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Intelligence Reform - Seminar 1 |
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Revolution in Intelligence Affairs: Transforming Intelligence for Emerging Challenges Synopsis Seminar #1 Survey Intelligence Opportunities and Shortfalls: Question is not whether the Intelligence Community is broken or not, but how do you leverage the political will for the good and not for the bad. Question is how it should happen in a productive way…given that something will be done…need to address it at a more detail level…what should be done two, three, four, five levels down...that will really contribute and help….and what should they not do because it will break something that does work today. There is no correlation between increased collection and increased output….focus should be on giving the decision-making quality product….American solution to problem-solving within the government is to throw more resources at it….every solution for the IC is just to put more resources, just buy more of what’s there today? How can we come up with new methods by which existing organizations either go away or work together? Need a systematic (holistic) look at the organizational change required. Old concepts driving stovepipes/continuing stovepipes…owning data empowers you. It is not necessarily true today. Agencies/departments say that they have to own the vehicles that make the data come together….Question if that is true? Organization structured so that data and knowledge are still produced in this structured way. Question the idea that the national intelligence and the tactical intelligence need to be in the same report. No problem with DOD holding their own intelligence and the national intelligence community to have their own….should not consider DOD intelligence supporting the tactical commander and to have the national intelligence community supporting the President. …that’s not duplicative. Investigation into just what data is germane topic….way we are set up structurally constrains the way how we view data. Issue complicated by need to have the skill sets required and which are unique to the Intelligence Community. Distinction between professional specialization and institutional stove piping. Asking wrong questions…not necessarily how do we make NSA better, DIA better, but real issue is how do we do intelligence better…how do we do HUMINT or cryptology better. Need to create a truly clandestine service...That is a HUMINT clandestine operation that is not visibly identifiably connected with Langley or intelligence in general…..got to aggressively combine human penetration, unmanned penetration with new technology for close surveillance. Believes that culprits in outing covert officer…is at Langley not downtown. Need to restore the role of science, scientists, scientific thinking, scientific criticism, in the business of national intelligence, in all its aspects…. US Government IC no longer the unique possessor of knowledge…challenge is getting results that are value added If product is treated like a free good, demand goes to infinity and supply goes to zero. Need to address the pathologies…things that are wrong internally Need to bring science back into DI..erosion of the role of science in all aspects, particularly analysis. Intelligence challenge…do not know enough (about adversaries/threats) to even ask the question if we are on top of the challenge…do we know enough o meet the demands of the situation and the policy for addressing it?...need new approaches to security classification, clearances, accountability….especially important for the exploitation of open-source data and especially open-source people. System is dysfunctional…bureaucracy of security system acts as impediment to providing information to end-users with legitimate need. Non-mission essential training is burdensome (i.e. Sensitivity training to lawyering). Huge increase in the number of lawyers in general counsel office (2 to 160 in 1990) Congressional oversight…insufficiently muscular and excessively costly Fixing national intelligence is only one of the broken areas…nation-building, security provision, government creation, economy building are …need to get on top of nation building, public diplomacy..diplomacy….National security decision-making needs to be fixed in a process sense. Failure to plan for the aftermath of victory is a failing of decision-making apparatus as well as high policy. National Intel reform will be competing with dollars and political capital with all the other things that need fixing. Primary mission of analysis is to get the best answer to an intelligence question given the data available, the expertise available, and the knowledge base available. Second big mission is to identify priorities for intelligence collection, processing, and analysis…especially the non-fashionable ones. Sometimes intelligence has to be responsible for looking ahead. (Speculate) Databases are 10-20 years out of date (example Cuba)…Should be identifying priorities even the non-fashionable ones with the policy makers with or without the policy maker. Community should assess the adequacy of total performance on those priorities in the light of the situation, the degree of command of the subject matter, the degree of being on top of the subject of an intelligence issue…Need to be able to say ‘you are trying to do things that we are insufficiently positioned to support you on in this intelligence area and we have to fix it. Assessing the adequacy of total performance on those priorities in the light of the situation, the degree of command of the subject matter, the degree of being on top of the subject of an intelligence issue. There’s a mindset problem. Can I step outside of my mindset and look at it a different way. Not using the power of things available….i.e. latent semantic indexing….commercial world is putting this stuff to work much faster than the Intelligence Community…and the commercial world isn’t even that swift. Got to find ways to make the burden of current intelligence lighter so as to free up more resources for deeper analysis and empowerment of same. IT environment can address the dimension of connecting people. Human networking, communication, connecting to the right people inside and outside so that when an analyst starts to drift his PDB the system tells him…to facilitate human networking across organizational lines across disciplines quickly and spontaneously. Networking that’s transient or lasting depending upon the need…to get the best answer, influence collection, and processing as well as the analytical product and for helping to reach judgments about performance .. We have to move from total risk avoidance in security…to risk management. This means a change of attitude as well as achievement…getting the right IT environment in associated security regimes for open source people, data and exploitation is really tight…it is not just technical or IT related issue, it’s an environmental issue…it’s a work environment issue. Need to come up with a new paradigm for security that is less based on rules, hierarchy….counts more on indoctrinated judgment, trust and accountability…a cultural shift. How do we do the right things and keep the seniors from doing the wrong thing? The constitutional construct for the Intelligence Community is a work of genius. In some ways more applicable to the post-Cold War situation we are facing….the post-post Cold War and the Gulf War…because of its federated, diverse home…..main flaw is that the central agency does not regard itself as central but as more important and separate….that is wrong...in violation of the Constitution. And they have gotten away with it….it’s a federation of intelligence organizations that serve mostly the needs of policy agencies. Needs of DCI…good working relationship with SECDEF, in terms of volume and priority, his department is the most important customer...he needs a critical understanding of where his deficiencies are, and he needs a vision for radical improvement…he has an obligation to make INR what it has historically been…one of the strongest, and certainly bang for the buck components of the intelligence community. In a bureaucracy, risk taking is something that tends to die over time. Collection DO kind of risk has changed recently (as considered within the history of intelligence and history of human collection intelligence)...it is a relatively new phenomenon that we have decided it is easier to pay someone else to go into harm’s way…that is easier to pay a partner with a sister intelligence service or liaison service and use their guy to do the work. This is taking more and more the easy way out. Our traditional approach was to go into harm’s way. We rely solely on recruiting people from the inside instead of putting our own guys on the inside. As a result, we lose the best guys. Analysts don’t have access to DO operational traffic. As a result, analysts don’t have the information. DO reporting cables are important because they contain judgments that the analysts need to know. Agency analyst have almost impossible task of getting routine access to DO operational traffic. Ownership of data is still viewed as power and the empires are reluctant to give the power up even within their own organization, much less in servicing customers…that is a cultural issue...it’s a pathology…really a sickness. If the organization demands a strong leader to be successful, then it’s the fault of the organization …that’s what is wrong with the current structure. How do we advise those in charge to the underneath so that it really does survive or do well with a unique DNI? How do we capture ourselves relate to the change in the nature of warfare. Fundamental causation is that we are inability to get down to the root problems and then derive from that the recommended areas for change. (Example, discussion on lack of foresight to develop Arabic studies programs is great …however that doesn’t address the nature of the change of warfare so that we are actually transitioning the same limitations ...addressing the symptoms not the cause) DOD no longer the most important customer…Modern US IC conceive din 1947 basically supported organizations that had war fighting missions (i.e. 7 th Army in Europe, STRATCOM. They had a clear understanding of what their mission was.) Now the nature of the mission has radically changed, but the organizations in charge of the “changed” mission have refused to take the change seriously. DOD no longer the most important customer and DOD has to understand that, the IC community must understand that and the American people have to understand that. This is necessary so that when the shift in IC community priorities occurs, they will understand what we are doing. The difficulty is dealing with multiple priorities (i.e. Troops in Afghanistan and Olympics in Salt Lake City.) Need to turn our attention to deal with the Intelligence Community comprehensively, morally, and legally as it relates to the domestic infrastructure. The Intelligence Community cannot afford to fail, because when they fail, the nation really suffers. Historically, more and more intelligence was captured by DOD. War on terrorism is very similar to war on drugs. Had some great tactical successes in the war on drugs, but failed badly at it. And now we are not doing it because we are fighting the war on terrorism. It is a strategic issue. It is a social problem. The realization of this insight is discouraging because of the way we are handling it. Ethnography section Difference between error and failure. In most cases, what has been categorized as intelligence failure has been intelligence error. Intelligence analysis is a science. Analysis itself is a scientific process. It’s about confirmation of a hypothesis. The removal of the Soviet Union as a target had the same effect on the analytic culture of the CIA that the meteor strike had on the dinosaurs. AN entire culture disappeared over the course of the ensuring 36 months to 48 months…an entire culture disappeared analytically. It was replaced by a culture that no longer had a fixed target. It no longer had the same identifiable sense of purpose. HR departments in the organizations don’t track the demographics of their personnel…cannot answer the questions related to what kind of people (skill sets/experience) that their personnel have. There is an absence of a coherent and rigorous requirement process, which went unnoticed because it was replace by rapid iterative contact between consumers and producers…that looked like a coherent requirements process…got trapped into a cycle of responding rather than a coherent strategic look at what we knew and needed to know. There needs to be a close working association between policy-makers and intelligence so that policy-makers can understand the intelligence, and so that intelligence community can understand what the policy makers are going to need in order to formulate these policies….the job of intelligence is to assist the policy makers to formulate and execute foreign policy. A lot of intelligence people don’t realize that policy-makers are going to make decisions whether they have information or not, and it’s always better to have information. It would be far better if we could work the information into the system so that when questions are asked, we are prepared to answer that. It isn’t good enough to be insightful into specific areas of national security and to be hopelessly ignorant and unhelpful in an area that the decision maker needs to have in order to make appropriate policy decision. Lesson for intelligence analyst… In order to change someone’s mind, you better be able to make a case that’s not questionable so that they can take some action. ..or someone who wants to take a specific action, to convince them not to take that action. Need to have separate analytical processes; 1.) to determine analytical conclusions and 2.) to measure the confidence of the conclusions…that is really very hard for the intelligence community to do. Need to have a separate process that determines the confidence you have in the judgment…separate process from determining the confidence that you have in the judgment…otherwise a powerful person can grandstand on something and influence the entire process. We have unwillingly (unwittingly) built into our collection of analysis process a bias that really colors our judgments, has le to intelligence failures, and will take a lot of work to overcome.. We tell our collectors more and more precisely what to collect….and that is exactly what they collect. Is that are fair representation of all the information that is out there in the real world? Biases are interjected and we don’t talk about it…we ignore it. Collectors get rewarded based on how much time they spend on priority targets. Thus it is more worthwhile for the collector to work on priority collection targets than to do independent searches. The chances of finding something of high priority are low so it falls below the lowest of priorities. Intentional reduction…we do not place sufficient value on generating alternative hypothesis….In the requirements process, the data probably only supports one, maybe two hypotheses because they have been told exactly what to collect. Need to aim the direction of the requirements collection process. Important to have good sound basis for the use of open source. Need to collect that and keep it around for history, because it does document history and the documents change a lot. Need to tell collectors that we want them to provide us a lot. They should provide us with what we often know, not just what we think we want to know. We need broad comprehensive tasking to perform independent collection to do rigorous hypotheses testing…only then will analysis be a trusted influence in the intelligence process. There is no peer review and no hypotheses testing.
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