Leadership Quote by Stephen Cambone

That blandly futuristic phrasing is doing a lot of political work. Stephen Cambone, speaking as a national security insider, wraps a power claim in the language of planning: “working hard to think about” sounds modest, even bureaucratic, while it quietly asserts the right to define what “intelligence capabilities” should become. The sentence’s real engine is its time horizon. By leaping “not today but 15 to 20 years,” Cambone invites urgency without accountability: you can’t easily audit a forecast, but you can fund it, expand it, and grant it legal latitude in the name of preparedness.

The subtext is consolidation. “Combined needs” signals interagency fusion - CIA, Defense, NSA - a post-9/11 posture where stovepipes are treated as the original sin. In practice, “combined” often means centralized: shared databases, interoperable surveillance, unified analytic pipelines. It also preemptively reframes civil-liberties debates. If the requirement is set decades out, objections about overreach can be cast as shortsighted or naive about technological change.

Cambone’s diction is carefully noncommittal. He doesn’t say threats, enemies, or even terrorism; he says “capabilities,” the most elastic word in the security vocabulary. Capabilities are tools that can be repurposed, expanded, and retained after the crisis that justified them fades. The context is a government learning to treat intelligence as infrastructure - less a set of discrete operations than an enduring system to be built, upgraded, and normalized. The future-tense calm is the tell: this is how extraordinary powers get argued into permanence.