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Opening the Gates

Interesting development:

[...] OMB has given a green light for the creation of an Open Source Agency as proposed by Congressman Simmons, strictly contingent on the DNI’s blessing of that agency being outside the wire in order to be fully effective with all those who do not wish to cooperate with an element of the secret intelligence community.  General Mike Hayden and General Dale Meyerrose are fully informed and have been asked to recommend to the DNI that we be allowed to proceed.  At the links dated today you will find the OMB issue paper (the major change is that Congressman Simmons no longer supports an OSA inside the wire, as our newest book documents).  We have in hand a 100 day start up plan, and we have in hand the 20 member corporate team that can have this agency up and running within 100 days.

Steele is a pitbull who has locked his jaws on this and related issues for almost two decades. Persistance seems to have paid off. Tracking . . .

Aiming High

In an era of asymmetric threats and workforce demographic pressures, finding ways to share experiences and shorten the learning curve for military personnel has become crucial. Not all information has to be shared through formal channels. Nor should it, when speed is of the essence, or when it’s specialized knowledge for a specific group of people.

But the military is hierarchical by nature, which can make it difficult to cut through the structure to deliver information quickly to a target audience.

To address this, the Air Force is establishing Internet “communities of practice,” where sites will bring together widely dispersed groups to share information and solve problems.

The informal network of sharing lessons learned has always existed, but we’ve finally reached a point where a) we’ve got the technology to spread those lessons beyond an immediate physical location and b) we seem to have institutional recognition and acceptance of the practice. It will be interesting to see how well this develops, if the other services will take note (ground forces, I’m looking in your direction) and if this sort of thinking will energize current nascent efforts along these lines in the IC.

Good ideas from a good guy

From probably the best DIA director in recent times comes an idea that, if there is any sanity in our armed forces, should gain traction quickly:

Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1996 to 1999, and whose military career encompassed irregular warfare from Vietnam through Somalia and Bosnia, made the argument in a paper he distributed earlier this month [that the military needs a new institute to teach irregular warfare].

Hughes said that the increasing use of unconventional warfare tactics, like terrorism and insurgency, was rendering conventional military thinking “both tactically inadequate and strategically dangerous.”

“Unintended consequences, exploitable mistakes, and peculiar responses to our best intentions have become a real concern,” he continued, arguing that “In some cases our response to irregular warfare, notably in Iraq, has been circumstantially more deleterious to our cause than the original events we are responding to.”

It has been said that every Marine is a rifleman first and every soldier gets trained in the most rudimentary Infantry tactics, but it isn’t until you earn a spot in Ranger school or prepare to join as SOF unit that you start to learn the finer points of fighting “dirty.” Fans of The Patriot and students of martial history know that this is an age old problem: you’re always building up forces to fight the last war. OK, we’ve got the massive forces assembling on a field of battle for a knock-down-drag-out routine down. We’ve got it down so well we are the dominant force on the planet for such an approach. Yet no matter how many times we are taught the lesson, we fail to expand our ability to compete in modern conflicts. By that I mean we show up ready to play American football while the opposition is ready for Lacrosse. We can flatten a few players here and there, but their maneuverability and skill at moving the ball tires out even the best conditioned gridiron hero.

By all means keep teaching our ground forces how to fight the good, traditional fight, but recognize that these basic skills are just that, and make irregular warfare training the capstone course for the combat arms. This doesn’t mean that every ground-pounder need be Ranger qualified (though doubling the number of Ranger battalions and a 50% increase in SF groups would both jack up available resources and reduce the deployment churn and flight to PMCs) but your standard issue GI should be able to show up in the next garden spot we fight ourselves with real training under his belt and not have to learn the hard way – if he makes it that long - on-the-job. We need this now (we needed it yesterday) because we’re fighting insurgents in Iraq now, we’re fighting terrorists in Afghanistan now, we’ll be in Somalia soon enough. Even if you are one who thinks China is the next big thing we should be preparign for, let’s not forget the work of this guy named Mao . . .

HLS: Serious?

An interesting development that went mostly un-noticed in the broader press coverage dealing with homeland security.

The short version is that while the Zotob worm was running rough-shod over the ‘Net last August CBP computer systems went belly-up. The initial reports said that the worm was to blame, but that was quickly retracted and the excuse was that the crash was “routine.” A lot of folks bought this excuse because, as front-line CBP personnel said at the time, the system crashes about as often most of us change our underwear.

At the time I wrote that either way, this was no way to run a system that is at the pointy-end of our efforts to prevent bad guys from entering the country. It appears that barring an appeal the CBP is now obliged to release under a FOIA request records related to the un-infection. No matter how it plays out my original comment still stands: if we can’t keep a simple system like this secured, we’re asking for trouble.

The NIE Key Judgments in Plain English

What should strike those of you who have not worked in the IC is how unexciting the whole thing is. Granted, there are most assuredly several sentences and perhaps a few paragraphs that are missing due to classification issues, but you are still looking at about 80% or better of the entire Key Judgment’s section (“executive summary” in any other document). Not “special” or “secret” enough for you? That’s because for the most part secret information is almost always a supplement to what you could collect from freely (or cheaply) more available sources. Occasionally (perhaps more often than that) you get a gem that could not be obtained from OSINT, but it is less frequent than you might think.

The second thing you’ll notice is the liberal use of caveats. As I’ve mentioned previously this is a nice way to make sure you are never wrong. Why make a hard call when the odds are someone is going to call you on your “mistake?” Are the odds really that bad? Yes, given the paucity of information that most in the IC are working with. Forget having perfect information, you are almost always working with a fraction of what you would like to have. Given the treatment of analysts in the recent past, who wants to subject themselves to a virtual kick in the groin? To be fair this is more a trait of the old-school who edit such works. Most people at the working level are perfectly content to stake out a position. Live and learn.

Based on my own experiences putting together NIC documents let me try to translate the meat of the KJs into plain English:

In a nutshell, we have kicked AQ (actual and affiliate – I will use AQ for brevity sake) @ss, but of all the terrorism-related threats we face, AQ is the worst. They are not saying AQ is the devil incarnate, more like “of all the things you can die from, being burned alive is right up there.” They also point out that while we can bear down on terrorists like a battleship, their ability to maneuver like cigarette boats is going to continue to make life hard (read John Robb for background).

Note that despite strong efforts at spinning the early leak, the IC has no firm metrics with which to gauge the spread or extent of Jihadist growth. Without a baseline from which to measure change, they are only a skosh away from plain old guessing. Obvious conclusions follow.

That the “global jihadist movement is decentralized and lacks a coherent global strategy” is nothing new to followers of terrorism issues. Name 12 terrorist groups and they’ll have 11 different agendas between them. And you wonder why some IC critics call its work pedestrian.

That Iraq is the new Afghanistan is similarly, staggeringly prosaic. Nice, safe assessment that keeps those who have grown used to this sort of output happy.

. . . you know what, the more I look at this the more I can see that I’m just going to keep repeating myself. Let me try to sum up the whole thing in the following sentences:

Terrorism in general isn’t going away any time soon. They will use the tools and techniques that work to try and kill as many of us as they can. The strongest groups are bruised but not broken, which is both a blessing (lowers threat) and curse (they learn from their mistakes and will be that much harder nuts to crack later). We can reduce the threat by working to eliminate or reduce their breeding grounds and address their grievances in a reasonable manner, which means (as Chairman Hoekstra pointed out last week) using more “soft power” in order make terrorism the least attractive option for young Muslim men. This is the information age and they’re operating at Internet speed. If we don’t get with the program we’ll be in a world of hurt sooner rather than later.

Declassed NIE Key Judgments

At ODNI site or here if you run into network problems. Commentary coming later tonight.

More NIE Cherry Filling (Running Updates)

Love those tart cherries . . .

As predicted, it turns out that the recently leaked NIE isn’t exactly the scathing indictment of current war/counterterrorism efforts as certain elements would have you believe. In fact just a few snippets of the rest of the story paint a much more interesting picture. Amazing thing context.

Something no one seems to be talking about is the basis for claims about the terrorism problem allegedly getting worse. “Based on what?” is the question that should be asked. Reminds me of the day Rumsfeld’s snowflake came down asking about “metrics” related to our IO efforts. Everyone dutifully marched off to collect and cook numbers, but no one had the guts to say, “Ah, accurate metrics would require that we have baseline numbers collected before the war.” Funny thing math.

So, the real politicization of intelligence continues; pick the bits you like and leak them for a few bonus points during the news cycle and then hope that no one will call you on it.

Update: Leaks - they’re what’s for dinner! Will try to post as often as I can as things develop. Reportedly NIE Key Judgements are destined for release this afternoon. KJs are basically the “executive summary” of the larger report. Highly-distilled meta-view of the larger report.

Bright Spot for IT, Sharing

Intelligence community leaders recently unveiled new information-sharing technologies that promise to consolidate links among secret networks, co-opt IT projects into enterprise architecture and launch innovative knowledge distribution systems.

One sign of the cultural and technological shift is the recently established Cross Domain Management Office.

Dale Meyerrose, CIO for the Director of National Intelligence Office, said the new office would dramatically reduce the number of “trusted guard boxes,” or gates that filter information passing among classified networks and databases.

Just a reminder that when I’m not “slamming” the DNI I’m cheering his choice of two key people; one is Eliot Jardines A/DDNI OSINT and the other is Gen. Meyerrose, DNI CIO. These two guys arguably have the toughest jobs in the community; promulgating the use of open sources and squaring away the IC IT infrastructure. The former is in part a cultural issue that is unlikely to be resolved in the near future (I feel for you buddy) but the latter was frequently thought to be unfixable (Virtual Case File anyone?). By all public accounts Gen. Meyerrose is living proof that the impossible can indeed be done, it’ll just take a little longer.

Canadian HLS

Definately not serious.

What drives people in the IC

They are few and far between but MAN the payoffs feel so righteous!

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