The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Phi Beta Iota: The report observes that we lack both indicators and the ability to share information about indicators across boundaries. More disturbing to us from a public intelligence perspective is the report's unwillingess to address the cognitive dissonance that led to the break-down of an educated multi-cultural field grade officer in the U.S. Army.
Continue reading “Reference: Protecting the Force–Lessons from Fort Hood”
Phi Beta Iota: Below are two comments.
Original source comment, a CIA-trained SOF retired O-6: Article is loaded with some phrases and abbreviations that even I, who normally speaks that sort of thing with native fluency, had some problems with. Seems to me that the military has taken a tough job, particularly in a combat zone, and made it even tougher through organizational and bureaucratic complexity as well as fielding a workforce to address the problem that probably is not sufficiently senior or personally mature.
Retired CIA Case Officer (C/O) comment: There are two truth-tellers in this article. The first is that it deals with echelon above division, which confirms that the US military is simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to do tactical clandestine human intelligence or overt human intelligence collection and integration. The second is that doing “HUMINT” in full combat gear with tactical gloves, sunglasses and so on, is not HUMINT–we call it street-walking. Neither HUMINT nor OSINT are serious disciplines today in the USA, on either the military or the civilian side. The CIA does not do street-walking–they're more upscale, and go directly to sleeping with local liaison. Take your pick, neither of these is righteous good stuff.
UPDATE: A colleague from within asked us to highlight this quote with the observation that neither the US IC nor DoD have any clue how to execute. We agree. Both lack leadership with vision and multinational panache; they simply do not know what they do not know because they have both wasted the last 21 years refusing to listen or learn.
P.23. They must embrace open-source, population-centric information as the lifeblood of their analytical work. They must open their doors to anyone who is willing to exchange information, including Afghans and NGOs as well as the U.S. military and its allies. As General Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, recently stated, “…[T]he best information, the most important intelligence, and the context that provides the best understanding come from the bottom up, not from the top down.”
The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic.
News Story with Links: Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos
Good News: Some good people in the field have finally re-invented half the wheel–the company-level bottom-up half. Unfortunately they have absolutely no idea what can be gotten from the rest of the world (non US citizens without clearances); they are jammed into a legacy system that demands at least a SECRET clearance; there is no Multinational Engagement Network that is totally open albeit commercially encrypted, and therefore this is going nowhere. We could fix this on leftover loose-change, but ONLY if DoD intel leadership will accept the iconoclastic multinational solutions that have been in gestation for 21 years.
Bad News: CIA and DIA are still broken and not likely to get fixed anytime soon. The Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are an utter disgrace. DoD commanders still have not figured out Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and OSINT does not appear in this report, nor does Reach-Back, 24/7 tribally-nuanced on demand web-cam translator services, and on and on and on. Army G-2 is non-existent–Army is simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to do tactical intelligence in small wars. Neither is the Marine Corps, but they adapt better. What is so very tragic is that this is a problem that can be fixed FAST with Multinational Engagement and a proper use of distributed linguistic and cultural assets. All it needs is an internationalist mind-set, which no one now serving in DIA or CIA actually can muster. All of the pathologies we have been writing about since 1988 are to be found in Afghanistan, and none of the solutions that many, many authors have written about for the last 21 years are even on the table.
See also:
Phi Beta Iota: The below material is a bit cluttered as it was built up over time as the individual pieces came to light. The important point in our view is that each element of the dynamic planning model is an intelligence (decision-support) requirement, and the U.S. Intelligence Community is completely unable to address of of them in a tactical near-real-time neighborhood level of granularity such as Dr. Stephen Cambone knew in 2000 we would need. This is why General Flynn says intelligence is not helping in Afghanistan. 95% of what we need to know to support this planning and operational campaign management model is available for open sources of information–multinational open sources of information.
UPDATE: Full Text Found
The Hairball that Stabilized Iraq: Modeling FM 3-24 by Brett Pierson, Walter Barge, and Conrad Crane
Phi Beta Iota: These guys were around long before the new handbook came into being, and chances are most of it was drawn from their earlier work. This is righteous brilliant good stuff, and it is precisely the kind of thinking and leadership process that should go into Whole of Government Planning, Programming, and Budgeting, if we can ever get the Office of Management and Budget back in the business of “managing” to outcome and effect.
UPDATE: A single page of text has come available and the slides are now infamous after media discussion. Below is the graphic used in the NBC report:
We thought we would add a couiple of thoughts:
1) Whole System thinking is long over-due for a renaissance. We have a government that overseas is all fist and no brain or heart, while at home it is all lips and no brain or heart.
2) If you think of the world as a three level chessboard, the bottom level is the Earth–natural resources and the specifics of the atmosphere, climate, and so on. The middle level is the vast public, a power that cannot be suppressed in the long run. The top level is the Industrial Era menage a plus of governments, corporations, and other institutions, all working on a zero-sum basis, none actually willing to share information or work from a shared Strategic Analytic Model to harmonize spending.
3) The dynamic planning model, the Navy's global gaming, the DARPA efforts to “simulate” what everyone on the planet is thinking, all are the right idea executed in the wrong way: divorced from reality. Creating a World Brain Institute with an embedded Global Game that absorbs all true cost information as it becomes available is the fastest possible way to “get a grip” and achieve non-zero infinite wealth.
We're in the process of trying to track down the Army originator of this brief, which is both exquisitely focused and extraordinarily complex.
Below is a first cut–nothing more than an ugly concept for consideration, of what could become a generic approach to assuring our personnel going in harm's way that everything possible has been study to study, understand, and plan for every aspect of what we call Stabilization & Reconstruction Operations, what others call Occupations.
Professor Walter Dorn is the virtual Dean of peacekeeping intelligence scholarship, going back to the Congo in the 1960's when Swedish SIGINT personnel spoke Swahli fluently and the UN stunned the belligerents with knowledge so-gained. This is the final published version of the article posted earlier in author's final draft.
The UN is now ready for a serious discussion about a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN) but a Member nation must bring it up, as the Secretary General has kindly informed us in correspondence.
In the absence of US interest, we are asking Brazil, China, and India to bring it up. Should a UNODIN working group be formed, it will certainly include African Union (AU), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) counterpart groups, as the regional networks will do the heavy lifting and be the super-hubs for the UN (this is in contrast to a US DoD-based system in which military-to-military hubs would be established to do two-way reachback among the eight tribes in the respective nations). Both concepts are explored in the new book, INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH and in two DoD briefings that are also relevant to the QDR.
CNN Editor's note: Charles S. Faddis is a retired CIA operations officer and the former head of the CIA's unit focused on fighting terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction. The author of a recently published book about the CIA, “Beyond Repair,” Faddis is also president of Orion Strategic Services, a Maryland-based consulting firm.
Phi Beta Iota: We know and admire Charles Faddis. Below the fold are other references on the implosion of CIA, which is no longer fit for duty. Panetta means well, but he does not know what he does not know, and the stuffed shirts surrounding him are not about to tell him what he really does need to know, in part because they don't know, they've made a career out of pushing paper, inflating success, and avoiding accountability. The difference between the earlier set of anti-CIA retirees and our set are two: 1) we're not breaking rules and cannot credibly be labeled as traitors; and 2) we know vastly more about the real world of all-source intelligence than the incompetent insiders and we cannot be silenced. Eventually an honest political leadership will hear us.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Earlier Relevant Journal Entries:
Continue reading “Reference: Retired CIA officer–Fix the Agency”
EDIT of 9 Jan 10: Note seven comments from retired senior officers.
Critique of the CT Summary for the White House
This is a negligent piece of work that fails to include all that is known merely from open sources of information, but more importantly its judgments are misdirected. This incident remains incompletely investigated until the person who video-taped events on the airplane comes forward and is identified.
Where we differ:
1. It was passengers who restrained the individual, not the flight crew, as is stated in the first paragraph.
1) Does not identify the primary error. The Embassy officer (or CIA officer) who interviewed the father did not elevate the matter. The same kind of mistake occurred when the Taliban walked in and offered us Bin Laden in hand-cuffs.
2) The absence of a machine-speed cross-walk among US and UK visa denials is noted, but the weakest link is overlooked. The Department of State either didn’t check their visa files or, as has been remarked, may have failed to get a match because of misspelling. The necessary software is missing. State continues to be the runt in the litter (we have more military musicians than we have diplomats) and until the President gets a grip on the Program 50 budget, State will remain a dead man walking.
3) Another point glossed over: the intelligence community, and CIA in particular, did not increase analytic resources against the threat. Reminds us of George Tenet “declaring war” on terrorism and then being ignored by mandarins who really run the place.
4) “The watchlisting system is not broken” (page 2 bottom bold). Of course it is broken, in any normal meaning of the word “system”. John Brennan is responsible for the watchlisting mess, and this self-serving statement is evidence in favor of his removal. If we are at war, we cannot have gerbils in critical positions (quoting Madeline Albright).
5) “A reorganization of the intelligence or broader counterterrorism coummunity is not required…” at the bottom of page 2. Reorganization, in the sense of moving around blocks on a chart, may not be required, but the entire system is broken and does need both principled redesign and new people the President can trust with the combination of balls and brains and budget authority to get it right. Thirteen years after Aspin-Brown we still have not implemented most of their suggestions; the U.S. intelligence community is still grotesquely out of balance; and the Whole of Government budget is still radically misdirected at the same time that our policies in the Middle East are counterproductive.
Continue reading “Reference: WH CT Summary, POTUS Directive, DNI Blurb”
