The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
“Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War,” originally a paper at the Army Strategy Conference, 1998.
DOC: Creating a Bare Bones OSINT Capability
When Paul Wallner, on rotation from DIA to CIA, first attempted to establiksh an Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) concept of operations, this was the first paper delivered to him. At the same time, he gave OSS a fair shot at business with ten trial weekly reports spanning everything from medical to regions to logistics. What we did not discover until a few years ago is that a sergeant, then on reserve duty and billing himself as an OSINT expert, was throwing away our analytic summaries and loading the carefully sorted headines associated with each analytic summary into the DIA “bin” willy-nilly. Our attempt to show DIA that OSINT could be done as a low-cost out-sourced activity that did not require legions of contractors or “butts in seats,” died from this one specific pattern of misbehavior, a lack of intelligence and integrity on the part of one individual so shocking as to defy understuanding. Neither Wallner nor Steele knew about this until years later.
See the formally published version:
This is one of two seminal documents in circulation in the Spring and Summer of 1997. The financial numbers in this document were vetted and modified as necessary by Don Gessaman and Arnie Donahue–they are suitable for a President or a Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and still valid today adjusted for inflation. The other is the study done by Boyd Sutton on The Challenge of Global Coverage (click on the frog to go directly to that study. In both instances, because the recommendations were at odds with the conventional bureaucratic desire to increase secret technical intelligence capabilities, the reports were ignored.
We must “recognize that 80% of what we consider intelligence–decision-support–is now either erroneously classified or not done at all, and this is the fundamental weakness of our national intelligence community.
The three references:
1996 Testimony to Moynihan Commisson
1993 TESTIMONY on National Security Information
1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)
