On-Site Inspection Agency - OSIA

On January 15, 1988, President Ronald Reagan directed the Secretary of Defense to establish the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), its mission was to carry out the on-site inspection and escort responsibilities of the United States under the provisions of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (lNF) Treaty. Signed on December 8, 1987, by President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the INF Treaty enjoined the two countries to eliminate all ground launched missiles (approximately 2.700 missiles) with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. National teams of inspectors would monitor and report on the elimination of these missile systems and other significant provisions of the treaty. On-site inspections were a major component of this and all subsequent phases of the treaty. They had immediate significance, both as a barometer for measuring adherence to the treaty and as a precedent for entering into future arms control treaties and agreements. Consequently, the purpose of President Reagan's January 15, 1988, directive was to define the INF Treaty mission and to fix responsibility for the U.S. government's on-site inspection and escort mission in a new Department of Defense organization: the On-Site Inspection Agency. Eleven days after the President's directive, on January 26, 1988, William H. Taft I V, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, established OSIA as a separate operating agency in the Department of Defense.

The new agency would have three deputy directors-a Principal Deputy Director, a Deputy Director for International Negotiations, and a Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. The new organization's first charter stipulated that OSIA would have two principal responsibilities:

• To manage and coordinate the U.S. INF Treaty on-site inspection activities in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and

• To manage and coordinate all United States activities associated with the Soviet Union's on-site inspections of United States' INF facilities in the United States, Belgium, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

On February l, 1988, Brigadier General Roland Lajoie, U.S. Anny, became the first Director, On-Site Inspection Agency. The INF Treaty mission largely determined the new agency's initial organizational structure. Responsibility for planning, operational training and conducting on-site inspection and escort missions was lodged in OSIA's operations directorate. The directorate had two components: an inspection division, which prepared for and conducted U.S. on-site inspections at the 130 Soviet INF missile sites in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia: and an escort division, which was responsible for coordinating the escorting of Soviet on-site inspection teams at the 31 U.S. INF missile sites located in Western Europe and the United States. The new agency’s portal monitoring directorate had responsibility for conducting and managing the continuous on-site portal inspections.


As always, artworks featuring the insignia are available via my “Military Insignia” galleries from FineArt America and RedBubble. You can just follow the links in the article to get to the corresponding galleries.

To active duty or reserve military personnel, veterans and their family members: I grant an explicit permission to download the above images to be used for non-profit/non-commercial and charitable causes, benefiting troops and their families, as well as for non-commercial internal duty-specific purposes, such as unit website design, training materials and presentations.

The above information was exerpted from the book by Joseph P. Harahan called ON-SITE INSPECTIONS UNDER THE INF TREATY.