not because we opposed civilian control or legal review, but because we understood what was at stake. A commander responsible for a special mission cannot treat time as an administrative inconvenience. Time is access. Time is surprise. Time is source protection. Time is the difference between action and regret.
Political appointees often arrive with title authority but little operational literacy:
Some are exceptionally capable.
Others are products of campaigns, think tanks, Hill staff networks, ideological patronage, or personal loyalty systems.
They may be intelligent and patriotic, yet still unqualified to judge special mission-unit risk. They know the language of oversight but not the grammar of operations. They ask questions that sound responsible in a conference room but reveal little understanding of time, access, initiative, adversary adaptation, or the cost of lost surprise.
This is where mission necessity collides with political hesitance. The commander knows that an opportunity may exist for days or hours. The intelligence officer knows that the source may disappear. The SIGINT officer knows the target may change devices, networks, or patterns. The ambassador knows the host government may deny knowledge. The OSW staffer knows a failed mission can become a career-ending scandal. The congressional-affairs shop knows a covert success may remain invisible while a failure becomes a public bloodletting.
The safest bureaucratic position is often to delay until action is no longer possible.
The tragedy is that delay is rarely treated as a decision. A rejected mission has a paper trail. A delayed mission dissolves into process. Nobody owns the opportunity cost. Nobody signs a memorandum saying: “We accept the risk of allowing this target network to continue operating because we are afraid of political exposure.”
Instead, the process simply keeps moving until the mission dies quietly.
V. The Approval Chain and the “Chop” Problem
The chop system is supposed to create accountability. Each agency mark signifies that the relevant office has reviewed the proposal, identified equities, raised objections, and either concurred or non-concurred.
In CIOP coordination, the chop was supposed to mean something disciplined: an office had reviewed its equities, identified concerns, and either concurred or non-concurred on grounds relevant to law, policy, intelligence, diplomacy, or operational risk. Too often, the chop became a political insurance policy. Offices wanted enough proximity to claim diligence if the operation succeeded, enough distance to deny ownership if it failed, and enough procedural leverage to stop or reshape the mission without appearing to bear responsibility for the consequences of delay.
In theory, this ensures that the Secretary, the Chairman, the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA Director, the Secretary of State, and the President receive disciplined advice.
In practice, a chop can become a weapon.
An agency can withhold concurrence to force modification, protect its turf, extract visibility, preserve collection, or avoid being associated with risk. A staff office can demand access to details beyond its actual need to know. A country team can slow-roll a response because it fears host-nation consequence. A legal office can ask for hypothetical facts that no operation can answer before execution. A policy shop can demand a diplomatic end-state that the operation was never designed to produce.
JCS deployment orders are especially vulnerable to this problem because they are the visible military instrument. Once forces move, aircraft launch, platforms stage, communications packages deploy, or special mission units enter a theater, the military signature can become discoverable even if the policy intent remains sensitive. Everyone therefore wants influence over the deployment order, but not everyone wants responsibility for the mission outcome.
The Secretary of War should demand that objections be written, specific, and decision-relevant. “We are concerned” is not enough. Concern is not analysis.
The proper questions are:
Is the operation lawful?
Is it authorized?
Is the intelligence sufficient?
Are U.S. personnel adequately protected?
Are intelligence equities deconflicted?
Are diplomatic consequences understood?
Is the objective worth the risk?
If the answer is no, say no and own it.
If the answer is yes, do not murder the mission by process.
VI. Oversight Versus Permission Without Responsibility
Healthy oversight asks hard questions and improves the mission. Unhealthy oversight spreads fear while diluting accountability. The distinction matters. A good reviewer sharpens the commander’s thinking:
This distinction is not theoretical. As a mission commander and later as a staff officer in senior coordination channels, I saw officials object to missions without ever being forced to state the real basis of objection. They did not say the mission was illegal. They did not say the intelligence was invalid. They did not say the objective was unimportant. They simply asked for another meeting, another sensitivity review, another legal refinement, another country-team comment, another assurance that no one could honestly provide before execution.
The proposal remained alive on paper while the mission died in fact:
What is the mission objective?
What authority governs the action?
What is the exit criterion?
What happens if compromised?
Who informs the ambassador?
What does the President need to know?
What intelligence equities are at risk?
What is the plan if the host nation reacts?
What is the congressional-notification posture?
A bad reviewer performs political self-insurance. He wants enough visibility to claim diligence if the mission succeeds, enough distance to deny ownership if it fails, and enough procedural leverage to stop the operation without ever admitting that he stopped it. This is how national-security bureaucracies produce paralysis while preserving the appearance of seriousness.
The SecWar must recognize the difference between legitimate dissent and institutional cowardice. Legitimate dissent is specific, grounded, and tied to law, policy, intelligence, force protection, diplomacy, or strategic consequence. Institutional cowardice is vague, recursive, and procedural. It hides behind the passive voice. It avoids decision.
It converts urgency into staffing rhythm.
VII. The Ambassador and Country-Team Problem
No clandestine or covert activity involving boots on the ground in a target country can ignore the U.S. country team. The ambassador is the President’s representative in country, and the CIA chief of station, defense attaché, security officer, and other embassy elements may have critical knowledge of local actors, liaison relationships, surveillance threats, and diplomatic tripwires.
Bypassing them casually is dangerous and often stupid.
But the country team is not immune from bureaucratic self-protection. Embassies live under exposure. A failed operation can collapse bilateral access, trigger expulsion, embarrass the ambassador, endanger local partners, and create local legal or political crises. Country teams therefore tend to see downside vividly and opportunity abstractly.
That is understandable.
It is not always decisive.
The right model is informed compartmentation: enough visibility for the ambassador and essential country-team principals to protect U.S. equities and avoid fratricide, but not unlimited diffusion of operational detail.
The more people read in, the larger the leak surface and the greater the chance that a cautious local objection becomes a veto over national-level necessity.
VIII. What the Secretary of War Must Do
The Buck Stops Here
First, force decision discipline. Every significant objection must be reduced to writing and tied to law, policy, intelligence, diplomacy, force protection, or strategic risk. No anonymous institutional fog. No indefinite “coordination continues” language. No slow death by staff action.
Second, protect the mission window. Time is not administrative background noise. Time is an operational variable. If the target, access, source, platform, or political opportunity is perishable, the process must acknowledge that fact explicitly. Delay must be treated as a decision with consequence.
Third, separate need-to-know from want-to-veto. Not every office that wants visibility has a legitimate requirement for operational detail. Compartmentation is not arrogance; it is protection. The SecWar should insist that sensitive details be shared only where the receiving office has a real equity and can add decision value.
Fourth, make policy, own policy. The military should not be forced to execute ambiguous civilian intent while political officials preserve deniability. If the operation serves national policy, the policy chain must say so clearly. If the policy chain lacks the courage to authorize it, the mission should not be disguised as a military staff problem.
Fifth, listen to dissent without surrendering to fear. The best operations are often improved by hostile review. But review must culminate in decision. A government that cannot decide will eventually be shaped by adversaries who can.
Sixth, remember that oversight is a constitutional necessity, not a bureaucratic sanctuary. Congress, inspectors general, lawyers, and policy officials all have legitimate roles. But accountability cannot become a substitute for action. The United States does not need reckless operations. It also cannot afford a national-security system where every hard mission dies because no one wants to be near the blast radius of failure.
IX. Final Judgment
The interagency process is both shield and obstacle. It shields the country from illegal, poorly conceived, diplomatically catastrophic, or strategically incoherent operations. It also creates a place where risk-averse officials can bury necessary missions while appearing responsible. The Secretary of War must not romanticize operators or demonize bureaucrats. Both instincts are wrong.
The real requirement is command judgment.
The SecWar’s job is to ensure that the process tests the mission without killing it by delay, protects the republic without protecting cowardice, integrates agencies without surrendering national initiative to tribal vetoes, and preserves civilian control without empowering unqualified political staff to substitute fear for strategy.
The enemy does not care about our staffing process. The target does not pause because Washington needs another concurrence. Strategic surprise is not lost all at once. It bleeds out through meetings, edits, hesitations, and unsigned concerns. A disciplined SecWar must know when the process is protecting the mission, and when the process has become the threat to the mission.
X. Command Principle for Approval & Oversight
The Secretary of War must treat the interagency approval process as an operating environment, not merely an administrative process. It has terrain, tribes, choke points, ambush sites, deception, passive resistance, and competing centers of gravity.
It must be mapped, managed, and commanded.
The right answer is not to bypass oversight. The right answer is to make oversight accountable. When a reviewer objects, the objection should be written, specific, time-stamped, and tied to a recognized decision category: law, authority, intelligence validity, force protection, diplomatic consequence, congressional notification, escalation risk, or strategic coherence.
Vague concern should not be allowed to masquerade as analysis. Delay should be recorded as a decision. Non-concurrence should be owned by name and office. Concurrence should not be meaningless.
Need-to-know should not be converted into want-to-veto.
A mature national security system must be able to say yes, say no, or say not under these conditions. What it cannot afford is the slow death of necessary action through unsigned hesitation. Strategic surprise is a perishable commodity. Once lost, it cannot be recovered.
The enemy does not wait while Washington protects itself.
Secretary’s Decision Checklist
Secretary-Level Test
Authority: What statute, presidential authorization, executive directive, or military authority governs the proposed action?
Objective: What precise national objective does the mission serve, and what condition defines success?
Risk: What are the operational, intelligence, diplomatic, legal, congressional, and escalation risks?
Delay Cost: What will be lost if approval is delayed by 24 hours, 72 hours, one week, or one month?
Deconfliction: What CIA, DIA, NSA, State, country-team, and combatant-command equities are implicated?
Ownership: Who owns the decision, who owns execution, and who owns consequence management?
Written Objections: Which objections are specific and decision-relevant, and which are merely bureaucratic risk avoidance?
Compartmentation: Who genuinely needs operational detail, and who only wants veto visibility?
Conclusion:
We Are Challenged Globally, Daily, by 5th Generation Warfare
The stakes of this discussion extend far beyond the frustrations of operators, intelligence officers, diplomats, or policymakers.
The United States remains engaged in a continuous global competition in which hostile state actors and their proxies challenge American interests every day across military, intelligence, cyber, economic, informational, and political domains. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea do not wait for staffing transitions, committee reviews, or bureaucratic consensus before pursuing their objectives.
They exploit speed, ambiguity, deniability, and surprise. In such an environment, the Secretary of War, the Intelligence Community, Congress, and the Executive Branch share a solemn responsibility: not merely to oversee the nation’s most sensitive capabilities, but to preserve their effectiveness.
Oversight must remain rigorous, lawful, and accountable. Yet it must also recognize a fundamental reality of statecraft: capability delayed can become capability denied.
Strategic surprise is a wasting asset.
Opportunities rarely survive prolonged hesitation.
General George S. Patton once observed that “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”