The Military’s Top Spy Will Be a Woman

The Military’s Top Spy Will Be a Woman

·        Introduction

For the primary time in history, a embellished feminine officer is poised to become succeeding director of the Defense intelligence service, the military’s main spying organization. If she gets the job, Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, presently the senior operative within the Army, can become one in all the foremost powerful ladies in each the ...

or the primary time in history, a decorated female officer is poised to become the next director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s main spying organization. If she gets the job, Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, currently the senior intelligence officer in the Army, will become one of the most powerful women in both the intelligence community and the U.S. military. It would additionally leave her poised to at least one day ascend to a fair additional prestigious post.

Running the DIA — which has a multi-billion budget and a workforce of more than 17,000 civilian and military personnel — would typically be the last stop in an officer’s decades-long career. But for Legere, it’s conceivably a stepping stone to an even bigger job running the National Security Agency and serving as the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, which oversees all military cyber defense and warfare. Legere has already been on the place for that position, and was passed over not because a lack of qualifications, current and former officials said, but because an Army general was already within the post, and by tradition, it was time for the job to go to a Navy admiral.

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Indeed, Legere’s resume makes her a natural candidate for National Security Agency director — it’s much a carbon of the agency’s previous chief, Gen. Keith Alexander — and there’s precedent for a military intelligence director carrying out his military career with a final flip at the National Security Agency. If Legere were eventually to urge that job, it would come with a fourth star and the enormous power and prestige of running the nation’s largest — if most controversial — spying agency and overseeing all of the military’s growing array of cyber forces.

Today, there square measure additional ladies serving as senior officers within the nation’s intelligence than ever before. Women currently serve as directors of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, and the deputy director of the CIA and the executive director of the NSA (the No. 3 position) are women.

Legere began her career within the Army once finishing the University of recent Hampshire’s corps program in 1982. Her initial assignment was as a platoon leader with a military intelligence battalion, and Legere later served in intelligence posts in Germany and South Korea. She worked her high the career ladder, punching all the requisite tickets for an aspiring flag officer, including multiple tours at the Pentagon. More recently she served as a senior intelligence leader in Iraq.

Legere’s career has not been without controversy. She, beside different high Army officers, has backed a multi-billion dollar Army cloud computing program called the Distributed Common Ground System, which critics in Congress say costs far too much cash and has did not give effective intelligence to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has withheld from Congress a report that shows a more cost-effective, commercial software program can perform many of the same tasks as the Army’s preferred system, undercutting the arguments Legere and different high officers have advanced for years.

Still, she has broad support from current and former officers, significantly those that have worked together with her most directly.

"She’s a visionary leader, not only great at being an intelligence officer but also focused on how to efficiently manager manpower and resources," said Terry Roberts, a former deputy director of armed service intelligence World Health Organization served with Legere once she was running Associate in Nursing intelligence brigade in South Korea.

Roberts says that Legere was as comfy operating with analysts and technology as she was excavation into the weeds of the budget method. Those skills will come in handy at the DIA, where Flynn, the outgoing chief, was faulted for micromanaging his staff and having big ideas but little follow-through.

Legere additionally contains a background in technology and human intelligence gathering — 2 essential parts of the DIA’s work. In 2004, she was the commander of the Army’s 501st Military Intelligence Brigade, in Asian nation, during a high-tech experiment dubbed Operation Morning Calm, in which analysts used new information sharing and analysis software package to spy on a three-month long North Korean military exercise. At the time, Legere told a newsperson that the new intelligence systems diode to Associate in Nursing "exponential" improvement within the quantity of your time it took analysts to crunch knowledge and create reports.

In 2006, Legere was promoted to assistant chief of workers for U.S.forces in Korea, an assignment that was also a prerequisite for a senior post. Two years later, she was sent off to Iraq to function the deputy chief of workers for intelligence for the U.S.-led coalition, commanding about 1,000 employees in an intelligence center in Baghdad. A brigadier, she was one in all the 2 highest-ranking ladies in Iraq at the time. As a part of her duties, Legere oversaw a program to coach Iraqi ladies as spies so as to assist move widows World Health Organization became suicide bombers to penalize their husbands’ deaths at the hands of U.S. forces.

By the time Legere arrived, the sectarian violence that had overrun the country in 2006 and 2007 had for the most part subsided, thanks partially to improved intelligence analysis by U.S. forces, that helped to pull together or kill suicide bombers, terrorists, and insurgents. At the time, Legere told a newsperson she was anticipating Iraq’s future. "We’re not there yet, but I think we will get there,