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.
Ishmael Jones (a pseudonym) is a very experienced non-official cover (NOC) officer who left the CIA and wrote an excellent book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture (Encounter Books, 2008). The lessons from his experience are available directly from him to DoD clients that wish to avoid CIA's many mistakes.
Hello Robert, thanks for your note and I comment as follows:
I certainly agree with Tom on bad management being the cause of poor intelligence collection. Bad management in the intelligence field thrives within bureaucracy, which is easy to create in the Washington, DC area. Today, more than 90% of CIA employees live and work entirely within the United States because bad management finds it convenient to do so. Employees learn skills which advance them within bureaucracy but which do not contribute to intelligence gathering. The lack of on-the ground focus on foreign lands leaves major intelligence gaps unfilled.
Tom Briggs is a former CIA clandestine case officer with an excellent book to his credit, Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009). Before joining CIA he was the Acting Provost Marshal (sheriff) for 25,000 US personnel operating in Cam Ranh Bay, Viet-Nam.
Robert,
As I hope you remember, I started my time in info technology in requirements after many years in operations. I learned that when you ask someone what his requirements are he most often begins to include his solutions, e.g. we need a computer database to help us keep weapons from being smuggled into this country. My response was you don't know if you need a computer until you tell me what data you have, what data you might be able to collect but are not collecting, and what questions you want to ask that the data might be able to help you answer. It was hard to keep them off solutions and focused on what they knew and what they wanted to know. As I read Part IV, 01 Requirements Definition, I thought of my experience and wondered whether the definitions were being simplified to their very basics. A colleague and I wrote the very first requirements for automating the DO. When the IBM programmers with the contract read them they sneered and said, ‘these are high level requirements, we need to have the requirements that tell us exactly how to build the automated system'. My colleague and I said, if you don't understand the high level requirements, how can you begin to write the specific requirements? Thus, the first specific things that were developed for the automated DO system were faulty in many ways. The programmers excluded my colleague and I from their deliberations as THEY wrote the specific requirements, and no one in management thought there was anything wrong with that.
My colleague was the one who named the highest level requirements. He called one ‘author'. He didn't say we needed to write cables, or memos or whatever, he said we needed a computer based author capability and proceeded to outline in general the authoring needs. I don't remember the other 4 or 5 categories but they were similar.
So, I wonder if we really ‘assign' requirements to humint or osint or techint? Should we have ‘high level' requirements from policy makers or military commanders and then figure out which int can collect on them, or, let them all collect and see whose information is the most relevant and useful? I am talking mostly about operations, but except for acquisition of which I know not much, I think I am also talking to strategy and policy.
I read through your ‘conversation' once and the above represents the one thing I wanted to say right away. There are other things to say, but I can't do it in well ‘fell swoop' as you often do. I need to rest to read your ‘conversation' again and see what else I might add.
Almost any problem you can name in the intel community begins with bad management. Even if you have an excellent manager, it is only until he moves on, and the odds are good he will be replaced with a much lesser manager. I guess I tend to have a negative attitude.
New technologies, dwindling resources and explosive population growth in the next 18 years will alter the global balance of power and trigger radical economic and political changes at a speed unprecedented in modern history, says a new report by the U.S. intelligence community.
Those major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts.
…what sets the next quarter century apart is the way seven “tectonic shifts” are combining to drive change at an accelerating rate, said NIC Counselor Mathew Burrows, the report’s principle author. Those factors are: the growth of the middle class, wider access to new technologies, shifting economic power, aging populations, urbanization, growing demand for food and water, and U.S. energy independence
MARGUERITE GUZMÁN BOUVARD: That’s right. And before I—after I finished that book, finally the Department of Defense was letting out these statistics. They were not letting them out before. I tried to get them. I called Veterans for Common Sense, Veterans United for Truth. They have 50,000 members. They said, “Sorry, the numbers are not coming out.” And what I did get was that, in every 36 hours, one veteran from the Iraqi or Afghanistani war are committing suicide, and 18 veterans of all wars commit suicide a day. Also—
Phi Beta Iota: “Cognitive Dissonance” is a very important concept when one has integrity and desires to do a self-evaluation of one's priorities, policies, acquisition, and operations.
The Islamist takeover of two-thirds of Mali this year has spurred the West as well as concerned neighboring countries in Africa to find a way to restore Mali to its democratic path and drive out jihadist elements. Islamist groups in Mali currently include Ansar Dine, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is considered one of the most dangerous of al Qaeda's affiliated groups.
I wrote this with John Kerry and Michele Flourney in mind, but regardless of who is eventually made Secretary of Defense, the core concept remains: the center of gravity for massive change in the US Government and in the nature of how the US Government ineracts with the rest of the world, lies within the Department of Defense, not the Department of State.
John Kerry, Global Engagement, and National Integrity
It troubles me that John Kerry is resisting going to Defense when he can do a thousand times more good there instead of sitting at State being, as Madeline Albright so famously put it, a “gerbil on a wheel.” Defense is the center of gravity for the second Obama Administration, and the one place where John Kerry can truly make a difference. Appoint Michele Flournoy as Deputy and his obvious replacement down the road, and you have an almost instant substantive make-over of Defense. Regardless of who ends up being confirmed, what follows is a gameplan for moving DoD away from decades of doing the wrong things righter, and toward a future of doing the right things affordably, scalably, and admirably.
