Robert Steele: The Craft of Intelligence – OLD vs. NEW

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UPDATED 18 January 2014

Intelligence Chief Describes Complex Challenges. America and the world are facing the most complex set of challenges in at least 50 years, the director of national intelligence told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence here today.

James R. Clapper Jr. said capabilities, technologies, know-how, communications and environmental forces “aren't confined by borders and can trigger transnational disruptions with astonishing speed.”

“Never before has the intelligence community been called upon to master such complexity on so many issues in such a resource- constrained environment,” he added.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr. and others accompanied Clapper during his testimony on Capitol Hill. Clapper spoke for all agencies in his opening statement.

All U.S. agencies are combating the complex environment and making sense of the threats by continuing to integrate the community and “by taking advantage of new technologies, implementing new efficiencies and, as always, simply working hard,” Clapper said.

Still, he said, all agencies are confronting the difficult fiscal environment.

“Maintaining the world's premier intelligence enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult,” the director said. “We'll be accepting and managing risk more so than we've had to do in the last decade.”

Terrorism and proliferation remain the first threats the intelligence agencies must face, he said, and the next three years will be crucial. [Read more: Garamone/AFPS/31January2012]

Tip of the Hat to AFCEA.

Below the Line: Craft of Intelligence for the 21st Century

steele formal high res — Robert David STEELE Vivas

The New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence were published in 2002 and ignored, just as our 1994 warning on the urgent need to invest, in 1994 dollars, one billion in cyber-security, was ignored. So today we spend $80 billion or more per year while producing “at best” 4% of what a major US consumer of intelligence needs, and we are spending at least $15 billion — probably closer to $75 billion a year when crude and ineffective “defenses” are tallied up — for cyber-security including offensive cyber-war.

The craft of intelligence is about outputs (decision support) and impacts (lives saved, costs reduced, constructive impacts enabled).

The craft of intelligence is predominantly but not exclusively about open sources and methods and it is about multinational information-sharing & sense-making (not bi-lateral to the nth).

The craft of intelligence is not federal, not secret, and not expensive. It is about harnessing the distributed cognitive surplus of all eight tribes of intelligence; about creating the Open Source Agency and network; and about making intelligence not just an inherent function of command, but an inherent function of citizenship.

The craft of intelligence demands a strategic analytic model that enables the eradication of all ten threats to humanity while also enabling the harmonization of all planning, programming, and budgeting across all core policy areas — it enables Whole of Government effectiveness, and it enables regional and global deconfliction and collaboration using shared information and intelligence as the foundation for a shared view of the world. In its ultimate configuration, it is a living World Brain and Global Game in which Panarchy — the connection of all minds with all information in all languages all the time — replaces tyranny, corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse. Put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug is invisible. This is the new craft of intelligence.

See Especially:

2013 Intelligence Future
2012 Academy Briefing