Responding to David Isenberg: Intelligence On Demand in a Mobile Device – Hardy Har Har Choke Cough Gag
Robert,
Your comments are absolutely correct. Here are some supplemental thoughts on this:
The use of mobile devices to provide intelligence to policy makers is a very superficial concept that ignores the more important question of content. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. IC is now primarily focused on institutional survival and growth. I am not sure that any U.S. President since President Eisenhower has considered intelligence as a key ingredient in policy development or strategic planning.
The NSA has been popular with most Presidents and JCS because it traditionally provides fragmentary snippets of information with no effort to actually analyze their meaning in a larger context. The same is true for the NGA. CIA “all source intelligence reporting” ceased to be important after President Nixon dissolved their Office of National Estimates. DIA continues to be an agency without a mission. And of course ODNI and DHS are political gestures that have no relevance to decision support intelligence.
An independent Open Source Intelligence Agency staffed by serious people who place integrity over institutional loyalty would be a threat to the rest of the IC. If such an agency approached the development of intelligence from a global, multinational context, its products would be impossible for any rational policy maker to ignore. For this reason don’t put any money on such an agency being created in our lifetimes.
Richard
ROBERT STEELE: If I were ever to have the opportunity–a stretch at this point–I am committed to a “soft landing” for every person with clearances, every civil servant, every contractor. The point is to take good people trapped in a bad system, and redirect them, with appropriate training and funding, toward doing the right thing right instead of the wrong thing “righter” (this is an oxymoron).
Imagine the value to every community across the land if we put adjunct intelligence officers into every high school, and set them free to create a Smart Nation? Imagine the value to every research program if we put adjunct intelligence officers in as outreach specialists, fostering the proven process of intelligence across disciplinary and domain lines?
I know, with absolute certainty and a modicum of humility, that US intelligence could be, should be, the catalyst for a national renaissance across the board. Integrity–such a wonderfully complex evocative word. Integrity.
See Also:
Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
