The origins of the Army's Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence can be traced all the way back to 1885 when the Army first established a Military Information Division within the Adjutant General's Office as a permanent peacetime intelligence organization. After 1889, the Military Information Division began to receive reports from a growing network of military attaches sent to overseas capitals. In 1903, when the Army created a General Staff, the Division was upgraded in status and became the General Staff's Second Division. However, in 1908 the Second Division was consolidated with the Third Division, which was responsible for war plans and training, and under peacetime conditions, the intelligence function soon lapsed.In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, the Army was effectively without an intelligence organization.
The situation was remedied by the strenuous efforts of Major (later Major General) Ralph VanDeman, who quickly organized a Military Intelligence Section within the War College Division of the General Staff. This organization quickly expanded. By the end of the war, it had become a full division of the General Staff and was headed by a brigadier general, while its activities had expanded to include codebreaking,conducting counterintelligence operations, and operating the military censorship organization. Once the country returned to peace, however, the Army's commitment to intelligence waned. Due to Congressionally-imposed restrictions on the number of general officers permitted to serve on the General Staff, the Military Intelligence Division was normally headed by a colonel. The Division's sources of intelligence were limited,and when the Army Signal Corps succeeded in breaking the Japanese diplomatic machine cipher in 1940,the information derived from intercept was so closely held that only the Army G-2 and two other officers had access to the source. As a result, the Division's intelligence estimates were prepared without any SIGINT input.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there was a general reorganization of the War Department General Staff. All operating functions of G-2 were placed under a separate Military Intelligence Service (MIS), and the Military Intelligence Service created a tightly compartmented Special Branch to evaluate (and later,disseminate) intelligence product derived from SIGINT. As the war went on, communications intelligence became the single most important intelligence source, and the Special Branch rapidly expanded. Finally, in the summer of 1944, MIS was reorganized, and SIGINT made available to additional intelligence analysts.In late 1944, MIS was given operational control over the Signal Security Agency, the Army's main codebreaking organization at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia. When the Army Security Agency was created in September 1945, it was given the status of a field operating activity under the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2.
In 1946, another Army-wide reorganization dissolved the independent MIS and reestablished the Military Intelligence Division as an operating agency under a Director of Intelligence. The title of the head of the Army's intelligence staff was changed to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, in 1950 and to Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) in 1956. The 1956 redesignation was a step backward for Army intelligence,since the other General Staffheads were advanced to the Deputy
Chief of Staff level. Meanwhile, the electronic warfare mission had been assigned to the Army SecurityAgency; as a consequence, the Army Security Agency had been resubordinated from the Assistant Chiefof Staff, G-2, to the Chief of Staff of the Army.
A major change in the status of the Army intelligence staff took place during the tenure of Robert S.McNamara as Secretary of Defense. McNamara's decision to create a unified Defense Intelligence Agency(DIA) in 1961 resulted in the transfer of ACSI's responsibilities for intelligence production to the new agency. Since personnel transitioned along with the function,the end result was a massive reduction in the ACSI staff. DIA also took over control of the attache system and the Army's strategic intelligence school.However, in the late 1960's, the Army gradually edged back into the intelligence production field, as DIAr ealized it could not satisfy all service-specific needs.
In 1969, the new Army Chief of Staff, General William Westmoreland, directed that the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence divest itself of direct involvement in operational activities. Inresponse, ACSI resubordinated diverse counterintelligence, administrative, security, imagery, and human intelligence elements previously under his direct control to the U.S. Army Intelligence Command. However,as a result of the disestablishment of USAINTC in 1974, some of these reverted to OACSI. Additionally,OACSI now commanded a number of field operating agencies involved in intelligence production, briefing,and dissemination.
The organization of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command in 1977 allowed the ACSI
once more to divest himself of operational responsibilities and center his attention on providing intelligence planning, programming, and staff supervision to the Army. However, OACSI became involved in the intelligence production field yet once more when a new Army Intelligence Agency was created in 1984 as a field operating activity under ACSI's command. Even after the discontinuance of AIA in 1992, the Army intelligence staff continued to exercise operational control over the production elements now resubordinated to INSCOM
In 1987, Army intelligence reached a significant milestone when the position of ACSI was upgraded to that of Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. The change reflected the importance that the Army now placed on its intelligence component and restored Army intelligence to the position of equality on the Army staff which it had enjoyed until 1956. Most recently, the DCSINT has launched an Intelligence Integration Initiative (I3), under the terms of which ODCSINT will realign functions with INSCOM to bring about greater efficiency and achieve the personnel economies made necessary by a downsizing Army.