Obama's NSC Will Get New Power

James L. Jones Jr., center, before the Senate Armed Services committee.
Doug Mills/ The New York Times

From The Washington Post:

Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body.

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.

Read more ....

My Comment: The intent is clear. All intelligence information is to be centralized into the NSC before the President gets to see it. Will this make the entire process more efficient and accurate in assessing world threats .... hmmmm ... I would have to say no.

Good intelligence can always break through the bureaucracy and the layers of officials that screen this information before the decision makers get it. Changing the office chart will not change this one bit. My only hope is that it would not delay it.