The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Source: 2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is central to both the informed execution of all inter-agency and multinational operations other than war (OOTW) and to the proper direction of all of the classified disciplines without exception.
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Jan Herring, the first National Intelligence Officer for Science & Technology (NIO/S&T) is the father of Open Source Intelligence in the USA. Now retired, his baton has been picked up by Robert Steele, who took the campaign multinational. The history continuing resistance to what was originally Jan Herring's lead is covered briefly in 2008 IJIC 21/3 The Open Source Program: Missing in Action.
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.
