We have appointed a military leader due to the fact that most of our Intelligence Community (IC) is military. And it needs strong organizational leadership abilities. Blair's firing (sudden resignation) was a mistake. If being blunt is not within the scope of this position or it comes across as being to harsh to the sensitivities of this administration, then too bad. Any mistakes made by the Office of Director of National Intelligence, should be absorbed, learned from and incorporated in new protocols. This zero defect mentality is what led us to 9/11 in the first place (in part).

While a lot of people would like the DNI to be a coordination function, it is actually only part of the job. The DNI is the leader of the IC. And it was a position long over due. The Director of Central Intelligence (DNI) was too big of a responsibility to also run the entire IC. As history has sadly demonstrated. The DNI has a great opportunity to strengthen our IC.

If we really want to fix our IC, we need to seriously look at fixing Counterintelligence. While Washington is in the 'Intelligence Must be Reformed' cycle our adversaries are steeling us blind.

Steven Johnson's comment about Congressional oversight is correct: perhaps incomplete in noting that the amount of time Congressmen and Senators devote to oversight of Executive Branch activities generally is significantly less than it was a couple of decades ago, but correct in what it does say. Congress acted in a bipartisan way to move pieces of the national security puzzle around the board after 9/11, but did little to change how it operates itself. It still has too many elected officials with bits and pieces of oversight authority. Actually, of all the aspects of the intelligence and national security policymaking process, Congressional oversight was probably the one that changed least during the last ten years.

On the other hand, with respect to his main argument, Johnson begs the question. It's true that John Negroponte and Michael McConnell had more harmonious relationships with intelligence agency heads than Dennis Blair seems to have had, and obviously Blair had problems with the President he served that his predecessors did not. Getting along with everybody, though, is not the point of the DNI position.

Did any of these men, though, improve the intelligence community's performance by being DNI -- as opposed, say, to what someone like McConnell could have done if the intelligence reforms had never happened and McConnell had been named DCI instead of Porter Goss? OK, that's an unfair question, but the point is clear enough.

Five years after the reforms, the best we can say about the intelligence reforms that created the DNI is that they may not have made things worse, and might someday make things better. To an outsider, it looks as if the reforms created a major Executive Branch official, overseeing an additional layer of bureaucracy, with responsibility to coordinate but no authority to make this happen. That doesn't look like success to me.

There is no perfect position or perfect set of authorities. The congress, and to a larger extent the American people, have no stomach for an all powerful intelligence czar. The idea gives us bigger chills than an attack by terrorists.

Nevertheless, you need someone who can lead. Clapper is more than capable enough to serve in that capacity. In ways that haven't been seen since George Tenet was the DCI, he can be the focal point of the president's intelligence apparatus. The previous DNIs were all good and patriotic men. But they were not as big a persona as George Tenet was. And despite his shortcomings, George filled the shoes better than those who have come after.

Blair, like McConnell before him, was a back room operator. The people saw very little of him. He didn't start out like Woolsey, but he ended up there. Unable to influence the President he worked for. You need a DNI who is tight with the President, highly visible with the workforce, and willing to use the bully pulpit to overcome the intransigence and uncooperativeness at sadly still permeates the community today.

Clapper is able to be that guy. Will he get the chance?

The problem isn't poor leadership, it's the entire system. THERE ARE 16 AGENCIES!! Sixteen agencies that all compete with one another for funding, resources, and prominence. The country needs a complete streamlining of its intelligence system. You need an agency for each Intelligence discipline or "INT", one for SIGINT, one for HUMINT and so on, plus one more agency that turns the information brought in by the INTs into intelligence products (i.e. National Intelligence estimates, and other analysis). This analysis agency would oversee the "INT" agencies that feed it information and provide them with their collection requirements. The military intelligence agencies in each branch of service would not be a part of this change since they focus on tactical level intelligence but could still leverage assistance from any of the INT agencies. Doing this would cut the number of intelligence agencies roughly in half. It would give each agency a clear and defined charter of what their left and right limits are which would do away with most of the interagency rivalries that you see today. It would also prevent one agency from hiding intelligence from another because all the information would flow into the analysis agency.

And Congress will do no effective oversight until they get off the payroll of lobbyists, special interests, foreign powers and organized crime.