Who Will Stand the Next Watch?

Our republic still needs people willing to tell power what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear.

As the United States marks its 250th year, the easiest article for me to write would be another account of institutional damage to the U.S. intelligence community. I have written many since January 2025.

I have had no shortage of data. Last week, for example, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte announced another round of cuts and restructuring at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

(bilalulker/iStock)

But as I thought about what this anniversary week means for national security, a different question came to mind: not only what today’s leaders are doing to our intelligence agencies, but whether the next generation will still see it as a mission worth serving.

That question comes to me most directly from my students (I teach at Georgia Tech). They read the headlines. They see the firings of intelligence officers, the suspicion cast on expertise, and the repeated attempts to bend institutions toward political affirmation rather than independent judgment. They understand that public service has never been insulated from politics, but they are asking something harder than whether the intelligence community is hiring. They are asking whether service in such an environment is still honorable, useful, or wise.

It is a fair question. It deserves more than a pat patriotic answer.

I began my government career in 1996, during the Clinton administration. I served under presidents from both parties, including administrations whose policies I did not always support and candidates for whom I did not vote. Intelligence officers are not hired to ratify the instincts of a party or spare policymakers from difficult facts. They are hired to help decision-makers understand reality before decisions are made.

My analytic judgments at times sparked frustration rather than praise from senior officials, not because of the quality of the assessment but because my objective conclusions ran counter to their preferred reality. But that was my job.

My own shorthand for that work has always been to “bound uncertainty.” Intelligence rarely eliminates doubt. It narrows it. It tells a president, Cabinet secretary, combatant commander, or ambassador what is known, what is not known, what is likely, what is possible, and what would have to be true for a competing assessment to hold.

That is not policy advocacy. It is decision support.

Intelligence is also a discipline of restraint. The intelligence officer does not get to decide what the country should do. But the officer does have a duty to make sure those who decide cannot honestly claim they were uninformed.

That distinction matters now because the pressure on the intelligence community is not only institutional. It is cultural. The danger is not simply that one office is cut, one leader is removed, or one assessment is ignored. The deeper danger is that professional intelligence becomes understood as just another partisan instrument — useful when it confirms power, suspect when it does not.

If that understanding takes root, the damage will outlast any one administration and will require concerted, long-term effort to undo.

Flawed reorganizations can be reversed. Offices can be rebuilt. Authorities can be restored. Harder to recover is a generation of capable young Americans deciding that the profession is no longer worth their time.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies do not run on wiring diagrams. They run on people willing to do difficult work without applause. Analysts who test assumptions. Collectors who understand risk. Technologists who can see possibility and vulnerability. Lawyers who know that speed is not a substitute for legality. Managers who protect tradecraft even when political incentives point the other way.

No one should enter that “unique” world expecting purity. There have never been perfect presidents, perfect policies, or perfect intelligence leaders. The Cold War produced abuses that required investigation and reform. The end of the Cold War brought reductions and uncertainty. September 11, 2001, exposed catastrophic failures and operational abuses. Iraq damaged public trust in intelligence judgments. Edward Snowden forced a reckoning over secrecy, surveillance, and democratic consent.

Young officers should not join because they imagine themselves rescuing the institution single-handedly. That is romantic nonsense. Institutions are not saved by personal virtue alone. They are sustained by habits: rigor, honesty, discipline, courage, and the willingness to tell a powerful person that the evidence does not support what he wants to say.

That is why my answer to students remains yes. Not because the environment is easy. Not because the institution is flawless. Not because service guarantees influence. They should go because the republic will always need serious people inside the room where uncertainty is being translated into judgment and within the institutions themselves when unwise or illegal actions are being contemplated.

The oath you take when joining the federal government as a soldier or a civil servant is not to a president. It is not to an administration. It is not to a director, a party, or a policy outcome. It is to the U.S. Constitution. That principle can sound ceremonial — until it is tested. Then it becomes the difference between serving power and serving the country.

The founders did not create the modern intelligence community. That world would come much later, shaped by global war, nuclear rivalry, terrorism, cyber threats, and strategic competition. But the founders did create a republic that depends on informed judgment. A democracy cannot make hard choices if its leaders are shielded from facts or if its professionals decide the arena is too compromised to enter.

This Fourth of July, the argument over intelligence reform will continue. It should. Budgets, authorities, oversight, and structure matter. So does the risk of politicization. But the next 250 years will not be shaped only by those now trying to weaken institutions. They will also be shaped by those who decide whether damaged institutions are still worth entering — and repairing.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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