The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
This is the original “Four Quadrants” slide created in the 1990's to show the human-centered path from what we do now (still), internal knowledge management, through social network information creation to external research (humans are central) and finally to organizational intelligence where machines and humans properly managed are a perfect blend. Note J-2 is the high side “owner” while the “low side” is more of a diplomatic and civil affairs outreach and multinational engagement endeavor.
This has been updated from an earlier DIA/DH version created by Robert Steele, and is in both the DoD OSINT Staff Briefing and the new Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) monograph on Human Intelligence (HUMINT): All Humans, All Minds, All the Time.
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The “New Craft of Intelligence” was defined by Robert Steele in 2002 and ratified by Dr. Stephen Cambone in 2004 when he called for the urgency of universal coverage at a neighborhood level of granularity. The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) refused a new defense Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) program offer from USD (I), with the result that today DoD has between $1 billion and $3 billion a year in incoherent Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) program elements, none of which perform to full potential at the same time that perhaps 70% of what we need to know and can know from OSINT is going unrealized.
From where we sit, outside the wire, we went wrong at multiple levels, all matters of balance and perspective:
1. Favoring secrecy over openness
2. Favoring technologies constant stare (mostly unprocessed) over engaged human brains with eyes on
3. Demanding unilateral collection, processing, and analysis instead of a multinational foundation
The philosophical and leadership issue that has not been seriously addressed within the US and many other secret intelligence communities is this: are we in the business of secrets for the Presidet or are we in the business of informing statecraft at all levels? Until we have a political and policy leadership that demands the latter, our policies will continue to be uninformed and disengaged from the larger reality that will never, ever, ignore us.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the only discipline that could possibly create, in the near-term, a foundation for Multinational Engagement. It is immediately applicable to disasters verging on catastrophes such as Haiti, and can be a trust builder toward shared classified processing across the others disciplines, among 90 plus nations.
Originally created by Dr. Mark Lowenthal, then with OSS.Net, Inc. and since modified, this slide, combined with Graphic: OSINT and Missing Information, depicts the challenge. What most do not understand is these two facts:
1. Open Source Information (OSIF) is not the same as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The latter is deliberately discovered, discriminated, distilled, and delivered decision-support tailored to a specific decision. No does this now in the IC that we know of.
2. Humans and Human Minds, not vast unaffordable non-interoperable technical processing farms, are how we cut to the chase. The magic of OSINT, as Dr. Stevan Dedijer stated so clearly in 1992, is to “know who knows,” so as to connect, as Robert Steele stated in Canada in 1994, the source with the consumer. This can only be done with Multinational Engagement, it absolutely will never happen if we continue to insist on US citizens with clearances as the heart of “national intelligence.”
