INTELLIGENCE AND THE AFGHAN SURGE

My apologies to those few of you who expected to see a MAZ-INT blog entry for November, however, the AFCEA Webpage does not seemed to be overwhelmed with inquiries about the missing blog, the IC seems to be functioning despite missing a month of my advice, and unemployment has started to drop since my last blog.  Perhaps I should take more months off!

 Not that you asked for one, but by way of explanation – my day job at Oracle kept me distracted from what I really enjoy which is examining  IC issues with you.  To be fair to Oracle, which insists on paying me far more than I am worth, most of my discretionary time in November was consumed with planning the AFCEA’s Spring Intelligence Symposium, which I am co-chairing with Zal Azmi.  The dates for  the symposium are 21-22 Apr 2010, at the DIAC on Bolling Air Force Base and the topic we will examine is: INTELLIGENCE R&D:  IS IT MEETING NATIONAL SECURITY NEEDS?  Thanks to Zal and a terrific group of session chairs the agenda is eclectic and stocked with highly qualified speakers from the government, industry, and the laboratory communities.  Hope you will save the date!

There are a variety of IC issues I am going to get to in lighting round fashion but they pale in significance to the President’s decision to commit 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to execute a Counter-Insurgency (COIN) Strategy.  So you know my position, I favor a Counter-Terrorism (CT) strategy that focuses on capturing/killing members of Al Qaeda, disrupting their planning, defeating their operations, and containing them to the Afghan/Pak border region.  It is not clear to me that a COIN Strategy can be successfully executed anywhere let alone in Afghanistan by 2012, but it is clear to me that American people (and their ground forces) are weary from eight years of combat in Afghanistan and will not endorse a continued large military commitment to the government in Kabul.  For those of you who remember Vietnam, you will see the parallels here to the “Peace with Honor Strategy,” where we militarily exited from that conflict in 1972 with the same terms we could have had in 1969.  I know the President isn’t interested in my views, but I am confident he heard them through the reported advice of Vice President Biden.

My strategic concern aside, the President has decided so what are the intelligence issues associated with this surge succeeding?  If General Jones asked for my input I would tell him FORCE PROTECTION as a Beirut style attack with double digit KIAed Marines and soldiers would result in the COIN surge being seen domestically and internationally as a failed strategy.  In garrison ground forces need to know everything moving outside their wire in time for them to react to it.  Conducting COIN operations means both securing the population from Taliban and Al Qaeda harm as well as working with the locals on building civilian infra-structure (e.g. wells, schools, medical clinics, roads, etc) -----  not patrolling in MRAPS and Black Hawks. 

Besides long-dwell, high resolution sensors, military intelligence is going to need to ramp up the use of WEB 2.0 technology so it can make sense out of all the data such sensors will provide through information sharing and collaboration.  Technical (IMINT, SIGINT, MASINT) and non-technical intelligence (HUMINT, DOCEX, OPEN SOURCE, etc.) are going to need to be mashed-up both in the field and up echelon to keep our forces from being attacked and enabling them to put their limited resources where they will do the most good for creating a more secure Afghanistan by 2012.  None of this will be easy in terms of work flow, but our industrial age security regime could end up sinking this mission by impeding the cross domain sharing of intelligence and operational data across echelons of command with coalition partners.  Presumably I am just uniformed, but I’ll take the “under” that their has been no specific tasking levied on the Unified Cross Domain Office (UCDMO) to support intelligence sharing and collaboration associated with the surge, nor does the UCDMO believe they have the authority to step up and take the initiative here.

Now to the Lightening Round!

Fort Hood shootings an Intelligence failure?!  I don’t care how much information the IC collected on Major Hasan about contacts with radical jihadists and whether they shared it or not, the first line of defense and responsibility here is his military chain of command.  My experience tells me that his peers and superiors misread Hasan’s unusual views and non-social behavior as somebody trying to avoid deploying and worse not wanting to pay the Army back for his education.  From an intel perspective this tragedy does show that progress is not as far along as reported since 9/11 on merging foreign intelligence into homeland security cases.

The new PACOM Commander, Admiral Willard, called out the American intelligence

Community (IC) for a failure to estimate correctly the growing capabilities of the Chinese Navy (PLAN) for the past ten years!   Does Admiral Willard actually mean the US Military Capabilities (and the USN in particular) have not grown commensurately with China's, which would be more about the leadership of the Navy than about IC performance. Besides the IC in general and Naval Intelligence in particular, Admiral Willard is also throwing the State Department under the bus with this claim of Chinese militarization.  The PACOM Commander is apparently trying to warn that the PLAN is moving towards near peer status with the USN, which is what maritime countries with strong economies do.  You shouldn’t need the IC to tell you that admiral, but for the record there is a lengthy bibliography of finished intelligence dealing with Chinese naval capabilities.

I understand a boat load of money has been appropriated for the National Cybersecurity Initiative  (NCSI), US Cyber Command has been established, and Mike McConnell has been on 60 Minutes warning of the extreme extant cyber threat to national security and yet no National Cyber Coordinator --- I mean Czar --- has been nominated yet! ! !  It seems anybody capable of doing this job is smart enough not to take it given that the position is buried on the NCS staff with meddling rights from the Council of Economic Advisors and has no authority over funding!  Doesn’t sound like a Czar position description to me!

The CIA has won a long turf battle over its boss, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to name overseas Chief of Stations (COS’), assuring the primacy of CIA personnel over U.S. intelligence operations around the world.  Make no mistake about it this seemingly petty dispute was a surrogate for the authority of the DNI over individual IC agencies.  What does this outcome tell the IC agencies about the DNI?  It tells me the DNI is the DCI without an agency!

The December issue of SIGNAL has a pretty good article about DCGS-N, but what do you mean titling it “Seaborne Intelligence Comes Aboard”?!  As an intelligence officer who spent 11 of his 27 years in the Navy afloat the introduction of DCGS-N is hardly the beginning the intelligence at sea.  The Navy started investing in and deploying  afloat IT dedicated to intelligence (NIPS/Naval Intel Processing System, which morphed into MIDB) during the Vietnam War before most IT companies where garage start ups.  JDISS is a Navy Intel System that started life as LANTDISS before anybody thought of DCGS.  Then there is OSIS, the first dedicated Intelligence Network in DoD that started up circa 1970.  As I was once told ----- the history of Rock n Roll did not begin when I turned on the radio for the first time! 

That’s enough of what I think ----- what do you think?