Before Sept. 11 skyrocketed Donald Rumsfeld to the top of the charts, he was drawing grumbles within the Pentagon for his contradictory messages. The uniformed brass charged that Rummy was demanding the services operate seamlessly in implementing new unilateralist and aggressive policies, while at the same time setting those same services against one another for failing to meet the goals of his lean and mean, highly automated fighting forces.

Although the skeptics were silenced by the victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, the unsettling trends continued, capped this year by the forced removal of the Army secretary and the move of James Roche from Air Force to Army. Now, Rumsfeld is applying the same divide-and-conquer rule to communications intelligence. The impact for systems EEs working at prime contractors should be felt within a few months.

The new policy of space unilateralism (see May 19, page 18) was spearheaded by the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Peter Teets. On Aug. 11, a cover story on NRO in the conservative U.S. News & World Report chided Teets for poor management and fiscal control, a problem that arises within NRO every few years, since the agency has to maintain secret reserve funds of several billion dollars to deal with classified satellite programs that go awry.

U.S. News author Doug Pasternak revealed that Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet have created a new, classified satellite-systems-engineering office within the CIA to deal with NRO's alleged poor performance. This fits with the recommendation of a presidential commission on NRO from November 2000, with one important difference: The commission suggested creating a secret systems-engineering office within NRO for advanced programs. Rumsfeld decided to take it out of the agency and place it within the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.

We've seen such a structure before. Through the '60s and '70s, the CIA and NRO designed competing architectures for signals and imaging satellites. The two intelligence agencies became bitter enemies, to the point where one NRO director refused to launch satellites designed by the CIA. Thanks to Rumsfeld, we've gone back to the future with another dual-headed beast. Once again it is likely to lead to more waste, backbiting and jealousies in technical intelligence.

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