David Ignatius applauds CIA Director John Brennan for doing “what many of his predecessors at the agency surely dreamed of doing over the past few decades, which is to put the existing organizational chart in a shredder and redo it.”  

“His first big move is to create mission centers that will supplant the existing geographically based divisions. The model is the Counterterrorism Center, which showed that combining different disciplines under one roof produced both better targeted operations and sharper analyses.”  

“Brennan’s second major change is a new Directorate of Digital Innovation. This sounds like technobabble, but it’s a good idea. Essentially, it takes the existing Information Operations Center, widely judged to be a success, and puts it on steroids. Every aspect of intelligence, including covert action, recruiting agents and protecting officers’ covers, is now linked to information technology.”  

“Brennan’s final reform involves personnel management. He proposes a new ‘CIA University’ and other improvements. The goal should be to assess and develop talent as effectively as the military does, through its network of schools, training centers and promotion panels.”