Search: tactical versus strategic intelligence + Meta-RECAP

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An important question — the USA no longer does strategic intelligence and it has never done Whole of Government operational or tactical intelligence. The $60B secret world is largely worthless at all four levels of analysis:

STRATEGIC: Next Generation near, 100 years our far

OPERATIONAL: Whole of Government regional and threat/topic based campaign plans, harmonized at OMB level

TACTICAL: the here and now up to 72 hours out, not just military but Whole of Government AND multinational

TECHNICAL: not just systems acqusition but opportunity cost, return on investment, countermeasures, utility within the whole

We continue to recommend, as an aggregate of minds devoted to public intelligence in the public interest, that all four levels of intelligence by multinationalized, with the UN, NATO, USAID, and White SOF dominant at the strategic and operational levels, new multinational regional intelligence and operations centers dominant at the operational and technical levels, and new multinational joint task forces and Whole of Government tiger teams dominant at the tactical level. What we are doing now is expensive idiocy. It is not working for the 99%, only for the 1%. Corruption rule, rather than intelligence with integrity.

Furthermore, the US Government is incoherent because OMB does not manage and has no clue how to demand or provide holistic decision-support to integrated Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting. Taking DoD as a simple example, the savings and nation-wide benefits that could be achieved through enforcing environmental, energy, and health standards on DoD alone, would be monumental, and would migrate rapidly to the rest of government and down to state and local. Similarly, having a single adult oversee all government purchases of information technology, with an open source carrot in one hand and a studded whip in the other, would redirect US IT overnight — the current OMB information oversight position was castrated long ago, and has ZERO value to the government or the nation.

Counterintelligence is its own special 360 degree blend — it is not done in the USA. It is by far the most important and the most neglected element of intelligence — absent a fully functioning strategic, operational, tactical, and technical counterintelligence capability, nothing the rest of the intelligence community does is fully functional, even if they were perfect, which they are not (20% at best, negative at worst). When politicians and senior policy makers, including uniformed flag and civilian executive officers, are all corrupt to the bone or willing to lie to Congress and the public — or to tolerate Congressional corruption — the concept of intelligence with integrity is moot. Integrity is central to intelligence and all that it support.

Technology is not a substitute for thinking. The US IC as a general observation is all money and technology, almost no integrity and intelligence.

Finally, it is not possible to have smart spies in a stupid nation. EDUCATION is “root” and government LEGITIMACY is the enabler of effectiveness at all levels.