Alessandro Politi was “present at the creation” in 1992, and on that occasion, while not a speaker, coined the term “intelligence minuteman” over dinner, and was instantly recognized as a thought leader. he went on to pioneer modern OSINT within Italy as well as the Western European Union.
Golden Candle Award: Mr. Alessandro Politi, Western European UnionOSS '93: Mr. Alessandro Politi, developer of “Intelligence Minuteman” concept and one of the leading advocates of open source intelligence within the Western European Union.
Click on the Frog to connect to his article about the “intelligence minuteman” concept as ultimately published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
Mr. Thomas Reynolds, the Deputy J-2 for the U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANCOM) provided an overview of all the places in the Third World where TRASCOM supports not just Special Operations and normal US military forces, but humanitarian assistance endeavors. As USMC and USSOCOM discovered in 1988, we do not have 1:50,000 combat charts for 90% of the Third World, and that is still largely true today (the vaunted shuttle mission came back with a lot of swiss cheese).
The short text summary and the slides are contained in the same document. What we have learned over the years is that the global providers of lift and logistics are the red-headed step-children of the government world, the last to receive proper intellience support, and the most likely to benefit hugely from Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Rare and Deep Insights into Intelligence Grid-Lock,
December 19, 2000
Loch Johnson
The opening quotation from Harry Howe Ransom says it all-“Certainly nothing is more rational and logical than the idea that national security policies be based upon the fullest and most accurate information available; but the cold war spawned an intelligence Frankenstein monster that now needs to be dissected, remodeled, rationalized and made fully accountable to responsible representatives of the people.”
Professor Johnson is one of only two people(the other being Britt Snider) to have served on both the Church Commission in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, and is in my view one of the most competent observer and commentator on the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community. The book is a tour d'horizon on both the deficiencies of today's highly fragmented and bureaucratized archipelago of independent fiefdoms, as well as the “new intelligence agenda” that places public health and the environment near the top of the list of topics to be covered by spies and satellites.
Highlights of this excellent work, a new standard in terms of currency and breadth, include his informed judgment that most of what is in the “base” budget of the community should be resurrected for reexamination, and that at least 20% of the budget (roughly $6 billion per year) could be done away with-and one speculates that this would be good news to an Administration actively seeking trade-offs permitting its promised tax cut program. His overviews of the various cultures within the Central Intelligence Agency, of the myths of intelligence, and of the possibilities for burden sharing all merit close review.
He does, however, go a bridge too far while simultaneously rendering a great service to the incoming Administration. He properly identifies the dramatic shortfalls in the open source information gathering and processing capabilities of the various Departments of the Federal government-notably the Department of State as well as the Department of Commerce and the various agencies associated with public health-but then he goes on to suggest that these very incapacities should give rise to an extension of the U.S. Intelligence Community's mission and mandate-that it is the U.S. Intelligence Community, including clandestine case officers in the field and even FBI special agents, who should be tasked with collecting open sources of information and with reporting on everything from disease to pollution. This will never work, but it does highlight the fact that all is not well with *both* the U.S. Intelligence Community *and* the rest of the government that is purportedly responsible for collecting and understanding open sources of information.
On balance I found this book to be a very competent, insightful, and well-documented survey of the current stresses and strains facing the U.S. national intelligence community. The conclusion that I drew from the book, one that might not be shared by the author, was that the U.S. Government as a whole has completely missed the dawn of the Information Age. From the National Security Agency, where too many people on payroll keep that organization mired in the technologies of the 1970's, to the U.S. State Department, which has lost control of its Embassies and no longer collects significant amounts of open source information, to the White House, where no one has time to read-we have completely blown it-we simply have not adapted the cheap and responsive tools of the Internet to our needs, nor have we employed the Internet to share the financial as well as the intellectual and time burdens of achieving “Global Coverage.” More profoundly, what this book does in a way I have not been able to do myself, is very pointedly call into question the entire structure of government, a government attempting to channel small streams of fragmented electronic information through a physical infrastructure of buildings and people that share no electronic connectivity what-so-ever, while abdicating its responsibility to absorb and appreciate the vast volumes of relevant information from around the globe that is not online, not in English, and not free.
It was not until I had absorbed the book's grand juxtaposition of the complementary incompetencies of both the producers of intelligence and the consumers of intelligence that I realized he has touched on what must be the core competency of government in the Information Age: how precisely do we go about collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information, and creating tailored intelligence, when we are all inter-dependent across national, legal bureaucratic, and cultural boundaries? This is not about secrecy versus openness, but rather about whether Government Operations as a whole are taking place with the sources, methods, and tools of this century, or the last. To bombs, bugs, drugs, and thugs one must add the perennial Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Mike Sandman, along with Jan Herring and Leonard Fuld, is arguably one of America's top commercial or competitive intelligence providers. He has in many ways defined the emergent industry, which still lacks sufficient appreciation for many factors including energy and environmental and human.
Click on the logo below to go to the Academy of Competitive Intelligence, which we consider to be the single best offering in English.
Brad, a respected scholar in his own right, was given unique access to all past publications of the CIA's internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, and has produced an absolutely lovely collection of the best thoughts inside CIA from 1955-1992, organized into sections for imagery intelligence collection, overt human intelligence collection, clandestine human intelligence collection, human intelligence and its consumers, the analysis function, analysis and its consumers, and counterespionage. I regard this book as an essential supplementary reading for teaching both students and practitioners.
Conservative Internationalists Provide the Game Plan,
December 7, 2000
Robert Kagan
his is a very worthy book, and should be much much higher in the popular sales ranking. I bought this book at the same time that I bought the more historically grounded “While America Sleeps”, and could not have asked for a better companion volume. Finally, I understand the forces that are tearing George W. Bush in two-on the one side, the conservative isolationists, who believe that we must reject internationalism in all forms, and eschew intervention or “911 missions” at all costs-and on the other side, the conservative internationalists, who by this excellent account have both a pragmatic and realistic grasp of the lessons of history, of the shrinking globe that we find in the present, and of the speed with which “regional” threats can become global challenges.The two introductory contributions, one on the national interest and global responsibility, the other on the differences between conservative isolationists and conservative internationalists and all others, are extraordinarily essential readings for anyone who hopes to understand the early days-and contradictory signals-of the next Administration. Individual chapters by very well-qualified experts cover the conservative internationalist view of China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Europe and NATO, Asian Allies, and Israel. More general chapters address the decline of America's armed forces and the strategic case for dealing with weapons proliferation. The book concludes with three truly essential readings for any citizen, student, businessman, bureaucrat, or policymaker: on morality and foreign policy by William Bennett, on statesmanship in the new century by Paul Wolfowitz, and on strength and will in historical perspective by Donald Kagan.
Well-footnoted and indexed, this is a very serious professional contribution to the rather lackluster national discussion about where our national security and foreign policy should be going. As one who previously advocated a change from 2+ major regional conflicts (MRC) to 1 MRC and three separate forces for dealing with crime, environmental and cultural movements, and electronic and economic warfare (1+iii), I am now fully persuaded, mostly by the Kagan's book “While America Sleeps” but also by this book, that we absolutely must go toward a 2+iii national security strategy.
My one concern about this book is that it completely ignores what is quaintly called Program 150-all that State Department, Peace Corps, Agency for International Development stuff. It also mentions intelligence and counterintelligence only in passing. Conservative internationalists clearly have the brain power and the strategic vision and the historical understanding to be vital protectors of America's interests, but they must expand their vision to go beyond guns and consider the potential contributions of both diplomatic and economic butter, and applied intelligence. There is in fact a need to have a very strong Presidential program that fully advances, in an integrated fashion, American investments in diplomacy, defense, transnational crime fighting, economic assistance including a Digital Marshall Plan, and cultural exchanges worthy of a great Nation. This book lacks an appreciation for all the “soft” stuff, but it covers three of the four bases very nicely. A “strong buy.”
