Originally Posted by FliesWay2Much

An individual in those senior jobs in the Army intelligence world is primarily a staff director. He's worried about budgets, procurement, personnel, meeting finished intelligence needs of DoD and military leaders, and developing policy. He's very familiar with the intelligence community, particularly how to generate taskings and how to produce and analyze finished intelligence (including how to debate conclusions and recommendations in intelligence products). He has provided and approved countless entries in the president's daily brief. Most important, he has provided the non-biased, peer-reviewed intelligence necessary for senior leaders to make threat-based decisions. In years past, the forerunner to the TSA, the FAA Office of Civil Aviation Security (which functioned quite well, by the way) consistently had a career intelligence leader as the director or the deputy for years.

Assuming this rumor is true (haven't had the chance yet to check it out myself) and that he actually gets confirmed, I think this is a good thing for the American public. The TSA has had way too many cops in leadership positions, or purely irrelevant people (like Kippie). He certainly has the mindset to be able to question intelligence & threat-based decisions the TSA has made (if intelligence has been factored into ANY decision in the entire DHS?) and stop wasting resources on threats which don't exist. That's a good thing.

Because of his background, he's less likely to focus on retail security at airports because that's not his expertise. If he decides to get rid of strip search machines, it will be a threat-based decision. If he decides to keep them, it will be because he is spending time on something else.

His challenge will be that he will be surrounded by cops and other law enforcement careerists (including Nappy) who are his peers in most of the other DHS bureaus. He doesn't think like them and arrives at decisions from a completely different thought process. He will either become very frustrated or simply cut out of the inner circle.