The NSA Is Tearing Up Its Org Chart. Gen. Rudd Wants Five New Mission Centers for AI, China, Cyber, Combat Support and Global Intelligence Running by Mid-October.

The National Security Agency, the largest of America's intelligence agencies with more than 30,000 military and civilian employees at Fort Meade, Maryland, is about to be reorganized around five missions instead of its existing directorates. Army Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, who has run the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command since his confirmation in March, told senior officials this month that the agency will stand up new mission centers for artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support and global intelligence, according to reporting by The Washington Post and The Record.

The timeline is the striking part. Mission directors are expected to submit their organizational redesigns by the end of September. Rollout begins in mid-October. Full operating capacity is targeted for mid-January 2027, roughly four months after the plan was announced. By comparison, the last major restructuring, the NSA21 plan launched under Director Mike Rogers in 2016, was given a two-year runway, consolidated the agency into six directorates, and by most internal accounts was never fully completed. A second effort at the start of the current administration, known internally as EVO25, was abandoned.

Each of the five new centers will be run by a newly elevated "mission director" holding authorities comparable to an NSA deputy director. Rudd told senior officials that some of those leaders may be recruited from outside the agency, a prospect that has unsettled career staff given the director's own unconventional path to the job through the Army's special operations community rather than signals intelligence. Some center heads had reportedly been selected by mid-September, with internal announcements expected as soon as this week.

The agency's most storied hacking unit is being folded into the new structure. Tailored Access Operations, founded in 1997 and stripped of its name in the 2016 reorganization, was reconstituted by Rudd earlier this year. It will sit under the global intelligence mission director and is receiving a significant budget increase for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The fate of other recent creations, such as the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center that works with defense contractors, remained unclear.

Former officials who spoke to the Post were skeptical of the pace. One said Rudd had "admitted that they don't know how they are going to do it, so they are going to rush into reversible decisions, in case it is wrong." Another described a recruiting scramble: "They are begging people to come back, especially leaders."Officials acknowledged the rapid realignment will "break things" that will have to be fixed on the fly.

Rudd has framed the overhaul around speed, arguing that intelligence has to reach military commanders faster, followed by scale, innovation and integration. He reports to both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton under the dual-hat arrangement that also makes him head of Cyber Command. Since taking over he has pushed AI adoption hard inside the agency, rolling out an internal desktop assistant called "Ask Mary" and continuing to use Anthropic's frontier model despite the Pentagon's restrictions on the company.

The China and AI centers reflect where Washington believes the contest is heading. U.S. officials have grown increasingly worried about how quickly Beijing is closing the gap in artificial intelligence, and the NSA's own public warnings this year have focused on Chinese firms distilling American models. Whether a four-month reorganization can make the agency faster without breaking the parts that already work is the bet Rudd is making.