The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
This was the basic OSINT cell recommended to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1990. We still need to get to where every Agency and every major Command and every partner across each of the other seven tribes of intelligence has such a cell, and they are all linked in a global Open Source Information System – External (OSIS-X) that is NOT controlled by the USA.
Hard to believe, but the U.S. Intelligence Community still does not do holistic analysis, in part because most of what the U.S. Government actually needs in the way of decision-support is not secret and has nothing to do with really expensive improbable threats.
ANY factor can be put in the center–the point is that ALL factors must be analyzed at ALL times.
As with all graphics this remains the intellectual property of Robert Steele.
This is the highest level depiction of the Expeditionary Environment analytic model created by the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIC) on the basis of Robert Steele's first graduate thesis on the remediation of revolution across multiple dimensions. With deep help from the Warfighting Center, this model ultimately defined 144 mission area factors, and in warfighter terms, three to five degrees of difficulty for each of those factors. To the best of our knowledge, no such model exists within the U.S. Intelligence Community, nor is this model still in use at MCIA.
First presented in Canada in 1994, this was the first depiction of how out-of-date the existing government intelligence communities are. They are hierarchical Weberian stove-pipes out of touch with reality and anyone who is actually steeped in reality.
The old intelligence paradigm is on the left–a very controlled hierarchical stovepipe process that is best characterized as twelve-month planning cycles followed by three-month writing cycles and eighteen-month editing cycles. Most of what we produce is too late, not right, and not useful.
The new intelligence paradigm makes the acme of skill “knowing who knows” (with a tip of the hat to Stevan Dedijer) and the ability to put a consumer with a question in touch with a source (or multiple sources) who can create new tailored knowledge in the instant.
Hard to believe, but we are not making this up. The U.S. Intelligence Community still does not routinely depict threats in relation to the level of analysis, only in absolute terms and generally in worst-case technical threat terms assuming idealized scenarios favoring the enemy. And when that is not good enough, field grade officers are assigned to manipulate the data bases and fabricate threat capabilities.
This slide, less the bulls-eye that still does not exist, was created by the Collection Requirements & Evaluation Staff (CRES) of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the mid to late 1990's. It is still more or less on target, which should give the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) something to think about–MASINT is a bust, HUMINT is inept, and OSINT is underfunded. Time for leadership.
