Rear Admiral Gilbride has promulgated the Concept of Operations (CONOP) for the National Maritime Intelligence Center (NMIC), effective 19 August 2009.
It is quite good and serves as a model for all others. it is, as of now, the single best attempt to truly integrate the concerns and capabilities of the inter-agency community of interest.
A few shortfalls are easily corrected. The Department of Agriculture and food security, for example, are not embraced. That needs to be corrected. The CONOPS is also too focused on security and avoids both protective and enabling opportunities for maritime intervention. Environmental Impacts, for example, focuses only on weather and the opening of the Northwest Passage, not on pollution or other maritime dumping activities that further toxify 75% of our Earth.
Hamilton Bean, “Communication and Intelligence: Allies or Enemies?,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence Vol 22 No 2 March 2009 pp 360-365
1. Needs to be redone and reissued without Doug Naquin’s signature. The delegation of authority to him is in violation of both ICD 300 and ICD 301.
2. The Vision is flawed because it focused only on security. Whole of Government needs for OSINT span the full range of ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies that need to be harmonized, listed below to demonstrate the paucity of the CIA OSC version of vision.
Any Open Source Officer (OSO) who cannot recide these from memory and relate them to the mission of the US National Intelligence Community as outlined in the National Intelligence Strategy, should be assigned to less-demanding administrative duties.
The above can be used in conjunction with Secretary Gates’ statement that the military cannot do it all, and the Defense Science Board studies (all available at www.phibetaiota.net under References/DSB), to make the case for OSINT being a “360 degree” service that must meet the Mission Area needs of all of the elements of the Federal, State, and Local governments as well as regional constellations of mixed government and non-governmental organizations focused on challenges of common concern, e.g. Darfur, piracy, etcetera.
The illustration on page 5 is severely flawed in that it fails to integrate the OSINT needs and capabilities of all the federal non-security consumers at the same time that it assumes Homeland Security Enterprise will cover the non-security aspects of information sharing, and it ignores the Rest of the World both domestic and international.
The illustration on page 7 is severely flawed—a historic tendency of FBIS/OCS in that it assumes all OSINT is accessible via technical means. Humans and direct face to face interaction with Humans, is not part of the FBIS/OSC understanding.
The objectives on page 8 are laudable and not achievable as the IC OSINT enterprise is now organized and led. The integrated linguist activity is a particularly urgent need that is not understood nor properly defined in terms of online and human capabilities that could be harnessed.
